How to Retain Top Talent with Just 15 Minutes a Week

Speaker A: Whether it's in your professional life or your personal life, think of yourself as the Chief Listening Officer. If you have direct reports every week, don't skip it. Do a 15 minute check in or more. If you want to do longer and just simply ask, what did you love working on last week? Uh, what are your top priorities this week? And then the last, most important thing, how can I help? When people see leaders doing that, they come back for more.

Speaker B: Welcome to Voice Activated, the podcast dedicated to unlocking the power of employee feedback. I'm Sean Fitzpatrick, founder of Telemap and your host. In each episode, we'll dive into real world examples and best practices, as well as some lessons learned from employee surveys, Pulse checks, focus groups, 360s and more. If people are at the heart of your business, you're in the right place. Expect open conversations, practical advice, inspiring stories from, from companies that are getting it right, and some reflections from those who've hit a few bumps along the way. Tune in, listen up, and let's activate the voice of your employees. Today I'm, uh, joined with Joe Quinn, Chief Operating Officer at Covenant hr. Joe is a seasoned HR professional with lots of experience, a range of different companies, from Fortune 500 to small to mid sized technology firms. And he's gone through a range of different activities, from leading organizations to mergers and acquisitions, to major cultural transformation, from improving engagement and retention to integrating global teams. Joe has helped organizations listen better and lead smarter. So let's get into it. Joe, welcome to Voice Activated.

Speaker A: Great to be here, Sean. Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Joe, I know you've led a lot of different, uh, organizations in a chro role, um, from small organizations or mid sized org to very, very large billion, uh, dollar organizations. And it'd be interesting if you could share a moment when uh, someone influenced you in terms of how you thought about culture and leadership, uh, and that impact it's had on you.

Speaker A: Yeah, so for me, I read a lot and uh, I have been involved and attended a lot of different chro kind of workshops. And uh, I attended one in Minneapolis, Minnesota many, many years ago. And Marcus Buckingham was there and uh, he addressed a group of about 20 CHROs. And what really resonated with me, he said, every leader's job is to be the clo. And we were like, what do you mean clo? And he said, your leaders, including yourselves, need to be the chief listening officers. Okay. Uh, and by the way, that works at home too. I've been married 46 years to a, to a Ph.D. psychologist. And uh, I probably hear all the time that I'm probably a better clo at work than I am at home. So I'm working on both of those. But really seriously, it's all about engaging your team. Uh, many companies get it wrong and they believe in performance reviews and engagement surveys and all those types of things and metrics and dashboards. When you really look at it, if you can spend 15 minutes on a week with your direct reports and ask them three questions, right, what went really well? What do you love working on? And they're going to tell you that, okay, uh, what would you like to learn more of? And hopefully they tell you that. And then the last and most important thing is how can I help you? So I've been a believer in one on ones my whole career. The first time I got into any kind of leadership role for many reasons. The most important reason is do you like going to the dentist?

Speaker B: Not really.

Speaker A: No, not much. M. I don't like going to the dentist and hopefully the dentist is maybe once a year to get your teeth cleaned. But even that's not fun. So consider this a performance review. If it's once a year, nobody jumps out of bed and says man, I can't wait to go have my performance review. Even if it's going to be good. People don't like performance reviews. They don't really enjoy them. Uh, and so if you have regular check ins with your people, right. 15 minute to half hour check ins weekly engagement has been shown for research to go up by 13%. But more importantly you're not going to the dentist. Now you have a regular weekly relationship with your boss, he or she and the atmosphere is one of comfort, not oh damn, I got to go into a performance review. I wonder how this is going to go. So I'll come back to the chief listening officer. You really have to be there and listen to the people on your team and they're going to tell you what they need.

Speaker B: I really like that because it's so simple, right? Uh, in terms of those three questions and to do it on a regular basis, how do you get employees to open up? Because if you, you know, if you think of a lot of traditional organizations, they don't have that type of culture where they necessarily meet. We do a lot of employee surveys at Ah, TalentMap and one of the most common, you know, responses around, you know, they're not happy with the performance feedback or performance management system or they get comments that I haven't met with my boss. I've never gotten feedback. I don't you know, haven't met with my boss for months. So not all organizations are, in fact, I would even argue, probably the majority aren't doing it that way. Um, so how do you, you know, if you think about employees, all of a sudden there's, you know, I'm coming in and sitting there with my manager, I may not be ready to open up right away as to things that are working and things that are not working and resources that I might need. So how do you, how do you bring employees along on that journey?

