Leveraging Thought Leadership Featuring Shep Hyken and Shane Green
In this LinkedIn Live panel, host Peter Winick interviews customer‑experience authority Shep Hyken and culture‑expert Shane Green. The conversation begins with a look back at pre‑COVID speaking models—largely in‑person keynotes—and moves into how the pandemic forced a massive shift to virtual and hybrid events. Both guests note that the sheer volume of online sessions has raised audience expectations, making content quality and relevance essential. They discuss the "Convenience Revolution," citing survey data that shows customers are willing to pay more for speed, delivery and frictionless service. The dialogue then pivots to the tight link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, referencing the American Customer Satisfaction Index and Glassdoor rankings, and emphasizing that great culture (exemplified by Ritz‑Carlton) drives performance. The panel explores the challenges of managing remote teams, especially middle managers, and the need for leaders to adopt daily check‑ins, virtual “shared lunches,” and purposeful networking to maintain engagement. They reframe the "Great Resignation" as a "Great Reshuffle," highlighting lifestyle and cultural fit as primary drivers of turnover. Finally, both guests share optimism about the next 12 months: a renewed focus on the human element of work, the emergence of the workspace as a community hub, and the opportunity for companies to raise the bar on both customer and employee experiences.
Chapters
Well, welcome, welcome, welcome. You are listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership on our LinkedIn Live, and today is a real treat. I've got 2 buddies, 2 really smart people that have been in this space for a real long time, and I'm excited to have the conversation, but I don't want to shortchange them by not giving them their quick intros. So First, we've got Shep Hyken. So Shep is a customer service and experience speaker, an international leading authority on customer service, customer experience, and loyalty in business. He's a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 7 books. I just finished your latest book, Shep. Thank you for that. You're in the Hall of Fame of Speakers, and we'll get into the rest of it in a little bit.
Shane.
Shane and I have known each other for a very long time, and Shane is a world-renowned speaker. He's the author of The Culture Hacker and a television personality. He works with Fortune 500 global entities on customer experience and organizational culture and has a deep, deep background in hospitality. So welcome, gents. Thank you for joining us. And Shane, you're— we're looking into the future, everybody, because Shane is in New Zealand. So that's what tomorrow looks like. Kind of like today.
Good day, everyone.
It's late tonight in New Zealand. Is it late? Yeah, it's like middle of the night for you. What is it, 2 in the morning?
No, it's 7 AM. It's all good. It's a reasonable hour.
Exactly. This is why we have Calendly and none of us schedule our own calls. So let's, let's kick it off. So there's a commonality, and the reason I sort of curate the guests is some commonality from a content perspective, but also some, some commonalities and differences from a business model perspective. So I want to start with you, Shep, because, you know, in the old days or the pre-days or whatever we're going to call them eventually, you know, and still today, your core business was keynote speaker, right? You're one of these road warriors out there speaking all the time.
Half our business is related to, you know, I mean, What I do for the company, I speak on stages and I write all the content, all the articles, videos that you see, I create those. And then we have trainers and we have some other roles that we play with our clients. And, but I'd say about half or so is me getting on a stage. And yeah, that pretty much went away, with the exception of a few outliers.
Yeah. So, so why don't we start with how that's changed, because you're still delivering value to clients. You're still putting out great stuff. You're still putting out books. So it's not like you crawled under a rock, obviously. You had to evolve. Maybe you did for a little bit. But what's different about your world today and how you serve your clients than it was a couple of years ago? Sure.
Well, prior to the pandemic, if you were to say, Shep, would you do a virtual event? That meant a webinar. And to me, it's like, that's one of the most boring words in the entire world. 3 syllables. By the end of the 3rd syllable, it's like I'm starting to fall asleep. You know, and I thought I did a pretty good job. I hosted a lot of virtual book clubs, some executive roundtables, and we were doing maybe 15 a year. And the last 2 years, we've been doing like 115 a year, probably more than that. It seems like some days I would do 2 and 3 clients in one day, which was crazy. I could never do that. I could never be in New Zealand, New York, and St. Louis, you know, presenting in the same day. And virtual made that that reality. And as I look to 2022, where we are right now, the majority of what's coming in is for live onstage presentations.
Hmm.
