#30: Joy Banfield, HR Expert - How to recruit like Google, building high performing teams, and handling difficult employees

Your potential candidates have to go on a candidate journey just like your clients or your customers go on a customer journey. And so it's all about those touch points. How are they being marketed to as potential candidates? Where do they see your organization out in the LinkedIn sphere or what have you? How are you presenting yourself? What is your own mission and vision and values and how are you communicating that? And then also how are you listening to what's out there in the market and being approachable and able to be transparent and have these conversations.

Foreign episode we have recruiting an HR expert Joy Banfield. Steve this is a fun conversation. The more you watch the news, the more you see companies struggling to find good workers, to find employees, to backfill open jobs. You're hearing stories of ridiculous new trends of, you know, for instance, people abandoning their interview, they just ghost people, they don't even show up. And to pick through Joy's brain on this was really interesting. And to get her thoughts on what are we seeing and why and how do we combat it going forward?

You know, Jake, she spent quite a bit of time talking about what companies have to do to up the game because the days of older are over and culture is so important for an organization and once you have that culture, you have to guard it jealously and then market to people that fit that culture. And I had the pleasure working with Joy in my company and it was an exciting, fun time trying to get people to come into a quilting organization and we made it look like a very high tech startup and that was our culture there.

Yeah. Yeah. So for anybody who is a manager who has people working for them, if you own businesses, this is a great podcast episode to tune into to get some advice from. Again, a recruiting and HR expert. So stay tuned and let's just head west. So stay tuned as we discuss how to recruit today, building high performing teams and handling difficult employees with our guest, Joy Banfield. This episode is brought to you by Skyline Point Capital. If you're anything like me, you're always considering where to invest your money. Stocks, bonds, crypto and rental home. The list is literally endless. As we've all seen over the past year, the stock market is unstable, the housing market is just weird and inflation is on the rise. In times like these, the clear place to invest my money is in multifamily real estate, AKA apartment complexes. Here's why. Returns on real estate investments have little to no correlation with the stock market. There's lower volatility, stable income streams, and the tax benefits are insane. And let's not forget that the apartments will typically appreciate in value over time, which means you can walk away with a pretty nice return when the complex is sold in three to five years. Best of all, multifamily investing is passive, so you get all the benefits without the hassle and headache of your typical rental home investment. Getting started has never been easier. Head to skylinepointcapital.com to learn how you can start investing today. Well, Joy, I graduated from Iowa State, I think coming up on 15 years now. I graduated with a marketing and management degree back in those days. And Steve, I'm sure it was even more so in your timeframe, but when you were in business there was only like a handful of degrees. You did marketing, you did management. I think MIS was a new thing, you know, it was really just a small group of degrees. I got a marketing management degree, but now that I've, I've been seeing some of my, some college students coming out of business with a psychology degree, it makes so much sense now. Like, boy, I wish I would have like really understood the psyche of a person so I could market to them better. Yeah, you graduated with a psychology degree and now you spent the past 15 years in, in something related to HR, whether it's people management or talent acquisition or anything like that. Was that a, a pre designed plan like you knew, okay, I want to work with people, I better understand these people. Did you have that foresight going into college?

I would love to say I did. Oh no, no. I was far too young to be making smart choices like that. I was, I was young graduate of high school and then went right into college. I actually graduated college at 19, so I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. But I knew that I liked the concept of understanding people. But I did adjust my graduate degree because I had known that I wanted to continue education. Because you really can't do much with a BA in psychology. Sure, it's like a history degree, right? Like you have to take it and apply it to something else. So I knew I wanted to continue my education. I went back to school to continue and fell into recruiting and immediately changed from a focus in school psychology to a focus in organizational and industrial psychology. And so my graduate degree was intentional, but not my undergrad.

Ah, that makes sense. What have you learned since then about or how do you think having a psychology degree and now a master's in it has helped you in what you do now of people management and recruiting and things like that? You think it gave you a leg up that Maybe otherwise you wouldn't have had.

I think in some ways, yes, in some ways I would love to also, you know, if I had time to go back to school again and get an actual real business degree, I'd love to do that. But I think that what. One of the things that makes it a bit unique is it changes your perspective on how you think about the decisions that people make and how people get from point A to point B and then what some of their innate drives are. And you learn a little bit. I call it positive manipulation. Manipulation is such a bad word. But it's more about like, how do you help drive people to good choices? How do you help support them in ways that lead them to make good decisions and see things differently and open up their minds, their mindsets and their perspectives and those kinds of things. So I think that in essence, it makes me somebody who's good at leading from behind. Not necessarily. You know, I don't have the accounting background. I can't go be a cfo. I don't have marketing background, so I couldn't go do that easily. But I can help people find their own value, their own talent, their own skills and play those out to the business world as a whole.