Speaker A: It's kind of magical. And here's how it is. If you listen to what they tell you and if they give you a couple of things that they need you to do to help them, it's all about follow up and follow through. So if I come in and I pour my heart out to you, Sean, and I say, hey, this is what I really love doing, this is where I need your help. You nod your head and you say, great, Joe, thank you, appreciate it. And then nothing happens. Am I going to tell you what I need help on again? So my point is if it's followed up on, followed through on, you build trust with your team and are like, oh, if I tell Joe I need something, he's going to get it for me or he's going to point me in the right direction or he's going to remove that barrier. So I'm going to be more comfortable telling my boss what I need because of the follow up and follow through. Failure to act on what is learned is probably one of the biggest failures that leaders have. I'll give you the example of you do a great employee engagement survey and you get the results and then you never communicate to your organization what the results are. Do I want to do the survey again if I've never heard what the heck the results are? Probably not right. So uh, the biggest failure of leadership is not acting on what they've learned. Following up and following through. That's what I've seen in my. So how have I fixed that? In organizations, I have basically instituted surveys where managers and leaders are put on the spot intentionally and I give them a heads up intentionally and the CEO usually buys into it. And what do I mean? We are going to ask employees obviously, confidentially, did you have a, ah, one on one with your manager on a weekly basis and if we score really low on that question, we know leaders aren't doing it, then we as the senior leaders have to practice what we preach and then we have to hold our leaders accountable to meeting with Their teams. So when I have done that, it has moved the needle dramatically around engagement because the leaders now know, oh, they're going to inspect what they expect. So I better have these meetings because they're going to check up on this. Right.

Speaker B: In some of your past experiences, then what you've done is you've used like broader employee listening surveys or employee feedback employee engagement surveys as, uh, sort of a checkpoint as to how things are going. And then you've used that, you know, one on one quick weekly touch point as really the mechanism to build trust and build that relationship between employees and, uh, their manager, supervisor, leader.

Speaker A: Yeah. The other key thing in any company that I've worked in is retention. If you have low retention scores, if people are leaving, you can pinpoint that to the managers that they're working for. So when I measure retention in the companies that I've worked with, I measure it by manager, by department, by division. Okay, so we're in hr. What happens? We get blamed when people leave the organization and get. You didn't get us the right people, Joe. You need to get us the right people. Well, when I start tracking retention and it pinpoints that Mary and John are always losing people, even though we're bringing in amazing people. But Sean and Joe and James aren't losing people. So what are Sean, Joe and James doing that the others aren't doing? And that information comes from exit interviews. If you do really good penetrating, confidential exit interviews, the people that are leaving are going to tell you what they're facing. And if you don't get surgical about it, I always say you can perform people up, but if they don't perform up, then you've got to perform them out of the organization. Because you don't, you're going to have a cancer where that leader is going to continue to have people exit the organization because you, as the leaders of that leader, didn't listen to the data that the people that left gave you.

Speaker B: M. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the extra exit feedback, another mechanism to give you great insight and great data to what's going on because they don't necessarily have to worry so much about what someone might think about them because they're moving on and they can give really open, candid feedback. Why did they leave? Why did they take another role if that's what they did? Uh, um, the other thing. So not just the employee side, the manager side. If managers haven't done this, how did you introduce this to an organization in the past? How did you get the senior team buy in or did they model it and then cascade it down? How do you build up? Because managers come from all different stripes and different. Some would be excited by this, some are like, oh, God, I don't have enough to talk about to talk to my people every day. You know, they might be thinking they do, but they might be thinking this. You know, what am I going to say? So how do you introduce it and then get it ingrained in the culture? How do you. How do you go about doing some of that?

Speaker A: It's pretty simple. So I'm a business leader, not an HR leader first. So I want to convince leaders that I'm working for, primarily the CEO, uh, the COOs and the CFOs. Hey, there's a business metric behind what we're trying to do. And of course they'll say, what do you mean? And I will say, look, if we improve our engagement scores, if we improve how we listen to people, it's going to improve our revenue. It's proven through research. So the way I've been able to do that, let's just talk about retention scores first and I'll get to engagement. I was with an organization that had horrible retention scores. Nobody was measured against it. So then we pinpointed where we were losing the people and what leaders were losing the people. M. Then we made their annual.