But just yesterday, I lost an engagement. Good news is my good friend got it. And it's for 2 weeks from now. And it's virtual. And here's what I see happening. Companies, when they've decided to do a hybrid or virtual work model for their workforce, when they decide to have a meeting, they're not going to bring them all back to one big, you know, spot again. They're going to do— in some cases, they will. I mean, there's going to always be that meeting in Las Vegas, the sales meeting, whatever. But if it's going to be a companywide meeting, they're going to do it virtually. And so I think that now that we've learned how to do it, and we've learned how to do it well, I mean, we, you know, they say, oh, I have Zoom fatigue, or, or, well, that's only— what you have is really bad speaker fatigue. Or bad programming.
No, so I, I think that's right because I think, A, the default setting now, if you will, will be virtual. Now again, like, there'll be exceptions. There's going to be, you know, big events in Vegas and that sort of thing, but—
Industry events will still be live. You have to get everybody together like that.
Yeah, well, if there's a trade show and that sort of thing, but having the corporate meeting, the typical, you know, event-type meeting, I think the default switch is now set to virtual. You'd have to convince us why to go somewhere. And I totally agree with you, Shep, that, you know, part of the reason that people have Zoom fatigue is because what they're watching on Zoom is terrible, right? Yeah, there's things that I watched, I used to watch on stage that were terrible. We didn't call it stage fatigue, we called it a crappy speaker.
Yeah, yeah, you know, I, I, I, uh, a client the other day asked, you know, hey, we want to do like a, a 2-hour Zoom. I said, are you kidding me? Do you know how much Steven Spielberg spends For one special effect that lasts 30 seconds in a movie, millions of dollars. And you're asking one of, you know, me or my trainer to get up there and do a 2-hour presentation to 300 people with no ability to do breakouts. I go, it's not, it's not good. And I told him, I said, you know, I don't care who you get up there, you will not have the best success that you can have. Now, I don't know if I agree with you, Peter, that default is virtual. I would like to think we're going back the other direction. I think companies want to. They're just cautious right now. The 3rd variant hit. You know, we had Delta and then now Omicron. And so that's really the 3rd wave of this COVID thing. And I think we're going to learn that we have to live with this, adjust to it, and recognize that, you know, life is going to go on or we're going to be shut down. And which is worse? You know?
When I was thinking about it, not just from a, from a COVID perspective, but also from an economic perspective to make, because now we've had 2 years of data that says, hmm, it really does cost a lot of money to get 700 people to go. But yeah, we'll see where it's gonna go. I wanna go to Shane for a minute because Shane, you've had a ton of pivoting to do, right? So your back background when you and I first met was, you know, as one of the world-renowned experts in hospitality training, right? And all that, that's typically face-to-face, right? I can't check in.
Yep.
Maybe on Meta I can check into a virtual hotel, but I haven't done that yet. then you evolved into Culture Hackers, and then you left us Americans here and you left Vegas and went back to New Zealand for a while. So give us an update on what you're doing in the world and what's different.
Well, actually, I think it's not even just about being in New Zealand, actually it's been traveling. Actually, I've taken advantage and we've actually been traveling. I think one of the things that Shep indicated, virtual has opened up the whole world. I can be anywhere in the world today and deliver keynotes, consulting, and coaching. And so in some ways, this was kind of a revelation for myself and my family where we're like, Why sit in one house? Why sit in one place when there is an opportunity to kind of spread out a little bit? Obviously, there's safety cautions and elements to think about, but in some ways it's been quite liberating. So that's sort of the first sort of element. I think the next piece that's come back, I think my aha was, we talked about crappy speakers. I go back crappy content. A lot of the content's outdated. Probably the biggest thing that I've been able to do in the last year and have invested is getting back to research. I had a bit of time on my hands, so it was about going back through. We've been doing surveys on employees and companies for years and went back through and said, all right, what is it all telling us? What is it all saying? And then we kind of threw it out the door and say, well, nobody cares about that anymore. So doing a lot of this, a lot of research and going, You know, it's got to be relevant. It's got to be recent. It's like people aren't interested in your ideas from 5 years ago when the world's, you know, turned itself upside down. What are the sentiments and ideas that are coming out? So, you know, it's been kind of interesting because again, technology has allowed us to survey. I'm doing surveys sort of globally, um, you know, and partnered up with some really cool, um, platforms that allows me to go into a different country and kind of go, hey, if I'm— if they want me to speak, I can in 2 weeks come up with, here's the state of your nation, just like we do a state of the company. So more relevant, more here's what I'm dealing with now, as opposed to something that is idealistic. So I get kind of fired up right now that I think it is requiring the content to be better. It's always required in my mind the speakers to be better. Chip, you're right, there's crappy speakers out there, but the content's got to fit now. And what I think companies are looking for is, give me something I can do now. They get the hype, they get the fired-up moment, I get excited, inspired, but they're wanting some to-dos. And I think that's how—
Stay there for a minute, stay there for a minute, Shane, because I think when we look at who was delivering, what we were delivering, and who we were delivering it to, there was a big chunk of it that was sort of entertainment, the motivational speaker, though, you know, it's the sales event, get them rah, rah, rah. I think that business is gone for the most part, right? And I think content, content, content, content, right? I think we're living in an age right now, I'm calling it sort of the COVID Renaissance, where what happened when we gave a ton of really smart people a bunch of time? Well, they didn't sit there and eat, you know, Pringles and watch Netflix. They wrote that next book they wanted to. They re-engaged in the research. They dove in. They thought of things. There's no shortage of ideas. There was a short— there was a constraint on our time.