Yeah. Which. And as you're leading teams and head of HR is an incredibly helpful talent to have. Oftentimes, I think people, especially when you get to like a head of HR or you know, chief human resources executive, whatever you want to call them, sometimes they get to that position because they were the highest performing individual. But they doesn't necessarily mean they have the innate talent to lead people well or to understand them well. And so, yeah, I imagine that would set you up pretty well to be in that executive role, as in hr.

Yeah, it just gives you a different. It gives you a different perspective and it's a support function. And that's one of the things that you just have to recognize is that it truly is a support function of the business. You're never going to be the flashy one up front, but a company can't run without its people function either. Right. You have to have the sum of the parts.

Okay, so that leads me into something. For full disclosure, Joy was my VP of HR at Tech Brands. And so you, you know, all the skeletons that are in the closet, so you can't talk about any of those things. But anyway, Joy and I worked closely over the years and had a lot of fun. But Joy, the big question today is how do I find great people and the. And with the dynamics of working from home, in the office, around the country, millennials and etc. Because when I talk to my peers in the business world, they're saying that I'm having a hard time finding people, number one. And number two, if I find them for an interview, they may not show up. And number three, if I find them and they show up for the interview, they're not qualified. I mean, all these things you're hearing that we need people. So you're the master and the old wise one. Lead our listeners to the promised land when it comes to finding people and running an organization.

Yeah. So I think a big part of that is looking at it from, step out of the recruiter mindset and look at it from the business mindset or the marketing mindset. Right? Your potential candidates have to go on a candidate journey, just like your clients or your customers go on a customer journey. And so it's all about those touch points. How are they being marketed to as potential candidates? Where do they see your organization out in the LinkedIn sphere or what have you? How are you presenting yourself? What is your own mission and vision and values and how are you communicating that? And then also how are you listening to what's out there in the market and being approachable and able to be transparent and have these conversations? So a lot of it is in your own presentation. It's no longer just, well, I'm the company, I'm going to hire you and you're here to serve me now because I give you a paycheck. It's really a symbiotic relationship and you have to look at it very much like you do taking a potential customer on a journey through getting to know your brand, I think that's, that's the number one thing. And then when it comes to candidates ghosting you or not working out when they first start again, that's, that's also give and take. It has to be recognizing that it's a competitive marketplace. It just, just like if you're selling widgets and everybody else is selling widgets, right? There's millions of other companies out there, there's millions of other small startups all the way up to big companies, right? There's so many different options out there. So how are you making yourself stand out? What's your own personal competitive edge for your business? And how is that making you stand out amongst the competition? There's the wifm, right? What is going to be in it for the candidate in addition to just the paycheck? Because while the paycheck is important that's usually not what retains people. That might be what gets them in the door. But your employees won't stay if all it is is a paycheck with a toxic culture. So there has to be a very, very holistic look at how you're approaching business, how you're taking care of your people, what is the give and take there? And then it's also how are you training them, how are you continuing their education, how are you investing in them? Much like putting R and D into new products, what investment are you putting into your people to keep them there too? So it's not a specific single answer there by any stretch of the imagination.

Okay, Joey, I heard a candidate journey. I heard wifm. I heard that it's how companies are engaging in them. It's more than just putting an ad in the Omaha World Herald. I'm hiring a accountant. Remember the old days? World Herald? You put something in the paper. I'm hiring accountants.

A long time since I thought about.

That, things have changed for business owners that are running companies. They're trying to get product out the door, they're trying to get invoices out, ordering product and et cetera. Who does this? I mean, is there a team, I mean, in a company or is there one person? From your perspective, what's happening, who owns this and what's the key with that?

It depends on the size of the business, I think. Obviously when it's smaller, much like it's people wearing many hats. So your managers might own it, the CEO might own it, what have you. But just like when you're looking at your business plan, there comes a point where you hire a salesperson, there comes a point where you hire someone to do your SEO, there comes a point where, you know, you bring in experts for these things. And for some reason it seems like the logical approach, logical approach that many leaders take is, I can do this myself. I know what I'm looking forward to hire so I can take care of it. But especially in today's world where it's all about how you present yourself online, what's your employer branding, how are you engaging with candidates? It's a full time job if you're hiring more than one position every three months. And so I think you'll hit that inflection point where it's necessary to either bring in a contingency recruiter to engage with specific jobs and help you sort of build out your own branding and your own recruiting journey, or it's putting that back on the managers or your leaders, which is unfortunately taking time out of their productivity towards their specific roles too. So there's a balance there.

