The Future of Work is About Impact with Front CEO Mathilde Collin and OKTA COO Frederic Kerrest

Hello everyone, I'm Mathilde Collin, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Front. I'm joined today by Frédéric Kerrest, co-founder and CEO of Okta. Frédéric, thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you very much for having me, I'm excited to be here.

Excited for you to be here. So today we're going to talk about 2 problems that every single business faces. The first one is employee engagement. People no longer want a job. They want meaningful work. And when companies don't deliver on this, they're not engaged, and the lack of engagement hurts your business. That's problem number 1. Problem number 2 is customer experience. Across the board, there is very little tolerance for even mediocre customer experiences. People want to do business with companies that delight them, help them achieve their desired outcome, and they will leave if the experience they have is not optimal. So my question for you, Frédéric, is do you agree with A, the fact that these expectations from customers and employees are rising? The second question I'll have after that is do you feel like in a COVID world, it's even more true than it was before?

Yeah, I think that certainly we've seen over the last few years, even before we got into this COVID-19 pandemic, that employees in general are expecting a lot more from their employers. You're seeing that when it comes to learning and development. You're seeing that with opportunities to engage with their peers across the company, ways to get involved in their communities. I think the for good— we have Okta for Good and the very many for good organizations that have grown, I think, over the last years are pretty indicative of that. Certainly, I think that's the case with customers, too. I think as we've seen the democratization of technology and as, you know, everyone's so used to, well, in the pre-pandemic world at least, ordering a cab by pressing a button on their phone, they're expecting that same experience when they go into the office. And I think that provides some challenges, but also opportunities for modern technology companies to really engage their customers and provide that level of enjoyment using their products.

I couldn't agree more. And these two problems, so employee engagement and underwhelming customer experience, they can seem separate, like separate problems, separate solutions, but my belief is that they're not separate, like they're actually closely intertwined. I'll try to explain why. One of my beliefs is if your team is engaged, but your customers are not happy, then eventually your team will burn out and be less engaged. You know, why would you work so hard on something if it's to make your customers not that happy? And on the other end, if your customers are happy, but the team is burnt out or not engaged, then your team can't do their best work. And so your customers will suffer from it. And so in an ideal world, you want to be on the upper right of the slide I'm showing. Which is engaged teams and happy customers, because they really go hand in hand. And so the first question I would have is, you know, do you agree? And have you seen either in previous businesses or at Okta sometimes where this business failure happens, where one happens but not the other one, and so there is a disconnect? And then I have a third question for you, which is, you know, how do you make sure at Okta that every person, every employee feels connected to the customer.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing is going back to what we were just talking about. I think what's changed a lot is with the COVID pandemic, we've had to be a lot more— pay a lot more attention to both of these different segments that you're talking about, the employees and the customers. Certainly when it comes to employees, when everyone started working from home, we started sending out things like weekly surveys to really engage them. It's not quarterly anymore. It's really understanding what's happening day by day, especially in such a dynamic environment. Finding new ways for them to get engaged. It's easy to do volunteering when you're in person. It's harder when you're virtual. How do you do that? How do you do virtual happy hours? How do you even provide L&D course employees so that they can get engaged about working remotely? And then the same is true for customers, obviously. We've seen the pandemic accelerate businesses moving to online, both for their employee bases, organizations like FedEx moving 85,000 employees online, working remotely over a weekend. And the same across all these industries. I think what you're talking about here is even more important, right? How do you get that winning formula for both your employees and your customers? One way that I've seen it work pretty well, we've been fortunate at Okta since the very beginning. We've had "Love Our Customers" as our number one corporate value. And so just putting ourselves in their shoes and showing a lot of empathy, whether that's engaging them with keynotes at our virtual conferences, whether that's we have weekly all-hands, we bring our customers into the weekly all-hands. And a lot of time we ask them questions that we know will make some of the employees uncomfortable. You know, like, what can we do better? How can the product be better? What else do you want? And then we also encourage everyone to spend a lot of time with customers, right? Not just in sales and customer success, but in product and engineering and marketing to really understand and get that connection going with what the experience is if you Matilde, I think he might have frozen.

We may have to continue without him until he gets rebooted. I am here. Can you see me? Yep, and I can see you and I can see the screen. All right, perfect. I don't see Frederic though.