Right.
I love the fact, mostly, that we're not traveling. You know, the amount of time, like you said, I'm on with New Zealand, St. Louis, I have a call late tonight with Japan. Like, this is awesome.
Yeah.
Those were— and I thought I was busy before, or effective, or productive, and the hacks to get through an airport. I love that, you know, we're all 18 inches from a screen, it's global. But I do think the key point here is getting back to the content. There were a lot of Let's call them lazy speakers. They've done their shtick. If you've seen them before, you know, at 3 minutes and 20, they're gonna pull their ear and tell the joke. How do you connect to me in a modality that matters, be relevant, and the, the, the information that you're providing is fresh? So when you're doing research, you know, that's fresh. That's not the book you wrote 5 years ago. Not that there's anything wrong with the book, but that's like adding to the principles and contextualizing it. So what do you say on that front, Chad? Oh, sorry.
Go ahead, Shane.
Yeah, I was just gonna say, I was just gonna say, you know, I think there's still a bit of a space for the entertainment. People like to be entertained. But let's face it, what have we done in the last year? Netflix gives us every stand-up comedian that we want live in our home for an hour. And by the way, it's good, it's a good timeout. I don't even need to go and find that. I miss live events, but at the end of the day, the content is readily available. So we said earlier, give me an excuse to get out of my house and come to Vegas or wherever That's the first piece. It better be really damn good. But then you go, listen, I can still get the same content in a shorter space, relevant globally, and get access to it a lot easier. And I think we're just responding to that.
I think we want more than content, though. People want to network. They want to learn. The best information comes with the discussion that happened as a result of what you just heard in the hallway. Now, Peter, To your point, information and timely, you know, we do every year. This is our 2021-2022 ACA. That's our Achieving Customer Amazement study, comes out in March, because we can't survey people. And this is me, I'm anal. I'm not going to survey anybody for a 2022 survey, even as late as December of '21. No. So last week, we went to the field with our questions. But the point is, If everything— and Shane, I believe this about you with your Ritz-Carlton background and everything you've done in hospitality— nothing has really changed between then and now. I believe that the concepts that we've been teaching over the years are timeless, but they're also at the same time timely when we pair it up with what's happening right now. We know that convenience has become a really important element of the customer experience.
Sure.
And at the end of the day, convenience. So if somebody— this is what we ask in our survey. Would you pay more for good customer service? And the answer is yes, overwhelmingly. 50-some-odd percent say yes. Would you pay more for convenient service? And the numbers go up higher. And if that convenience— and by the way, convenience is, you know, quicker online instead of, you know, doing it in the store. It's, you You know, maybe not having to wait in line, something quicker. But if you add delivery into the mix of convenience, then that number goes to 92%. So, you know, customers are willing to pay for convenience. Now, before the pandemic, if I ordered a pizza, the pizza was delivered for free. Today, they charge me $4 to deliver that pizza, $5. And I don't care. I'm happy to do it.
Exactly.