Joy, going back to your to Steve's comment of, you know, candidates ghosting on interviews. You know, like maybe they've, they applied for the job, they were given an interview and then didn't show up. And I've heard similar stories like that of people showing up in flip flops and sandals and a tank top to an interview. One that probably required the least business casual to people accepting a job and then not showing up. Now those are some kind of extreme cases, but what's the where does the responsibility lie for changing? Is that, is that, is that the responsibility of the employer to change their expectations of what is to be expected of a candidate? Whether it's, you know, how they show up dressed up for an interview or you know, how they conduct themselves? Or is that, is that a shared responsibility with the person or is it all in the person? So where is that kind of, that line of responsibility?

Yeah, I think it's shared responsibility. And then a lot of it comes down to how does the employer present themselves in the beginning. And you will end up with a certain level of candidate depending on how you put yourself out there as a company. So if I go on LinkedIn and I throw up three sentences that says, hey, I'm looking for an accountant, ping me if you're interested. That is going to bring you a certain level of candidate versus if you put together a formal job description, if you have a website that presents your culture and values, if you have a website that is transparent about what your hiring practices are, if you disclose your salary information on there, it's all about if you set a certain presentation, it will lead those higher caliber candidates to you. Is it perfect every time? No. But I can tell you that in my experience I've worked at companies that do really well at this and companies that struggle with this. And I am ghosted on interviews far less. I've been at my current company for six months now and I've not once been ghosted on an interview. And that has not been my experience in the past. So a lot of it is in how you present yourself. Do you look like a no shoes, no shoe, no service company or do you look like it's five o' clock somewhere company?

Yeah.

Like a Thursday. Thursday.

Thursday. Thursday. Exactly.

Hey Joy, the when you're having these interviews and over the course of the years at Tech Brands, we had multiple ways to evaluate potential candidates and even whether it's a Gallup or Predictive index or disc or et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned over the years of how to minimize getting a bad hire through testing and what recommendations you would have?

Yeah, so this is one that depending on what the news cycle is, you'll get different answers. There are some times where people love the idea of using these inventories and then times where they're hated. I think the important thing to consider is there's nothing wrong with collecting additional data points to help you make decisions as long as you're not using that as a rule in rule out. Because in order to be more inclusive and diverse, not everybody takes these types of tests the same ways. Not everybody will do that. And you also have to be careful because I'll use predictive index as an example because we used it at tech brands. I use it here. I love it. I'm happy to be back in it again actually. But, but you have to be really careful to not unintentionally set a bias. So you're just trying to hire more of yourself. It's really easy to do. Right? Like, I know I need someone who's really assertive and is sort of minimal on the details and really is driving. So I know what I want somebody to look like. Well, that might not be the right thing for every job, but your natural tendency is going to be to flock towards people like that. So you really have to just use it as another data point. Do I think it's helpful? Data point? Yes. Is it shown over and over again for some of these more well known tests like PI, like Gallup, to be good predictors of long term behavior? Yes. But would I ever feel comfortable saying it's a rule in, rule out? No, you have to look at the whole person. You're not just hiring someone's ability to write, you're not just hiring someone's ability to talk on the phone. You're hiring the whole person. And so that's just something you have to take into account when making those decisions on what tools to use.

Joey, how do you get in? You're in an interview and you really want to know what the person's abilities are, what successes they have and what failures and how they overcome it. Because everybody puts on the resume, I've done this, I've done that, I'm great, you know, I've scored five touchdowns and one quarter, all these type of things. How do you weed through all of the stuff on the resume and really get to the core? Is this the right person for my company.

Yeah. So I'll say, let me, let me answer the question behind the question there. First off, the hardest people to hire for in my experience is salespeople because they're the best at telling stories. They're very good at telling stories. And my answer is going to be you have to really listen to the story stories that people tell. So the salespeople are always just really challenging to know where the absolute truth is because they are the most successful by making their experiences sound good. And I'm not saying they all over exaggerate, but that's how you sell well is if you can pull out all of the great things about a product, a person, what have you. So I'm going to preface my answer with that and put that aside. But really some of it is about those. Tell me about experiences when like go into an interview knowing what scenarios you feel like someone in this particular role might have that are the most challenging scenarios or the biggest wins of a position like this and ask them to give you examples of times like these and then really listen to the details and find that middle ground. Because someone who's not being 100% truthful will either over share or under share. They'll either give you too many details or not enough. So try to follow your gut on, you know, does this story that I'm being told sound reasonable? Is someone telling me that they did this one piece of a project that led to 400% growth and is that realistic or is it not? You know, listen to your own judgment there and then listen to the details of what they talk about that is important to them because that is how you'll figure out whether there's a values fit to is, are they talking about the things that I want my business to be focusing on? Are they talking about the areas that I feel are the biggest challenges? And so some of that will help you in making those decisions and determining who you feel the best fit for your organization in the long run.