Speaker B: How did you do that? Like, is it just around just pure metrics in terms of turnover numbers that were captured in your HR system?

Speaker A: Turnover number. So if you have 15 direct reports and I have 15 direct reports and you're losing half of them and I'm losing none of them, there's something there. Right? Like, why. Why is Sean losing half of his team annually and Joe's not losing anybody?

Speaker B: Did you get granular around, like, regrettable loss versus not regrettable or volume, like all of that type of stuff?

Speaker A: Yeah. So in. In one situation, to convince the CEO, we went out and did prospect. We did interviews after the fact with 60 people that left the job classification after they had been gone for like six months to a year. And we had a research organization, not us, a private research organization reach out to those folks and ask them why they left. And man, what they told them was eye opening. Okay. Uh, and so do you recall some

Speaker B: of the new, like some of the cultural aspects or some of the things that. Was it around leadership? Was it around comp. Was it around professional growth? What were some of the two or three themes that, uh, came out?

Speaker A: Okay, so I'll get real specific. So leaders will always tell you we're not paying enough. We need to pay them more. We need to offer better benefits, you know, more holidays. They'll come up with all these reasons that have nothing to do with what they need to do. Okay. And so the specifics that we heard from 60 people were these. Your onboarding program is non existent. You don't welcome new people. Your leaders treat us really badly. The leaders of the leaders treat us really badly. There is almost like a hazing period when we join here and we don't like it. Okay. I mean that's real specific feedback that we got from one job classification of people.

Speaker B: And that's a first impression they get.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: That's, you know, that colors their probably whole mindset and attitude towards, uh, for the time that they're there. Because it's a first impression of the organization.

Speaker A: Yes. And typically those people leave within the first six months or a year. And I found that if you can keep people that first two years, they will stay. Okay. Uh, people typically will stay. So I tied retention metrics by individual. Typically people that have the most people in organizations are director level and above. And they typically have bonus eligibility. Well, I convinced my leadership to tie a major portion of their bonus into their retention numbers. Meaning they needed to improve their retention numbers year over year. And if they didn't, they lost that part of their bonus. So now all of a sudden it's not an HR problem, it's a operations problem. It's the, uh, I'm not going to get paid problem. Now all of a sudden what gets measured matters. Whereas prior to that it was, oh, HR didn't get us the right people. We don't pay people enough.

Speaker B: They want to bump it up to a corporate issue, let corporate put a policy in place or pay policy benefits. And it's not about my behavior as a leader. Uh, you know, that sort of brings up something interesting. And you probably have seen it more and more. Um, middle managers are really getting squeezed. In fact, we see this in our survey data when we get, um, engagement data back. And this is a shift I've noticed over the last five, seven years or so. Of course, senior leaders, executives, they tend to be, you know, um, engaged, high levels of autonomy in their work and mastery. They're experienced, they're really doing well. And you can see that in their survey feedback and survey results. And you see that often in the front line, frontline people, general, not as high as executives, but they generally are engaged in what they're doing. But what's surprising is middle manager scores seem to have dropped over the years. It used to be executives, uh, showed the highest ratings on engagement, then managers and directors, and then you went down to individual and they tended to have lower scores than everybody else still. Okay. But now we've seen m. Middle managers drop below individual contributors, workload pressure because they get pressure from the top, they get pressure from the bottom. You know, the whole sort of how do we be more inclusive and how do we uh, create a more uh, um, you know, work environment for employees? Because they have, well, have had more power in the relationship over the last number of years compared to many years ago. So I'm wondering how do you balance all of that, that pressure on middle management with that need to actually take on sort of this type of behavioral change and cultural change in the organization?

Speaker A: Yeah. So the way, again the way I've done that, it's a simple formula. What gets measured gets done. So if I'm a middle manager and I have at least five direct reports or more, we're going to measure retention to your unit and we're going to measure engagement to your unit. So there's nowhere you can hide. Right. It's like a lot of time. What you'll see is middle managers will blame, oh my people. If my people were better, I'd be doing better. Oh, they'll tell their employees, you know, I don't want to do this. The boss wants me to do this. So they play the blame game both ways and that doesn't work. And so you got to hold them accountable to their retention and to their engagement results. And again, if you tie it into their merit increase and if they're bonus eligible, trust me, people will get serious about improving or the company will get serious about removing. Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, so really focuses the mind, so to speak.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, that's good. I like that. Tying that retention component to the uh, you know, to their business, uh, bonus, uh, or to their, to their compensation bonus. Uh, have you ever sort of thought about or considered how do you uh, think about the cost of turnover? You know, have you ever sort of uh, thumbnailed it? Okay. It's about one time salary half times, 1.5 times. And I know it changes based on roles and the levels in the organized, but I've sometimes seen numbers out there and that sometimes is surprising to managers. Have you ever shared or talked about that in your different HR roles that you've played?