You are on the customer side.

Oh, right.

I lost you. Am I back? You are back.

I don't know who lost who, but I'm sure what you said was amazing. I'm sure you were sharing a lot of examples of how to be close to your customers. Is that right? The magic of working from home.

I can hear you. Can you hear me?

I can hear you.

All right, we're back in shape. All right, great, perfect.

All right, perfect. Well, and I was planning on ending the slide at 1:37, and guess what? It's 1:37. So I hope everyone heard what you said. I'm sure it was great. Perfect. So let me— the problem is, let me try to go here. All right. So, you know, we were talking about employees and customers working hand in hand together, and I was trying to find a good image of when it works out. And I think this gear was great. You know, if one is working and not the other one, then nothing works. Like your company cannot work. Okta obviously seems to be a company that's doing that really well. When thinking about other companies, I feel like Zoom is also a company that's doing, you know, making sure that their employees and their customers meet often and delight each other extremely well. If you look at a few interviews from Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, what he says is what they obsess over is looking at every customer interaction. And so basically they interact with your product, your processes, your people, and for each of them being very deliberate about having the best experience. And it seems to pay off. Like, you look at Zoom and, you know, they have amazing results. They have an internal NPS and an NPS that are through the roof. And so it just shows that when these two things are working together, that's when you can make magic happen. And so this is really, for me, the idea of switching from you're working to you're having an impact. Like, if your employees feel like they're close to the customers, understand the why they're working, then, you know, then you're working— you're not working, you're having an impact. And I don't know if you know, I'm sure I told you this, but this is the reason I started Front. Like, I started Front because most people around me were not happy at work. And so I tried to understand what would it take for people to be happy at work, and then wanted to create a place where that would happen and wanted to work on a product where, you know, we would change how people work. And as part of this journey, I've kept doing more and more research. And last year, we traveled around the US when it was still a thing. And I asked people, how do you feel at work? How do you want to feel at work? And the first thing that they mentioned was productivity. It was like, I want to be productive. That's what makes me happy and happy. But when you scratch the surface, you realize that what they're talking about is not necessarily productivity as in like, you know, you have a to-do list and you just tick things off. But what they want is making sure that they're helpful, they work on what matters, they make a difference. And so now I'm convinced that when we talk about happiness at work, it's not about productivity, but it's about the meaning of your job and what would happen if you weren't there. And if you just, you know, pursue productivity for the sake of productivity, then I think you can feel a lack of purpose or emptiness. And, you know, it's— I'm pretty sure, I'm not a doctor, but obsessing over productivity can lead to burnout. Which was true before, but is even more true today when you think about COVID where your office is your home, so work-life balance is super hard. Everything is closed, so going on PTO is kind of pointless. Your kids are home, so you're overwhelmed by them. And so when I think about the future of work in a post-pandemic world, I'm sure that the conditions that we will work with will be forever different. And I'm sure that the work will be way more about impact than it will be about productivity that we've desperately been chasing for years. Because we want people to remain engaged and because we want to do that. So my question to you, Frederic, is do you feel like in your professional life you sometimes have had this disconnect where you were super productive, but maybe you were not feeling as much of an impact and therefore were less happy? And then how do you make sure that at Okta everyone understands the impact they're having more than just being productive?

Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that we've focused on for, for many years now is, especially as you're trying to grow the company, and, you know, a lot of us who are in these high-growth environments, I mean, our company had— we started with 2 people, we have north of 2,500 employees now. Is really to keep trying to find people who Todd and I like to refer to as builders and owners, right? And who have this philosophy of they want to build things and they want the company to really be their own. And we try and emphasize that as much as possible because to your points in this whole presentation, it's really a lot more about how do you get that core engagement? And that core engagement is really if they feel that ownership, because all these folks are very, you know, highly effective, highly efficient expert professionals. You really want them to feel motivated and to own what they're trying to do. There's a lot of tactical ways you can do that. You know, we use a process called VMT, which is just a very simple strategic framework organizing people with vision. What is the vision you're trying to do? Methods, how are you gonna get there? And what are the targets? It's a very simple framework. It can go up and down and around to get people engaged and involved. But to your question specifically about productivity and impact and how I think about it, I think it's important not to confuse the two. So productivity is highly personal, right? Did I get this done? How far along am I on my to-do list? Do I have to change that? And impact really is more collective. And so thinking about how you can get a group to really produce and work together and teamwork and all the best parts of the team and all those kinds of things, I think that's the part of building these organizations that's very interesting. Certainly, I've found plenty of moments when I realized I wasn't being very productive. I think plenty of them have actually happened here during this pandemic over the last 4 or 5 months. One of them is I find that you know, since we are all interacting over web interfaces and video screens and so forth, I find that my productivity actually starts to drop towards the end of the day. So I'm trying to put the things where I need to have the most impact in meetings early in the day. And actually some meetings where I can just be maybe audio only, I'll put those towards the end of the day so that I don't have to look at the screen anymore. So I'm sure everyone's got their own tips and tricks, but certainly a key part of managing through this pandemic without a doubt.