My business mentor Fred Braun in Kansas, he was telling me, telling me about a way he interviews. And usually when you're hired, you're trying to hire high performing people. They tell you about how great everything was. He'd want to hire somebody that had a failure and it was more important how the person responded to the failure. Did they get back up? Did you get knocked down? That old song, you get knocked down, get up again. That's more important than you've got all wins, no failures, because everybody has a failure some way. But how do you respond to it because you know, we got to embrace change one of our core values and you can't, you can't predict the future. You have to adapt to it and everything is not going to work. And with these salespeople you're talking about, you're interviewing them, they're, they've done really well and etc. And they can convince you that's why they're in sales. They're very, very convincing. How do you start peeling the onion off? You said when something happened when this and I was at a real estate business seminar and I was on stage talking about hiring people and how important I said, how many of you have had a higher gone bad when they passed all the tests, I think 98 of the people raised their hands.

Oh yeah, I'd be surprised if it was that low.

And that's thing I think people challenge are challenged with how do I I thought I made a great hire. I thought I had all the data points checked off and it went bad. Tell us about that.

One of, I mean that's one of the things much like retail companies that have to deal with shrinkage, right? That is one of the things that to some degree you have to accept a certain amount of that because these are humans that we're hiring with their own drives and you have no idea what's impacting them in their personal life. Especially more as we're remote now, you have even less of an idea of what is really going on for those companies that are remote or hybrid. So I'm not saying give up, but I'm saying be realistic too and recognize that you're never going to get it right 100% of the time. Everyone can expect to have a rough hire. And maybe that's just a story for you to tell someday when someone else asks you to tell them about your failures. But it really, it's about getting multiple data points, asking questions in different ways, digging in to anything that stands out as that might be, if not a red flag, a yellow flag. Let's talk about this further. And then even maybe going beyond just the tell me about a time where you weren't successful about something. Because that's just such an odd and awkward and uncomfortable question on an interview. It's more about tell me about something that you've learned through a challenging experience or tell me about, you know, some something that you learned to apply in the future. Finding different ways to say those things so they don't sound like just those canned questions. Because if you throw canned questions like that at Someone who's interviewing, they will give you a canned answer. It's just there's so much information on how to answer all these questions nowadays. So you just have to be really careful. I think there is a certain amount of. You have to trust your gut. And if after a few times your gut is failing you, that's when, okay, then let me bring in more people because obviously I'm. I'm missing something myself. So how can I get better at hiring and making decisions and getting better inputs and those kinds of things and be reflective on that? It can't just all be someone else's fault. If I make five bad hires that I end up having bad hires, I say that I end up having to let go within six months. Is it a me problem or is it a them problem? And you know what can I learn to adapt myself in the future? And that's hard because that's an ego thing, right? Like, I would love to blame it on somebody else, but if the numbers show that there's a really good chance that it could be me, I need to accept that and learn from it.

Going back to Steve's question about how to cut through to get to the core of somebody, you know, you reference salespeople in a past job, you know, right. At a college. I joined Union Pacific Railroad, joined the marketing and sales team, and they had a program, it was sort of a training ground for about a year. You were in this, you were in this program that you oversaw some of the smaller customers, and you would have to interview out of the, of the program to, to land a higher level job. And so we were training nonstop for. We were running businesses, attending to customers, but we also had to train for interviews. And so I had probably 30 to 50 questions, canned questions, and how I would respond to them verbatim, memorized. And I had, as I was approaching the interview sessions to, to, to get out and get into like, you know, as a business manager or a sales manager. I had two managers and both were excellent at recruiting and interviewing. And they both had different strategies. One of them was he knew that we were all very well prepared for these interviews and we would ace them. So his tactic was, I'm gonna throw you off your game however I can. And so he would sit sideways in his chair, as he's only one interviewing. He'd sit sideways and pick up his phone and, and he'd ask a question, and they go back to his phone and act as if he wasn't listening to my questions whatsoever. And it would. It just Threw you off your game. And so whatever canned responses you had started breaking down real quickly. And for whatever reason, when you're kind of thrown off kilter, you know your game plan, as Mike Tyson says, you have a game plan to get punched in the face. You start to see underneath the onion layers. And then the other manager would ask a question that was so outlandish and absurd, you had to really think about, how do I respond to this? And what am I really communicating here with this answer? So one of them was he'd close every interview with something like, if you were a cookie, who would you be and why, or what kind and why? Or he'd say, all right, you're going to start a lemonade stand. Tell me the first 10 steps you do to get there. And he didn't really care about what you said. He wanted to understand how you think about the problem and how you resolve it, because he thought, oh, that probably made more sense and told me a little bit more about this person rather than the answers they're actually giving me. So I always found those. Those are two things I always employ now is throwing people off and asking random questions.