Speaker A: Absolutely. And again, HR doesn't have a lot of credibility with senior leaders because they're not typically viewed as operational or financially savvy. Okay. So what I have done to get buy in is I have worked with the CFOs or the senior leaders of the finance team and said, okay, if we lost, I'm going to pick a job a pharmacist. If we lost the pharmacist. Because I worked at Medco Health Solutions, which is now express scripts for 8 years, and pharmacist attrition, our goal was to have to retain 95% of the pharmacists that we had across the whole globe. Okay. That's a pretty lofty goal. We work with the finance team to say, if we lose a pharmacist, how much does it cost us? Okay. And I'm going back many years. So this is like um, the early 2000s. Okay. Back then, if you lost a pharmacist, it cost about $15,000 just to on not the cost to hire another pharmacist, just the onboarding time where they're not in beneficial production for the first six weeks because they have to learn everything that they need to learn. Right. And then if you look at the cost to hire somebody, that's another big cost. I would not come up with those numbers. I would work with the finance team to say, you tell me what the numbers are and then we will work to make it right. I won an award. It's actually sitting here in my office. I could pull it on the camera and show it to you. With Medical Health Solutions for improving Retention to the point where we saved the business like $1.5 million, uh, with our improvements around. And that doesn't sound like a lot of money, but it actually, it was

Speaker B: just, ah, how did you do that? What are some of the mechanisms you do? Was it around listening to employees? Was it around engagement? Was it around tying specific aspects? What are some of the mechanisms you use to help drive that improvement?

Speaker A: So we had something that we called the celebration of success. So after 90 days, if a pharmacist made it through the 90 day probationary period, we'd have a party for them where we'd have like cake and something to drink and we'd have the leaders come in and we would simply ask them and whiteboard it. Why do you think you made it through? What did we do really well and what could we do better? Okay, the stuff that they said we did really well, we continued to build on that. And then the stuff that, uh, they told us that we didn't do well, we were surgical around making improvements to what they said we didn't do well. And typically what you hear that you didn't do well is how you trained those pharmacists on the processes and the procedures that they had to use. Uh, and typically what we had to do was we had to change who the trainers were because somebody can be a great pharmacist. Fantastic. But they're horrible at, uh, relating to people and training people. And in fact, they don't even want to train people. They want to do their job to be the most efficient and effective productive pharmacist. But they don't want anything to do with leading and training and guiding people. In fact, they find that to be horrible. What leaders typically say, oh, Mary's, uh, great, let's put her in charge of training. They don't ask Mary if she wants to do that. Right. They just pick the best performing pharmacist who maybe doesn't have the personality to train new people. Right. So those were some of the things that we learned.

Speaker B: That's just. Yeah. And it's very tactical. Right. I like that. Celebration. What did you call the celebration again?

Speaker A: Celebration of success.

Speaker B: Celebration of success. And to get them to talk about what worked, what didn't work in that onboarding. And it ties back to one of the things you talked about earlier is acting on the results and following up on that action. Because that really, I know in our survey data, you know, if you say, well, uh, our response rates are going down this year, year over year, the first thing we ask is, what did you do to follow up on the last survey? Because employees are no problem providing input and feedback and they'll roll up their sleeves and give you lots of it. If they believe that you're going to do something with the results, if you believe they're going to listen and actually act on it. And then only you can't act on everything. But if they feel that you're going to act on some of the key things, they're more than willing. And if you're feeling they're not acting on it, you see response rates drop year over year. And it's not about, oh, letting more people know about the survey or that's helpful, but it's action that really drives response rates is what we noticed.