As long as it shows up on time and it's hot. So that's what we're looking for, is to take timeless content, if you will, or tactical ideas that will work. And in what we do, I believe, and I wrote about this in my most recent book, I'll Be Back, there's a chapter that says nothing has changed in customer service. Customer has a problem, a question, an issue, and at the end, they want it answered or resolved. Nothing has changed. 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and 100 years from now, that's going to be the same. Now, what will change is how we get to that resolution or how we answer the question. Are we going to give them a digital channel? Are we going to do it in person? Are we going to use technology? Are we going to use artificial intelligence? And you know what? To the customer, it doesn't matter. I just got my question. I just got it answered. I'm happy.
Well, I think a lot of these things that companies did in the middle of the pandemic for survival, we're not going to give up now. I love picking up stuff versus having to go and deliver it. I love the Starbucks app where I can click a button, and then I walk in and my coffee's waiting for me. They're not going to pay me for that.
There's a level of convenience. And yet you're still going to the store, but you're using some digital technology to get you there.
Exactly.
And so there, you know, in my book, that's another book I wrote called The Convenience Revolution, 6 areas of convenience. One is just eliminate friction. Just get rid of anything that's sticky and hard to do. Number 2, and I mean, I don't need to go through them in any detail. But No. 2, use technology.
No.
3, use self-service solutions. No. 4, a subscription model where things just show up without you having to deal with them anymore. And that could be your dog food, your razor blades, everything. Even, you know, you can now subscribe to a car. And that's another story. Delivery, I mentioned before. And is it logistically convenient? Are the hours of operation, you know, there? So we call that, you know, the ability to connect. Totally.
I want to go back to a point we made a couple of minutes ago about the content, right? That the bar has been raised for the content, and we've agreed that this isn't the worst way to deliver content. We could prefer in person, the physical connection and all that, but those that have figured it out, this isn't the worst way in the world to deliver pure content. What we haven't seen yet, or at least I haven't seen yet, or are the other reasons people were going to the event? And I would say it was connection and community. And I've seen people try lots of different things, but I'd love to hear what you guys are seeing around the connection in the community, because I did a little bit of light research last year to event organizers. And, you know, event organizers are so focused on the theme, it's gonna be resilience or innovation or creativity.
Right.
But when you ask participants, tell me about the best event you ever went to, several years later, let's say, That was the event. I don't remember if it was in Cleveland or Denver, but that's the event that Shane and I met at. So the highlight for me was I made a relationship that lasted me a long time. And the event organizers are going, okay, well, oh, that's cool. But we were thinking that was the year of the cat or whatever. So what are you seeing in the community perspective and the connection perspective? 'Cause that still burden is on us to be on the front of that.
Yeah, listen, I think it ties in really well with what we're seeing is what is the modern workplace about? So we've kind of said, COVID's kind of changed things up. I've got to give people an excuse to come to my event. I actually think we've got to give people an excuse to come to the office. The bottom line is people can work anywhere and work really damn well. So if you start to think about what we're talking a lot about now is, well, why should people come to work? Well, they come to work just for those reasons you said, Peter. It's about connection. Okay, we got to get around the water cooler and Shep and I can talk hockey all day long. We've got to focus on our sense of community. I think there's collaboration. So you've got to put people together to actually make them interactive, give them things to do. And then I think the final part is we're going to do celebration. So if I take those ideas of what the modern office environment should be like, now let's talk about our events. You better be celebrating. And again, I think people want to celebrate. They want excuses. They want to collaborate, which means they don't want to sit in a room and listen to people talking at them for 8 hours. They want opportunities to go in and not just network, but purposeful network. Give them a challenge, give them a task so they have that sort of starting point. Because, you know, some of us unfortunately are not really extroverted. So, you know, we struggle a little bit to say, well, networking, you know, because it has that kind of dirty word, Peter, that we've kind of gone through over the years.
Yeah.
So go back to those elements. You know, it is connection. I think that's what those events sort of come to. So there's more facilitation. You know, I said a long time ago, I don't teach people anything, but let's challenge them. Let's put sort of ideas in front of them and facilitate a conversation around those themes, as it were. I think that's not only the future of what these events should be like, but it's what the office should be about too.
Yeah, thank you. That's awesome.