Yeah, for sure. And, you know, as I was preparing this presentation, I was thinking in the same way that, you know, you've explained how Okta is deliberate about having an impact. I was thinking about what we can do if you're a CEO or a team lead to create an environment where you enable people to have an impact. I thought about 4 things, and you can tell me if either you have more and/or examples of what you would do for each of them. The first one is build with purpose, which is you should always make sure that people know what they're working towards. So just, you know, having a mission that everyone knows and repeating it and illustrating it and finding new examples would, I think, is super critical. Number 2 is working with intention. So we talked about this, but making sure that as a company, you create an environment where people can be efficient with their time. And it's harder today than it was, you know, when, we had an in-office culture, but you can still, for example, have days without meetings or encourage managers to have dedicated step-back time without their computer, etc. So that would be number 2. Number 3 is lead with trust. So specifically, I think creating a culture of alignment and sharing as much as you can so that people feel part of the journey, from running all-hands to quarterly meetings, to publishing dashboards, to sending metrics. I think that's how people really have the big picture of, you know, how their work directly correlates with the bigger objectives of the company. And the last one was fuel customer success, which is to have a culture that prioritizes building relationships with customers. And I'd be actually curious to know, you know, how you've scaled this at Okta and how it has evolved over time. At Front, for example, every person that joins will talk to customers in their first week. And that's just a good way to build this empathy. So curious if you agree with this, if you would add more, or if you have specific examples for—

I mean, I think you nailed it. So I agree with all those things. And I can think of immediate examples of very impactful and important things that we do at Okta specifically around those things. So I think that was great. I mean, building with purpose, I think that's very important. I'll go back to the VMT, the Very Simple Strategy Framework. We try and set up goals for the fiscal year at the corporate level. What are the biggest level of strategy, goals, and focus that we have? How do those cascade down through organizations? You should, regardless of where you are in the, in the company, where you are within an organization, have your own mini VMT, and it should roll up to one of the biggest things. So if you're working on something that's not aligned and associated with what everyone else is focused on, especially at the corporate level, like that's a problem. Right? So that's a good way of getting alignment. Been doing that for a long time. It's obviously easier when it's in person to have the dialogue, but it's actually a framework that translates very well to this remote environment as well. I think working with intention is a great one. I think leading with trust. I mean, you touched on it. We've been doing weekly all-hands and we still do today. We probably do about 40 of them every year, every Friday. Now we take off for holidays and end of quarters and things like this, but there's probably 40, 45 weekly all-hands every year. And that's with, you know, 2,700-ish employees now growing very fast. But it's very important because, as you said, so many of those employees are new. They don't even know how you operate, right? What is life like at Front? How do people behave? What do they say? What are the corporate values? How do we think about what the priorities are? Making sure that you can continue to translate and be present, in particular when you're going through these tough times, when there's a lot of challenge, when there's a lot of dynamicism in the environment. Making sure you're leading from the front is what I like to say. Making sure you're leading from the front, you're present, visible, I think is more important than ever. And then the final one I think you touched on is fueling customer success. We always, you know, prioritize customer success. It's our number one corporate value. I think historically in our business, historically in enterprise IT, in particular in identity management, vendors did a terrible job making customers successful. And obviously we brought a lot of that DNA over when we started the company 10, 11 years ago. I think it served us very well. As it has with your business and many of the successful transformational technology companies out there today.