Speaker A: I joined a large organization. I won't name the organization, but prior to joining the last survey they did, they had 50% of the, uh, people respond, that's horrible. Okay. So I said to the CEO, before we do another survey, allow me to be here for a couple of months and go around and find out why people didn't do the survey. Here's what every single person told me. Okay? Same theme. Why would I do the survey when I need. I didn't even hear what the last survey results were. And uh, there were no changes made. Okay. So I went to the CEO with that anecdotal data and I said, look, if we're going to do a survey, we got to do two things. We got to promise everybody that within 30 days of the survey, not only are we going to get up in a meeting and broadcast the results, we're going to tell them every month what we're doing differently, that we heard from them that we need to improve upon and we're going to celebrate those wins. Not that we did something, but that they can actually agree, yeah, the leaders actually did something. And then if we do that, the next time we do a survey, I guarantee you we're going to really get people to come out and do the survey. So we did that. The first survey we did, we had 75% of the people come and do the survey. The next survey, six months later because they saw we actually did stuff. We had 90% of the employees take the survey.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, uh, because they believe that something could change and they want to see, they want to see the business do better, but they also want to see their individual work environment improve, which goes hand in hand. If what I do improves, the company will improve. Uh, in terms of the business. I like, yeah, I like that. 30 days. I sometimes uh, we see that with our clients, we give them, you know, they say, well, what should we do on follow up? And we say, well you should do 30, 60, 90 within 30 days. Just share the results out. So everybody who wants to see them has had an opportunity to see whether it's uh, town halls, video record, uh, team meetings with your lead, whatever mechanism that cascades out that works within your culture. And then 60 days you're starting to develop some action. You don't have to have all the things in place and everything, but started to develop and you're communicating. And then 90 days you're checking in and you're starting to see maybe some, some low hanging fruit things or starting to see some action. It's not going to be major improvements because it could take a while. But that's something that uh, 30, 60, and it's surprise. It's hard for organizations to act that quickly and I don't know why, because they talk about engagement being important, they talk talent, you see the CEO stand up, very key. But to get them to move that quickly and it's not usually hr, it's the rest of the executive team. What do you think is the challenge there in or how did you get them to move quickly in that past experience you relayed?

Speaker A: So I found out why they didn't move that quickly when they got 50%. They didn't like the results. Okay. Uh, and I said, look, we're not going to like the results. We don't have to like the results. We have to improve on the results. We have to genuinely say, hey, we don't feel good about these results. We want them to be better and here's what we're going to do about it. And then you're going to be the judge. So we want you to come and tell us in the next survey, did we do enough and where we didn't do enough. Score us on what we need to do more of. Okay. And if you follow up on that and you actually do what you promised you were going to do, people are going to give you the benefit of the doubt and they're going to show up and want to take the survey because you actually listened to them and you did something about it. Right. So it's key. You gotta listen, you gotta come and be clean. I've seen organizations where they're afraid to even share the data and that's criminal. You gotta be transparent.

Speaker B: Uh, that's so true. It is what it is. Right? So not sharing the data doesn't change the culture. It's the scores are the scores. And even if you don't like them, uh, you know, sharing them doesn't change it to make them better now. But at least starts, starts them on that journey, starts them on that process.

Speaker A: So a lot of times, and it's a pretty crude saying, but leaders like to put lipstick on a pig. Well, it's still a pig. So if your results are horrible, don't put lipstick all over because everybody's going to see what you're doing.

Speaker B: They're going to notice. Yeah, yeah, uh, yeah, employees are smart. They're going to quickly build. Okay, this is ridiculous. Or they get very sin. In fact, it builds more cynicism if they, if you try it. And deteriorates trust in many ways. Yeah. So this has been really good. So you're really an advocate of listing your employees. I really liked how that, that concept of that weekly check ins, 15, 20, 30 minutes with some simple questions. Uh, uh, uh, and uh, and it's a simple thing for managers to adopt. Employees start to really like it. But now you've Shifted. So after many years of leading large organizations playing a, uh, leadership role within HR and CHR roles, you've moved over to the recruitment side of the business. And in fact, I'm not even hr, more of in the operations and business development side. So tell us a little bit about what some of the things you've learned as a HR professional and in different companies that's helped you in this new role. Tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker A: So, yeah, I'm more in a sales operations role. And uh, what I do is I'm on calls every day like you and I are on calls on a team's video. And again, it's, I need to be the chief listening officer. And what I mean by that is if I'm trying to sell you something and I'm talking during the whole call, I'm not listening to whether or not you need what I'm offering you. So my role is to really find out what are your pain points. So if I can find out your pain points around talent acquisition or recruiting and really tease those out, I might have a solution that is an immediate return on investment for your organization. And that solution is scout our AI proprietary recruiting software. So a lot of times people in sales get it wrong. They want to like, here's my demo, and take you through everything that it can do and show you how great it is before they even give you the potential customer the opportunity to tell them why they're here. Why are you here? Why are you interested in a, uh, software solution for your recruiters?