You're in a really interesting spot right now, Shane. Not New Zealand, but I'm talking about where you are in business today. Because you're focusing a lot on the culture and the people. And as companies move to a hybrid or even a remote workforce, how do you keep them engaged to the point where they are not thinking that they work for money, that they actually work for the company? And the Great Resignation that we're experiencing, you know, really throughout the world, I saw some really interesting stats. 80% of the people that resigned, 83%, I think I saw, They didn't resign without a job. They had another job they went to. So the Great Resignation is not about people quitting work altogether. It's about people finding a better job. And it's not always better pay. It's better lifestyle. And so—
But stay there one second, Shep, because I think a lot of where that's happening is where we don't put a lot of attention to. So if I am frontline at Target or Home Depot or whatever, right? Those people used to not have as many options, right? Now they're thinking, wait a minute, I kind of don't like it here. Just using Home Depot as an example, they don't treat me well, my boss is a jerk, whatever, whatever. But it's going to be hard to get a job. Then you go, hmm, I've been reading some great things about Target, about their culture. I got a friend that works there. Oh, and maybe they're paying a buck or two more, or maybe they're giving me flexibility in my— something I'm not— it's not always a dollar thing. It's an environmental thing. It's a culture thing.
It's a community thing. It's a respect thing. It's a cause, am I being— into? Yeah.
Cause, right.
But Shane has a perfect opportunity in this world right now because I believe that companies are starved— leadership of companies are starved for the formula that will keep their people and make their people happy. In one of my books I wrote, The Amazement Revolution, one of the chapters was about creating the Fun experience, F-U-N. And F-U-N is not about having a good time. It's about fulfillment. Is the employee fulfilled? Are they exploited for the unique talents? And are they excited about what's coming up next?
Right.
And Brian Keeley at the Baptist Health South Medical System down in Florida, legendary within the industry, he says, I want to create an experience at work that makes us the destination employment opportunity Where people will come here and never leave. Well, how do you do that when somebody's working out of their home and the only time they ever interact with their manager or other colleagues is maybe once every couple of days? You know, we talked to some of the great leaders in call centers that force thousands of people to, you know, tens, hundreds, millions of people in the industry. And I asked them, how often do you talk to their employees? And they said, we try to do twice-a-day meetings. 2 times a day. How many did you do before the pandemic? Once every couple, 3 days. And okay, what's the difference? We need to keep everyone engaged. So, Shane, riff on that for a while because I want to know what you're thinking.
Yeah.
So, let's take this Great Resignation, which was just a branding exercise. Let's call it the Great Reshuffle. I think everyone is just moving around. I actually think it's— I think what's really interesting is it's not employees that are reshuffling. There's some research coming out and we're doing some stuff. It's middle managers. I think that's the concern for a lot of companies is that they're losing some of this middle management band. And managers are starting to go and be even more, you know, middle managers, let's say they're into middle age. They've got kids, they've got aging family, they've got a lot of responsibilities going on. So I think what you said, Shep, is really important. They're not leaving for an extra couple of dollars at that point. They're going for a better lifestyle. They're going for something that works better with them. So I think middle management is an issue right now. And I think companies have kind of taken them for granted for way too long. I think that's where the problem is. They're not investing enough. One of the biggest things that I think has always fascinated me about culture, and when I started out in the culture transformation space, you go to a company and they said, I want better customer service. We've got to address the employees. We've got to fix the employees. We've got to train the employees. Employees were never the problem. It was always about the managers and the mechanisms and the things that were getting the people. Shep, as you know, you can't make someone take care of customers. They have to want to do it. So how do you create that want? Well, it's how the managers act and interact with them. It's the mechanisms that are going on. So as I started to shift into the space, and as you said, now shifting into virtual, you know, the companies that had a great culture before COVID still have a great culture. Because all the great culture was is they had a pulse on their people and were responding always to the fact that those needs change. Culture transformation is not an event. It's something you're doing it every day. So the companies, and this is where Ritz-Carlton was so great. The first day I became a supervisor at Ritz-Carlton, my general manager came to me. And this is after working in a hotel 5 years, being really good in the front desk, front of the house. And he says, I want to tell you one important thing. Your number one priority is no longer the guests walking through the door. And I was like, what? I've been doing it for 5 years. Isn't that why you promoted me? He says, well, let's just face it. You've got 150, 200 people coming through the door every day. You can't take care of them. But at that point, I had a guest service team of 22 people. He says, but those guys and girls can. He says, your number one priority is now to take care of them. And so that whole idea, that simple concept that great companies, the best service organizations always take care of their employees the best. And so that simple idea just has to be carried through. That is a timeless concept. What we're doing now is using technology and different things to bring it to life.