Yeah, makes sense. The other thing that I found effective is, you know, when we were smaller, we had a company mission and everyone could relate to that mission easily. And then company has grown. And one thing I found effective is to make sure that everyone understands the why of their team and the mission of their team and reframing it. In a way that's anchored around impact. So for example, success teams are not just about improving NPS, they are about building customers for life. Or support leaders, they're not just about resolving issues more quickly, but building personal relationships with customers. Sales leaders, just not preparing faster, but winning more of the right deals, etc. So I found that to be pretty effective. Another The thing that I've found effective, and we've talked a lot now about this in this presentation, is making sure that everyone is customer-facing. And making sure that it is part of the process of how you are a PM, how you are an engineer, how you are working in the marketing organization, to always talk to customers. This is the moment where I lost you, so I'm sure you've already shared examples of of how you do that at Okta. Maybe one thing specifically that I'd be curious to hear is, I think for customer-facing teams, it's easier 'cause it's part of their job. For non-customer-facing teams, what are the things that you've found most effective in making sure everyone is customer-facing?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, we're an enterprise software company. So from the beginning, having that interaction with customers, right? You're running, we're running mission critical critical infrastructure for them. It's security infrastructure, it's identity infrastructure. It has to be scalable, reliable performance. So from that perspective, it's not as though engineering and product and the typically non-facing organizations can, can really kind of sit in the background. But you're right, there are specific things that you can do and that we try to do. First of all, a lot of communication. So at all hands, we will oftentimes have either a CXO of a large company come and talk with us, and we'll do a fireside chat with them just to get their feedback on how we're doing. Number 2, we'll talk about customer go-lives. It's one thing to talk about winning new customers, which is great, but I think it's much more important to talk about when these customers go live and making sure that everyone in the company understands that and feels that because a lot of people worked on it and they can again identify with it and own it and say, yeah, I worked on getting that customer up and running. Great example is we helped MLB.com relaunch all their streaming services last year at the very beginning of the baseball season. Season, and we worked very closely with them. We actually had a bunch of our engineering team went and worked in person with them at their MLB headquarters and then did a bunch of translation back to the Okta offices. So kind of literally sitting side by side. And then there's a thing, I think a lot of very tactical things you can do that go a long way. A good example is more and more now, you know, people use the term dogfooding, which is using your own products and making sure you're really using them well. We've built this program over the last 3 years that's going really well called Okta on Okta. And it's basically how do we become the number one customer of our own product? And so we're trying to use it for everything. We're trying to replace all the old technology with Okta. We're trying to figure out how it works for workforce internal employees, for customer-facing properties inside our own products. And when you do that and you put it front and center and things are not going well, like everyone knows and they have that experience and people start to say, "Oh wow, I was designing it this way, but I can see how that's actually a problem." So I think really having people understand how that works by putting that in their day-to-day work lives has been really instrumental. And I know a lot of people do these programs now. What ends up happening if you do them right, actually, is— and I'll end on this point— is your customers end up asking you, "Hey, do you have like a white paper? Do you have a reference architecture? Like, what is the best way to implement Okta for these customer-facing properties or for these set of workflows internally?" And you can say, yeah, actually it is because we've documented our own stuff and you can make what you've done internally as IT. And IT always thinks that they're somewhere in the back and they're always behind the scenes in a closet somewhere running services. Now they can be customer-facing and they can go and present to customers and you can really flip the whole model on its head. And I think that's very empowering for a lot of the internal organizations as well.

I couldn't agree more. I mean, as you can imagine, everyone at Front works on Front.

Yeah.

And I do believe that sometimes it's dangerous because you need to make sure that you're not building for yourself and you need to think— Totally. Your customers, but I think it creates a level of engagement and that's absolutely critical. So thanks for sharing this.

Of course.

We are a few— I think we have 2 more minutes, but we are at the end of our time. I put a few key takeaways, but you obviously have so much knowledge about, you know, building organizations that are impactful. So If you are someone that's listening to this talk and, you know, is thinking, well, okay, I'm in the middle of COVID making sure that my business is impactful, making sure that my employees feel that impact, and you have one piece of advice to give them, what would you say?