Jake, you. You were talking about the lemonade stand. A couple of things we do at Tech Brands is that if you're in the. In the conference room and you look around, is there a pen or a cup or whatever? And if you're interviewing a marketing person, then you just randomly. You stand up, go pick it up and give it to them and say, okay, your job is to market this. Tell me how you do that. And that's just. You're absolutely right. It's not. It's. It's not what they're saying, but it's. How are they thinking like a marketer. And it's not about the right answers. Wrong answers is just the linear thought process. Are they thinking or. They did, though. They fold a couple times, depending on the interview. This is, I think, was before Joey's time. I can't remember if I used this before, but if we really liked a candidate, we would then try to convince him not to work for us at the end. And I think everybody I did that with, they hired on. I don't know how long they stayed, but again, you know, because we are. We were a crazy place. And Joy can attest to that. Yeah, she was the. The keeper of the cats. And the.

Well, I imagine you probably have to be somewhat off kilter is. I mean that in a positive way because you're. You're hiring people to a A quilting organization. I mean that's not, it's not like Google. Right. It's, it's a little bit harder to find great candidates and you, so you kind of have to be a little bit unique in how you, I imagine be a little unique in how you recruit and hire people. Is that, is that accurate? I mean, is that a fair.

Yeah, I think some of it too was how we presented ourselves and how we did our own employer branding. Right. Like you think a quilting company and you think like granny's basement with the ten foot sewing machine, which I'm, I have a ten foot sewing machine, but that's beside the point. But, but not this big open like office that was spacious and looked very much like it actually belonged in the 21st century and using new tactics and techniques. And it was all about our approach, I think, to business versus what we were trying to sell. And I think that's what we ended up selling. All of the, all of the newer grads or people who wanted that sort of forward thinking mindset is at the end of the day, I don't think it, it really mattered whether we were selling quilting supplies or quilts or paper or you know, whatever. It didn't matter. It was how we were approaching it, how we were taking advantage of those opportunities and were we talking about the right things and listening to our customers and learning from that.

And Jake, when you walked in, just like Joey was saying the typical thing, when you say quilting, you think of old, dark and dingy and you, when you walked into our offices and the way it was built because we had an upper deck and open area, it looked like a high tech startup out of California.

Yeah.

And it was really cool because when people walked in they just looked and go, am I at the right spot?

Yeah. Is this actually quilting?

And that goes back to what Joey was saying, the branding, what did you want to accomplish? Because it was difficult for us to hire people. You know, anybody coming out of college wants to work for the Google, the Facebook's high tech, this so called sexy businesses. But we wanted to make that sexy, make quilting sexy and exciting and, and we were pretty disruptive in what things we did. So it was, it was lots of fun in that environment. Joe, I got another question for you. Before COVID everybody came into the office.

Yep.

And it was real easy to see the people in person, the mannerisms and et cetera. And I know you're, you do a lot of recruiting online and how have you adapted how. And from that adaptation what recommendations do you have for business owners when they're having to hire somebody remotely to get the right person? Is it the same or different?