So I want to bridge that to Shep's domain because the data shows us that you're never going to have customer satisfaction scores higher than employee satisfaction scores. Yet everybody tries to fix the customer experience problem by throwing more money on that end of the tail. There are two sides of the same coin. So I want to hear the other side, Shep.
Well, I mean, here's the thing. If you look at like the American, American Customer Satisfaction Index, ACSI, that comes out by the University of Michigan, they look at every industry, every company. I mean, they, and they say, OK, what are the scores? If you were to look at the best performers in, in all industries, for that matter, maybe the top 20 companies, and then you go over to glassdoor.com, where employees get to rate their employ— you know, employees rate their employers. And take a look at the Top 20 Companies there. You would be pleasantly surprised at how many of them cross over as to great places to work are great places to do business with as well. You know, I've always believed, and Herb Kelleher, I guess, is one of my, you know, I studied Southwest Airlines for years and years. And I believe when he said, which is more important, you know, your shareholders, your customers, or your employees? He thought about it. He says, the employees, because if you make the employees happy, They better take care of the customers. The customers keep coming back because they like what the employees are doing. And that's going to make the shareholders happy. So it's easy to see who comes first. That said, I believe that you've got to, as a leader, define what you want your vision to be. At the Ritz-Carlton, it's ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. You knew that, Shane, the moment you walked in the door.
Yep.
And you lived and breathed it. And every single day, preshift, you had a meeting that covered one of the standards that makes that vision come to life every single day, every shift. How many companies, when people say, I want to have Ritz-Carlton-like service, are you really willing to do what they did? And the first thing is, it's a vision, then it's communicated well. And then you're training the people, assuming you have the right people hired to begin with. And then managers are role models; leaders are role models. And then they defend their culture if any of those managers and leaders seeing somebody or some group going out of alignment. And then, to your point, Shane, we have to celebrate when it works. That's a process that we take our clients through when they want to become customer-focused. And, you know, they go, well, well, we aren't really working on the tactics about dealing with the customer. Yeah, you are, number 3. That's training. And everybody gets trained. Frontline gets trained differently than people behind the scenes, but they're all trained to the vision. And it's so important you get that internal piece right before you can expect the external piece to work.
That's a big piece. You know, we had a piece on the wall at Ritz-Carlton. There was a hospitality axiom. It calls employees with a great attitude will deliver great service. Employees with a bad attitude delivers bad service. So basic. So simple.
Pretty simple.
You know, it's so basic. As I've gone through what I've understood culture to be, culture is just the collective attitudes, hearts and minds of a group of people. And what we did at Ritz-Carlton and what we teach organizations is every day the number one job of you as a manager is to check on the attitude of your people. Are your people feeling good? And if they're feeling good and got what they need, they're gonna take care of your customers. Trust that they can do it, enable them and then empower them to go and do that. But that's a piece, is like managers need to understand that it is about this culture, their hearts and minds that'll not only define customer service but performance. What I think I'm most proud of is that we've shifted from a customer service focus I now talk about performance with high— with organizations all the time. You know, Shep, you brought the thing, the daily pre-shift. I don't care what your company is doing, but talking to your employees at the start of the day, getting them aligned, getting them fired up, set expectations, get what they need, that just drives great performance. And so it's timeless.
Yep. So I want to dovetail on something you said there, Shane, about, you know, people feeling good. So if I'm a mid-level, middle-aged manager. I used to know how people felt, if my people felt good, because we're in the office. I'm walking around, you know, Shep's got a big smile on his face, Shane's looking down, I can grab them, we can have a one-on-one. How do I know? I mean, this is part of the challenge, is we have to change the way we lead and manage today, because I might not know if Shep's feeling good if I only see him on a Zoom call every other day. I might have to acknowledge that he's living in a time of stress and he's got, you know, young kids working from home, or You know, the home that he lives in is, you know, he's working out of a shared office with a spouse or 3 kids that are doing remote learning or whatever. And you wouldn't have known so much of the background stuff in the, quote, old days, right? You could come in and put on a smiling face whether you had a fight with your wife that morning or the dog died, right? Now it's— there's so much less we think we know.
But Peter, here's the piece. Even when we're in the office, there's a ton of managers who paid no attention to that stuff because they were so focused on the tasks, you know. So, so, so—
But they were crappy managers.