It's overcommunicate. I mean, without a doubt. So I tell everyone who works in our organization, whatever level they are, whether it's the C-suite, whether it's first-line managers, reach out to people. Call them on the phone. I actually have every day from noon to 1, I have a block called eat and call people. And I literally call people and I say, I'm sorry, you're gonna hear me eating because I'm eating and calling people, but this is my time to do that. And it can just be a simple Slack message. If you're more introverted, you don't like using the phone, you don't like being on Zoom, that's fine. Just Slack someone, hey, how's it going? Just checking in, how you doing? And not only people who work for you, which I'm sure that you're gonna do in your one-on-ones anyway, but maybe people who are peers of yours in other teams that you might have seen in the hallway, but you're not seeing anymore. Even better, international. So what I always tell people is, hey, every day reach out to someone in a different continent because now we have folks in, you know, we have offices, I think, in 15 different countries. So it's like call someone the furthest time zone away that you can and see how they're doing and connect with them. And that's, I think, the best way. Obviously, I've been doing that with customers for many, many years. So that's natural or second habit, but really Making yourself get out of your comfort zone. It's too easy. If you're sitting here in your own home office, you could just do the email, answer the thing, go in the meeting all day long and you're done. Boom. And then you do something else. No, no, no. Pick up the phone, call someone else, check in, see how they're doing. And you'll see that like communication information just flows that much better.

Yeah. Thank you so much. And I know that a few people from the audience have asked questions. There is one question that I think is interesting, which is how do you balance building relationship with customers with creating too much customization that doesn't scale? 'Cause you know, you want to be customer-centric, you want to make them happy, but then, you know, you end up with something that's unscalable. So curious about what you think here.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it depends on where you are in your customer lifecycle. So I mean, very early on, you know, we did what I would call unnatural acts to make the first 5, 10, 20 customers successful, things that do not scale for sure. And even when we launch new products now, the way we say, hey, it's a successful product launch is when we have 5, 10, 20 customers implemented and using the product. And for those first 5, 10, 20, 50, you're going to do weird things. They're going to call me on the phone. They're going to do these other things. When you start to get to the scale of 100, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, you just have to set up the processes. And the last thing is, I'll go back to communication. Just be transparent. Say, hey, Mr. Mrs. Customer, I love you dearly. Here's the roadmap. I'm happy to get your input on it. This is our plan. And all these little bells and whistles that, you know, you were working with in the old world, It might be time to rethink them. We might have some of them coming, but others aren't coming. But at least I'm gonna tell you what it's like. And they just wanna know. And if you're open and transparent with your customers around your roadmap, your plans, what might or might not happen, as soon as you know, that conversation, that relationship's gonna be a lot better through and through.

Totally makes sense. Maybe one last question that I have for you is if you think about, you know, on a weekly basis, how many times do you interact with customers today?

Oh, I interact with customers every day. I talk to Fortune 500 CXOs every single day on average. Sometimes it'll be like 3 in a week. Sometimes it'll be 6 in a week. I try never to have 2, more than 2 in a single day. Sometimes we end up having 3 and it gets tricky because you just have to be so focused on their business. And when you get on the phone with, I don't know, the CISO at FedEx or the CIO at John Deere, or, you know, you name your business, they wanna feel like you really know about them. So you really need to get back into all the details. What's going on? Where are we? And that can be very consuming. So figuring out how to balance all those things is tricky. But if I'm having a bad day, what I do is I pick up the phone and I call a customer and I just say, hey, how's it going? And they're like, why are you calling me? And I'm like, because I was having a bad day, so I want to see how you're doing. And it usually kind of gets me going again.

So I'm exactly the same. And I think, you know, making sure that— I'm convinced that becoming closer to the customer is really what keeps you engaged and make you understand the why behind what you're doing. So Thank you, Frederic, for having shared so many examples of, you know, what makes Okta a great organization, what makes you a great leader. I hope that everyone learned a ton. I enjoyed this conversation and I personally learned a ton. So thank you.

Me too. Thank you very much for having me. I think I'm the one who had the internet problem. So I'm gonna have to check that later, but this is the reality of working from home. So thanks again, Mathilde. Congratulations on all your success. I'm a huge fan of what you're doing at Front and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Thank you so much, everyone. Have a good rest of your day.

Thanks, everyone. Take care.

Bye.