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And if you find those details out, then you can literally pinpoint your demo to the pain points or the challenges that your customer or potential customer tells you why they might need your software. Uh, and I didn't learn this overnight. Okay. I've never been in sales. I've probably read five books on sales. Um, our youngest son has been in sales and so he's given me a lot of advice. But again, it's, it's kind of cool because I've always been about listening and learning. And so you got to listen and learn what your customer needs. And then when you show them pinpointed how your software addresses their immediate need, then you have a very strong chance of success.

Speaker B: Interesting. It's sort of like what you're talking about earlier on those weekly check ins. It's for a manager just to ask questions, listen for the pain points your employees have. In many ways, they're your customer in a way because you just want to make, uh, the ideal situation manager shouldn't do anything in terms of activity, but they really should lead and manage a, uh, team. And if it's trying to understand what is it that you need, what is it that I could help you with? And that's really what a sales job is like or a good sales job is like, like in terms of trying to understand people and what is it that they need and if we can help them, here's ways to approach it, or here's a solution that might work.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: What's the name of the company?

Speaker A: Covenant hr.

Speaker B: Covenant hr. And where would they find, like, is there a website or anything like that

Speaker A: where they find it or learn more about it? It's covenant-hr.com.

Speaker B: okay.

Speaker A: And, uh, we're all over, um, the, you know, we've got a website, uh, we're on LinkedIn. You can find a lot of our stuff. But what's interesting, the listening doesn't stop once I make the sale. I'm not done. And here's what I mean. Once we make the sale, recruiters that didn't buy the software, their bosses did, they're afraid that they bought this to eliminate their jobs. Okay. So what we do, part of our onboarding process is to meet with the team that we sold the software to on a weekly basis to show them how easy it is to use, to make sure they're using it and not make excuses not to use it and say, oh, this doesn't work. What we find is that the buyer loves it and then the people ultimately that are going to use it are afraid of it. Our recruiters within our business, when we introduced this a year ago, they were afraid and thought we were trying to eliminate their jobs. And they love it now because they went from being able to recruit about 30 jobs a month to being able to work about 100 jobs a month. Because the AI, the AI software does most of the heavy lifting and it brings the best candidates to the top of the funnel. So we filled a job for a healthcare System in Jacksonville, Florida, where it was an HR director, six Sigma black belt job. 683 candidates applied. Only 40 of them out of that group scored eight out of 10 or higher. Meaning, you know, 10 is the best score. So our recruiters loved it because they only had to look at the top 40 and disposition them versus having to read 680 resumes. So it really is a game changer.

Speaker B: Wow. Yeah. And that's like three times the number, almost four times the number of, uh, what they've done in the past really does Change the scope. It's not just an incremental improvement. That's a material improvement of capabilities to be able to do.

Speaker A: And the other thing it can do, Scout, uh, can interview candidates on screen like you and I are right now, in 32 languages. Uh, it can at the click of a button. If you like a candidate and you're a human recruiter and you want to interview them, you click a button. Scout sends them an email and says, sean's available next week from 10 to 2. The candidate picks a time. It puts a team's invite on their calendar. It puts a team's invite on your calendar. And Sean, all you had to do was pick the people that you wanted to see. It just makes their work so much easier. And they're more productive in talking to candidates more than doing the administrative minutiae.