But that's still there. And so one of the things I think is that the split— management and leadership are both sides of the same coin. In a perfect world, you have a manager who gets stuff done and a leader who inspires the people to get it done. What we're seeing in the virtual world is, I think, leadership coming to the fore. And it's almost— it's a full-time task. You used to say, all right, you balance your management and leadership tasks. I think today what Shep was saying, we're guiding. You have to be able to check. If you're a manager and you have 10 people virtually, That's a full-time job to check in on them because you need to talk to them every day and see how they're doing. You need to be thinking about how to celebrate with them. You need to set up one of our best practices we talk about is, you know, every week have the shared lunch where lunch or the coffee turns up, you get on and you have a virtual meeting that's nothing about work. It's just about, hey, just tell us how you're doing and, you know, celebrate. Those things used to happen live, but that's leadership. People that understand that my role and priority is to take care of my people regardless of where they're working and what they're doing. But what it is, is that now I can't walk the office and touch 10 people in 10 minutes. Virtually, it takes me a good hour to get around to everybody. So that's taking more time. But still, leadership is leadership. Focus on people, focus on the right things.
No, great.
They are the same things. We've just got to be willing to do it more. And as I said, expand the idea that being emotive and being personal and being interactive over Zoom, which can happen— I can see your facial expressions. That becomes more of an art and a skill that has to be developed. And that's teaching managers.
Right. One of the bigger stressors in a company during the whole remote migration was that managers were struggling actually more than the frontliners. Frontliners were still doing what they were doing, and managers couldn't do the walking around, looking over people's shoulder, noticing, coaching in the moment. They couldn't do any of that. And they're forced to learn a new way. And yes, I think that over time, some people, you know, they reveled in the whole opportunity to go remote because they're very productive. But then again, they have their space to do it in. I love— there's a TV commercial you see right now, and it's so good. I can't remember who the commercial is, but about— but it shows, you know, here you are in your office, and then it pulls back. It's at a dining room table, which is actually the same table—
Right.
where the kids are doing their homework, and then there's a science project going on.
The volcano. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like, this is what people are doing. Dogs are walking by, kids are walking by, and that's not necessarily the best workplace. Shane, we do something fun. When we went remote and we were all away, we had a day— we had actually 3 daily huddles, but the middle one, which was around lunch, we all got together and ate lunch together. We had an HR director, the Humor Resource Director, not the Human Resource. And their job was to bring a funny video from YouTube to our lunch for us to just laugh a little bit together.
That's fantastic. So I want to just be, be cognizant of the time, and we're going to have to wrap here. I'll ask each of you to give us sort of one thing that you're most excited about coming up over the next 12 months. What are you pursuing? What are you thinking? Where do you see opportunity? Not necessarily from a content standpoint, where do you see the opportunities? What are you excited about, Shane?
Uh, you know, I, I'm excited that there is a new respect for, uh, the human element of everything that we're doing. Yes, we're becoming more technology-focused and using technology, but I, I'm actually excited more than anything else that, that we are about human, that, that work and culture, that focus is about the people, um, the anxieties, the stresses, all the things that people are going through. But it's forcing us to actually bring health and wellbeing, fun, all the things, celebrations to the forefront, which I believe is what the future of work is all about. People will work from anywhere, work will get done from anywhere, but it's that human element that'll actually bring us together. And I think the workspace and the work environment is the new community. Go back 30, 40 years, you know, the community centre and all that where people would come together. I think it's the workspace and I'm excited to be a part of kind of bringing that to life.
I'm excited for what Shane just told us. But seriously, I think, as I look to the future of my world, I think customers are smarter and savvy, and they are loving the experience they're getting from rockstar companies. That's making other companies, they're forced to raise their game. And that makes me excited, because that gives me opportunity to help more people because they need the help. They want to get there. And I think that As we look at the Great Resignation, we're going to look at that in the rearview mirror because it's all going to balance out. Like you said, Shane, it's a reshuffling as much of anything, not just a resignation from work in general. People need to work. They're going to realize, I need a paycheck in order to eat and feed my family. So there will be places to work. And employers that didn't make it great are going to have to if they want to stay in business. So it's a competitive world.
Yeah, I love that the bar's being raised.
Customer service, employee service, Hand in hand. Absolutely.
So I want to thank you both for, uh, spending some time with us today and for the work that you both do. It's great stuff. So thank you. Thank you both for joining us today.
It's a lot of fun. Thanks.
Thanks for having us, Peter.
Good to see you.
See you guys.