It's different because in today's world, in many roles, it would be really easy for me to take my laptop and unplug from one company and go plug it into another one. And that's if. If. If you have a skill set that can be adapted to different industries. Right? So I think that. I think that it is. It's particularly challenging when it doesn't take as much inertia to take to change jobs as it did before 2020. So a lot of it comes down to, are you measuring the right things? Are you still stuck in that mindset where you measure productivity by time and seat or number of keystrokes per day, or are you really looking at the right things? And that's one of the things we talked about shoot week one of the pandemic, because it made all of us uncomfortable. And I think that the remote environment is hardest on people, managers, because you lose visibility and you can't see whether Sally and Jesse are chatting for an hour in the break room because they're at home. So instead you get to worry about whether they're doing that or not. So it comes down to, I'm not going to worry about that. I'm going to worry about are the tasks that I'm giving them getting done? Are they getting done at the quality of work that I expect? Are we having challenges of any sort doing that? So it's all about measuring the right things and then to some degree, accepting the fact that if you decide that your business is still one that is going to function in a remote environment or a hybrid environment, you have to embrace that and accept that it comes with a bit more work on the people management side. And I do think that while I think some jobs in HR were unnecessarily inflated and created out of the pandemic just out of a response of like, we didn't know what to do because all of a sudden it was the company's job to take care of people. And it just. The responsibilities changed so much. I do think that culture matters so much more because you're now having to engage with your employees very differently if you're remote and even more so if you're hybrid, because you engage with some employees when they're in person. And then some employees get left out if that is not the case. And so having a person who can really focus on that and help drive those decisions and Be really strategic in making those choices as opposed to being reactionary. That will pay off in the long run. And I've had many, many people who are founders or startup companies tell me that they waited too long to hire their people person because they waited until their attrition was bad and they lost people and that got expensive or they spent six months hiring a new role and they needed to hire it after two months. So it becomes very costly if you're not taking care of your people and being very intentional in that way. So of course I'm shameless plug for my own and profession. But, but realistically like you have to put time, effort and energy into the people who are doing the work of your organization. Just like you have to put money in technology, just like you have to keep upgrading your computers, you have to be willing to put time into the people too.

With, with culture being such an important component of a team and a business, what are some steps that you'd recommend for someone who is either starting a business or, or their business has moved again, like you said, hybrid or virtual to grow culture. It's so much, it's, it's so much easier to do that when you're in person. But we know culture is built on what you do, how you do it, what you say. So it's a little bit difficult, a little more difficult to do it virtually. But what, what things can be done that you'd recommend to, to bolster culture?

Yeah, I think the most important one is over communicate. And then when you feel like you have over communicated over communicate some more. Especially if you have say a handful of leaders, whether you're a single owner run company or whether you have a leadership team. If you think about it, all of you sit in a room or in meetings and talk about these big items, business strategy, wins, losses, those kinds of things. You talk about them as a team all the time and it almost feels like it's over discussed. And I think we ran into this with tech brands a couple of times. Steve is where I felt like we talked about this thing all day, every day. But it's because I happen to be in those meetings and not everybody else was. So I got feedback that we have no idea what's going on. So it's really, you have to be intentional about over communicating and sharing transparently as much as possible to your people. You also can get a lot of benefit out of getting, creating full buy in of whatever language or verbiage or terms you are going to use because it's those kinds of things that will collectively bring your people together. So what I mean when I say that is talking about your core values and using those same things, or even something as simple as, you know, naming what an employee of your company is, Right? If you work at Google, you're a Googler. If I work at Joe's Crab Shack, what am I? And, but create this language of, you know, create this language that brings your people together and that starts forming those things. But it has to be buying. It can't just be your people person. It can't be a single lone ranger manager that decides this is a great idea. As the runner of the business, you have to understand that some of this stuff seems frivolous, it seems silly. It really, really. You're going to tell me, Joy, that this is what's solving the problems of my business is whether we're called Googlers or not. But it's that idea and that concept that bringing people together to feel like they're collectively solving problems. And it's the core values, it's the language we speak, it's what wins look like as an organization. It's doing those things very intentionally that help bond people together as you go forward and continue to build your brand. So I think that's really, really critical when building those teams remotely, even more so than in person. And then it's just also being intentional about talking about it frequently, about having the right touch points, talking about the right things with the people when you're on the phone and making these rhythms of business something that your team comes to know and expect.

Joey, I want to talk about a case that we studied in graduate school, and I'm going to probably date myself a little bit, but people that remember Bobby Knight as the basketball coach of the Indiana Hoosiers, Fire and brimstone type coach, throwing chairs on the field, choking players. And then you've got Coach K of Duke, very cerebral, very motivational, but in a totally different way. And they both had national championship basketball teams. Who's the better coach?

Feels like a trick question.

It is a trick question.

That's why it feels like it. Well, I mean, the better, the better coach. I'm in hr, right? So I'm going to tell you, the cerebral one is the better coach. I don't, I don't know what the records are because I am not a fan. But it's, it comes down to, are you, are you finding the right ways to get your people to respect you and then want to perform? Are they performing out of fear? Because in today's world that's not going to retain people or are they performing out of respect? Your facial expression makes me think that I told you that I've given you the wrong answer.

No, no, no. There's neither a right or wrong answer. And after the case in class, they took a vote and who had the best and it came up like the 4951. Whatever. But the moral of the story is your company has a culture. It could be a Coach K, Coach Knight or anything like that. Hire the people that fit your culture.