Speaker B: And that's really where the value is. They can find better candidates or better understand them and how to onboard them if they select them. Like, there's so much more value there than sifting through paperwork and working through sort of requirements or qualifications people have. You know, if you can let AI do that. But it's interesting that some of your clients, and even internally, they're a little bit afraid of it when AI comes in. And we've noticed that there's a lot of uncertainty, um, and concern around how AI changes the nature of the job. Uh, and you've had some success in not eliminating job, but changing the roles. And I guess, is that how you, how do you see that happening? Because there's a lot of organizations out there where employees are concerned about, you know, how this can affect them either in a good way or maybe not in such a good way.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm very blessed to be working for a CEO who wants us to become the first billion dollar company with a small number of employees. Okay. And so we practice AI in everything. We do not. We don't just have a proprietary AI recruiting software. We literally use AI in everything that we do. We have tech talks every Friday where each one of us has a turn showing how we've used AI. It's amazing what AI can do for you if you just let it be, do the work for you. And I can give you examples if you want it. But there's so much that. I'll give you one quick example. Okay. So my wife has written several books. She's a PhD psychologist. She's got a book that's coming out, uh, later this year. It's called Essence Merging. It's a spirituality book. She knows I'm a big fan of AI and I use AI. So she said, hey, I'm going to hire somebody to read my book and edit the grammar and the punctuation, and I'm going to pay them $30 an hour to do that. And I said, colleen, why would you do that? I'll do that. She goes, how are you going to do it? You don't have time to do that. I said, I'm going to upload your book into ChatGPT and ask it to do that 300 page novel. Right. It did it in two minutes, so it gets better, Sean. So then Colleen says, great. This is great. Now I'm going to go up to my office and I'm going to come up with 20 questions that the pod. She's going to do about 100 podcasts between now and middle of next year to promote the book. Yeah. So I said, colleen, why are you going to do that? She goes, what do you mean? I said, uh, AI has already read your book. It knows how you write. Watch this. So I asked ChatGPT, by the way, I didn't type it in, I just asked it on the microphone. Hey, ChatGPT, please go into the book and come up with 20 compelling questions that a podcaster would ask the author about her book. Two minutes. She reads the questions. She goes, these are phenomenal. I couldn't have come up with better questions myself. Right. And she's a PhD, very smart person. Then she says, well, I'm going to take these questions now and I'm going to go answer them. And I said, no, we're going to ask AI to do it because it already knows you and how you write. Again, two minutes. It does the. And she, I guess she reads these and she's like, it's almost like it knows me. I said, it does know you because it knows your writing style. Right. And so there are hours and a lot of money that we save with not having somebody have to do that for her, you know, and I can give you many, many other examples, but people need to get comfortable being uncomfortable and embracing AI because it's here to stay. It's not going away. And there are companies right now that their CEOs are telling them you can't use AI. They're forbidding them to use ChatGPT at work. Yeah. And that's really a shame.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, ah, a really important area. I just was working with a company earlier this week and we were talking about, um, we also take all of the unstructured comments that you get from employees and employee surveys. Right. So you know, what could your leader do better? Or what, what innovation should they can or what, what's working, what's not. We, we ask those questions on the survey, get thousands of comments. But now we run that through Chat GPT to categorize it, theme it, look for trends, all that sort of stuff. But some organizations have no policy or no approach. They don't know what to do. How do we how. Because in the previously they would read all of those or have someone manually code them and now it's like done for you in minutes, in real time on our software. And they're like, don't know how to deal with that, don't know if we can use it, don't have a policy around it. So it's moving fast. And organizations uh, uh, I agree with you. Uh, it adds a lot of value. In fact, I just finished a book. It's called the AI Driven Leader by, I think it was Jeff Moore. Um, I can't remember. I'll put it in the show notes. But it, it talks about AI as a thought partner. You're still the thought leader. You know where you want to go. But they're really a thought partner to use them as a partner to help you achieve your goal. Like your wife trying to achieve what you want. Just use it as a partner to get you there faster, better with better quality along the way.

Speaker A: Yeah. So, uh, yeah, I'm reading a book right now. It's called AI first and the author is Andy. I think it's Adam Broham and Andy Sack. And it's an I'm on chapter five. It's, it's an amazing book. But here's how I use AI. Just one quick example. I record all my sales calls. I then take the transcript and I tell and I have a scout channel which is the AI proprietary software. I then ask Chat GPT to rate me on how I did in that sales call. Did I listen effectively, did I identify enough pain points and what can I do better? And it scores me and um, I'm constantly learning how to improve my approach by doing that.

Speaker B: What tool do you use? Because there's different ones out there. Uh, just to do that. And do you pre code it with types of terms or what the talk to listen ratio you want?

Speaker A: Yeah. So we use Apollo.

Speaker B: Okay. Yeah.

Speaker A: So Apollo will tell me how much, what percent I talked, what percent each person on the call talked. It will record the entire transcript. Sean said this, Joe said that. I don't have to take any notes. I can be totally zoned in on you, you can be zoned in on me. And then I will take that full transcript, put it into my ChatGPT AI agent and ask it to write me a full summary of what follow ups and actions I agreed to do. Because let's face it, I could miss things if I took notes. I can tell you ChatGPT makes us look like the best listeners in the world. If I could have ChatGPT listen in on my wife's conversations with me, things

Speaker B: will be way better. Oh yeah, you'll be golfing every Sunday.

Speaker A: But no, I'm very serious about it. Uh, it's amazing. Um, and we record all of our calls when we have team calls, and then we can make sure we're following through on the actions that we agreed to. But nobody has to spend that time being the note taker, which is an awesome way to improve your productivity.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, it, uh, adds, and you can focus, you can listen better. Literally, not just with that content, but, you know, with the whole body in terms of, uh, in terms of understanding. Really, what are they, what are their concerns? What are they getting? If you're not trying to take notes along the way as you go, it's a real, can be a real lifesaver. No, Joe, this has been a, it's been a great conversation. Um, I, uh, I'm going to ask you one more question, uh, about, uh, about, you know, just, you know, one, you know, if our listeners walked away with one idea or one shift in their mindset, what it would be. But before I do that, I just want to summarize what I heard. Like really you are about listening and using that to really do a better job for whoever you're interacting with. And, and you started off early on about how you listen to managers or, and you introduced a really useful tool, uh, in there, uh, in terms of how to listen to managers and how to. Or sorry, to employees as a manager and how to have just, you know, one or two or three questions to, to kick off those conversations and build them up over time. In fact, your advice was so sage, you even suggested that it could make you a better list at home with your wife and build relationships. I like that I'm going to have to apply that on my wife this afternoon or this evening. Uh, so. But anyways, getting back to our listeners, if you, if they were to walk away with just sort of one idea, one shift in, in the mindset, what, what would you want that to be?

Speaker A: So I'll come back to the beginning. Uh, I'm a big fan of Marcus Buckingham. And so whether it's in your professional life or your personal life, think of yourself as the chief listening officer, right? So in your professional life, if you have direct reports every week, don't skip it. Do a 15 minute check in or more if you want to do longer and just simply ask, what did you love working on last week? Right. Uh, what are your top priorities this week? And then the last, most important thing, how can I help? Right, how can I help remove any barriers, get you the budget and resources that you need, or if you need advice because you're new in your role, it's not like I'm going to do the work for you, but how can I help you? And when people see leaders doing that, they come back for more. I have long term relationships with the folks that have worked now. I've worked for a long time, right? I'm, um, and in the working world for over 45 years. I had, ah, deep relationships with the people that have been my direct reports and I've seen them be extremely successful and go on to do great things. Many of them are my customers now. Uh, it's because I cared about them as a person and I checked in with them every week and I didn't act like, okay, let's have a performance review once a year and come into my dentist office and I'm going to put, pull your teeth, right? So I literally got them comfortable to the point where, you know, I'm very proud. I've had in the course of my career three people come and work for me. When I left and joined another company, they worked for me before in a prior business and they asked me and called me and said, hey, I'd love to work for you again, Joe, do you have anything? And of course I'd say, be careful what you wish for because I might have something for you. So I was very blessed to have people come and join me and work with me and I really value those relationships. And to me it comes down to being the chief listening officer. Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, no, that's great, Joe. Well, thank you.

Speaker A: I like that idea.

Speaker B: Think of yourself as a chief listening officer and how do you then better understand the people you're dealing with? That's a great way to end. Thank you.

Speaker A: And then I'll just leave you one last thing. It's. That sounds all nice and, you know, it's very, uh, friendly and all that, but at the end of the day, you have to inspect what you expect. So you can be great as a listener, but you have to hold people accountable and you have to inspect what you expect.

Speaker B: Mhm. And one of the tools you did? I went out using surveys to get a sense from employees. Have you had your meeting with your on a regular basis? Yeah. And that gave a nice broad view of what's going on, which managers or leaders are doing it well or doing it at all and which ones are not. Yeah. Ah. Oh, that's great. Thanks for listening to Voice activated if you've heard something that got you thinking, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, talk about it, put it into play. That's how better workplaces get built. When you're ready to move from insight into action, head over to telemap.com you'll find two tools, resources and strategies to help you lead better with clarity, empathy and impact. And make sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss any more real conversations with leaders who know that some of the best ideas for change don't come from the top, but from those employees closest to the work.