Yeah.

Set the expectations.

Yeah. So people that like that fire Brimstone. Brimstone and get motivated by a more aggressive coach would go play for Indiana as versus Coach K. And what? There isn't a right or wrong culture? Yes, back then, but it was. Every company has a culture. At tech brands, we had a culture and we said we didn't care if you came from Harvard or wherever. If you didn't fit the culture, you're not coming in. And once you set that, you guard that culture jealously. Guard it. And so that leads up to my next question as we head down to the end here. You got a high performing employee, but he doesn't meet your culture. Conversely, conversely, you've got a person that's not performing that meets your culture. And everybody has them in their company. Everybody. How do you handle the high performer that's not meeting the culture standard and the one that is meeting the culture standards, but he's not living up to expectations.

So I'd say step one is coach both of those people on that and be fully transparent about why don't hope for the best or give passive comments about how to improve or speak to the team when it's really a single individual. That's the problem. Be very upfront and honest because people respond best if they're being told the truth and they're not just being fed a line of bull. So I would say for both of those people, that's the first step is coach both of them. Statistics tell me from what I've read that the high performing, more toxic person is going to be much more difficult to get to meet your culture than the underperformer who fits your culture. So it's easier to train somebody on a specific responsibility or practice or process than it is to change someone's personality that was probably formed when they were 18 months old. And some of that you're not getting out of them. Right. But you can teach someone how to do a task better. So I would say give Both a chance while recognizing that a truly toxic person at an organization can really be cancerous and can, can start building detractors as opposed to building people who want to be there. And there's really nothing that drives great people away more than allowing bad behavior on both sides. So that's the important thing is don't let either of these situations fester. But I would say, personally, I believe that the culture fit is much more difficult and more problematic for an organization than the skills fit. You can teach skills.

How much time do you give the person that doesn't fit the culture but he's a high performer?

30 days.

And how about if you aren't performing and you fit the culture?

I would, I would say that could be longer if they're showing improvement. So I have some bias here because I have some experience with some toxic people who I just, I just know they're not going to change because it's who they are. So I say 30 days because everybody should have a chance. But realistically, my anecdotal evidence is that after five days you don't see a difference. In 10 days you don't see a difference. But is the person who needs the skills improvement, are they showing incremental improvements? Are you setting realistic goals in the beginning that give them the chances to hit those targets? And are they trying to. Can you really see that they're trying? And if so, are we making incremental improvements? And then if it comes to a point where, you know, I have somebody on a 30 day performance improvement plan and they clearly checked out on day one, I'm not going to keep them 60 days or 90 days. They have to be showing me that they want it and at least showing some improvements in order for them to stay beyond the 30 days.

Joy we got. I have one more question before we wrap up and move into a quick speed round. Where do you see recruiting, virtual working, you know, like the hybrid mix. Where do you see these things going in the next 12, 24, 5, 10 years? Where's the future of this? Do you have any guesses, any ideas? And if you don't, that's okay. But I'm always curious as what. How does this continue to evolve?

Yeah, it's funny, I was just telling my husband last night, I'm like, I can't. I don't even feel comfortable signing a two year contract anymore because I've watched what happens after the pandemic and everything changes so quickly. So it's hard to throw out guesses like that. But I think that to some degree remote or hybrid work has got to stay around, especially for companies in Omaha, Nebraska for example, because we don't have the draw while the Silicon Prairie is getting bigger. Right. We don't have the draw of San Francisco or New York. So we have a smaller talent pool. So I think that companies in, in the smaller areas of the country would really be selling themselves short to walk away from that completely and do a full return to office mandate. That's just some of that is right. It's easier to recruit, so I would rather it go that way. But you're, you're losing out on a lot of talent. So I don't see us ever getting completely away from that. And I think the, the, the short answer is it's going to be cyclical. You see, companies all go remote and they say we're going to be remote forever. And now those same companies are killing that and they're all doing return to office. So it's all cyclical and it's always going to be that way. There are just going to be years where it's an employer's market and years where it's a candidate market. And you just have to find the right timing. Especially as a small business owner, you have to strike while the iron is hot and jump in and be an early adapter instead of waiting until it's all, you know, everyone else has gone the same way. So it's all about watching and listening to the trends and getting ahead of the curve.

Yeah.

Joy, got one last question here. Tell me how Chat GPT has affected recruiting and resumes and etc.

Great question. I, I'm an HR department of one, so I use chat. I shamelessly use Chat GPT all day, every day because who wants to write a policy when you don't have to? So I'm, I'm a proponent of using it in an ethical and effective manner. I think that it's not even necessarily chatgpt that's the challenge in recruiting. It's what the so called experts out there are telling people to do with ChatGPT. So you know, you have people who are self proclaimed recruitment experts going on LinkedIn saying I'm going to teach a course and how to tell you the right chat GBT prompts to use to build the perfect resume. And there's no such thing, there's just no such thing. So I think it's a tool that should be leveraged. I think that it's a great thing to be able to use to take, take your real Resume and put it into the tool and then put the job description in the tool and say, tell me where this matches and how I can highlight how what I do corresponds with the job. So I think just like, I mean just like a word processor is helpful in a resume, right? Like it's a tool that we have to use and it just should, it shouldn't be overused and it shouldn't be all about how can I be, how will ChatGPT help me hack finding a job? Because it won't. It's, it can be helpful but it's not the end all be all. At the end of the day you want them to hire you, not chatgpt.

Yeah, you don't need the artificial intelligence, may replace you soon enough. Don't speed up the process.

Very true, very true. Don't get me wrong, I love it, I love it. I use it all the time and find it very, very helpful in very many ways. But it has to be used ethically, which is questionable in recruiting tactics. There's a lot of different conversation being had out there about whether there have been biases TR into chatgpt that make it discriminatory. So there's more regulation being talked about passing about how recruiters use or how people who are hiring use AI tools. So it's one thing to just be cautious about, keep a, keep an eye on as things grow when you're hiring people. But it's definitely a tool that I think you'd be foolish to not explore at least in some degree both on the company and the candidate side.

Yeah. Well, Joy, let's jump into speed round real quick. We just have four quick questions. So quick questions, quick answers just for listeners to get to know you just a little bit better. First question, do you have any daily rituals that you swear by?

Let's see, for me it's my, my daily rituals are more my wind down than my wind up rituals. I've got teenagers at home that I gotta get out to high school, so my mornings are just harried. So for me it's more about centering myself in the evenings and helping my own brain shut down so I'm not dreaming about work at night. So it's cooking and taking time to sit on the couch and mindlessly doom scroll for a few minutes so I can just get out of it, get out of my own head a little bit. I'd say probably is ironically the thing that is the best for me personally, not recommending that for everyone, but for me and I am obsessed with my Dogs. It's a whole thing. So spending time with my dogs is very healthy for me, so there's that. But, yeah, my mornings and daily kickoff rituals are more just like, let's scramble to get everyone out the door.

Yeah. I'd say the workday shutdown ritual is the most underutilized habit of ritual that people forget to employ.

That's. Honestly, I'm back at work in the office now, and one of the reasons I could work from home, one of the reasons I like it, is I like my commute again. I love it.

Yeah. Great way to shut down.

Yep.

What's one item you could not live without? And your iPhone is not an option.

I'm a Samsung person, so that's a little offensive. Let's see. Probably my tablet, which I guess is kind of cheating because you said it couldn't be my phone. But no, I carry it around with me everywhere. I use it to color code my notes. I still take handwritten notes because that is how I retain information. So I can be sitting at a computer and instead of typing notes, I am writing on my tablet and have everybody's own section that's color coded and means crazy things to me. When we were at Tech Brands, I carried around a notebook and colored markers with me everywhere I went, and everyone knew that. And now I just do it on a tablet.

Now you look at Joey's notes, and it was like this technicolor flower thing coming off a page. It was crazy.

I love that.

All right, I still have the pens here, even though I'm. There we go. Memories.

Need a little pocket protector?

Yeah.

All right, last question. What's one book that's impacted you lately?

I have not been such a book reader. This is embarrassing to say, but I haven't read it yet.

What's the most impactful book you've read then?

Book reader? Honestly, this is, I think probably Plan B by. Yeah, I think. I think Plan B was probably one of the biggest, most impactful books. It was. It was. It's all about women in leadership and, you know, finding the next best option. I did not fall into my career on purpose. I didn't get here through a sequential step of things, either business or personal life. So it's been all about taking the situation and adapting to it and then really finding the joy in that and the power in that as well. So not a recent read, but probably the most impactful.

Yeah, I love it. Well, Joy, thank you so much for joining us today on Heading West. If people want to follow you, if they want to reach out. Where can they find you?

LinkedIn is probably best bet.

Wonderful. We'll link everything in in the show notes so people can find you pretty easily. But again, thank you for joining us. Thank you for tuning into Heading west this week's edition. Enjoy. Can't wait to talk to you again sometime.

Thanks, Joey. Good seeing you again.

You too. Take care.