How to Win the Talent War with Elisa Steele, CEO at Namely

Hey. Hello, Sastr. You guys ready for your last set of sessions? You've heard all about strategy. You've been to sessions on scale, you've been to sessions on how to drive your sales organization. Many of you, I hope, went to Byron's session around grit and how you actually run your SaaS businesses and grow and manage your workforce. And none of that can happen without your teams, without your people, without you, without leadership. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about talent and we're going to talk about how you win in the recruiting war with talent. So let's start with the concept of the consumerization of business. So I'm not talking about the consumerization of it, which we talked about years ago in terms of the devices we hold in our hands. I'm talking about everything that has to do with business that is now driven by consumer grade experiences. And we have a scarcity of one of the biggest resources that we need to run our businesses around talent. As a matter of fact, we're at the historic lows of unemployment, right? 300,000 new jobs in our country opened just last month. 7 million RECs open. How the heck do we compete? It's all around understanding the consumerization of business and how you attract and retain great talent. And I want to talk about three things today as it relates to talent and hopefully you'll walk out of here with the whole pie. I'm going to talk about purpose, I'm going to talk about insights, and I'm going to talk about exposure experiences. And those are the three things that I would tell you I've learned in my career around how to run and manage your talent, organization and your people. And so let's start with purpose. I don't think there's a person at Saster who isn't involved in your company because you're connected to their purpose. You're either running your company with purpose or you're part of a team where you feel like that purpose is pulling you all together. And if you don't have that, I bet this time next year at Saastr, you're going to be with a different company because it's what drives us to do something bigger than who we are. And I was reflecting in my experiences and in my career, where did I have some of the tightest, most connected feeling around purpose? And it was in a particular role when I was running marketing at Skype. And I think I'm going to share with you today a story There and how we took what at that time was our purpose, which was how do we bring people together even when they're physically apart? How do we use technology to actually make that human connection feel amazing and real? So I'm going to share that story with you now.

I consider Paige like a long lost sister that I never had, that I should have had. The crazy thing is me and Paige have been so close, but we actually have never met.

Oh. This was the first time that I held Sarah.

My mom was pregnant with me and just found out that I had one arm at 20 weeks. I think she wanted to find someone else that was experiencing the same thing. So she went on a website and found Theresa and Paige.

When me and Sarah were born, our parents were like sending letters and pictures to each other and stuff.

So they became close and then we kind of lost touch because Theresa had two more kids. When I was eight, I needed someone there that could understand everything about me. And I was like, I want to find Paige.

My mum got an email from her mum and apparently they had been looking for us for three years. We started emailing first. I asked her one day if she had Skype, what time is it for you?

I think they're like, when I first saw Paige, it was like I've seen a mirrored image of me.

When I saw Sarah, it was kind of like, oh, this is how people see me.

We'll talk about boys and wife and compare things.

She doesn't really, I don't really worry.

About what other people think about her.

She can walk around happily and with a short sleeved child. She helped me a lot and gave me a lot of confidence. There weren't less challenges after I met her. It's just that I wasn't going through the challenges alone anymore.

And I like move the brush or.

I move my finger and so I moved my finger.

Yeah.

I could tell Sarah things that I wouldn't be able to tell my friends. I trust her with my life. We have been so close for eight years, but thousands of miles away from each other. We definitely wouldn't be very close if it wasn't for Skype and how it's brought us together.

Some best friends come and go. I feel like Paige will always be my best friend no matter what. It's crazy that we've never met. We've always dreamed of it, but it's just never happened yet. I can't believe it. I don't think it's really sunk in.

I'm really nervous. No, it doesn't seem real. 5 minutes and 34 seconds.

You're so beautiful.

I can't do that. I'm sure we will always find time for each other because it's one of those friendships that you don't find twice.

Like two needles in a haystack that just found each other.

Such a great reminder of how to bring people together. And this concept of purpose, it's not a soft metric. It is well researched and well documented. Right. Nine out of ten of us in this room would actually go work somewhere else with a stronger sense of purpose for less pay because we care about what we stand for, we care about that connection. Absenteeism goes down, engagement goes up, and driving to that sense of purpose becomes critical for your talent retention. And I think we get up every day and we're distracted with everything. And do we really, really drive to that sense of purpose which ladders everything else from it? You think about mergers and acquisitions and the companies you want to buy or the companies that are going to buy you. You look at all the financials, you try to determine if the customer of your TAM is going to increase all of that good stuff. But at the end of the day, what's the number one reason that acquisitions fail? Because they don't have a connected sense of purpose and they have an incompatibility in their cultures. And if that's the case, no matter how good the financials look, it usually doesn't work out. And if your purpose gets diluted, and I would say in some respects that would be the case for Skype, then your purpose gets to a different place and things change so much that it doesn't actually have the same focus that it had before. So purpose number one. Number two, insights. So we're all at the point in our lives now where Amazon knows what we want to buy before we even know that the product exists. I don't know how much money I spend with, oh my gosh, yes, I need that. And I literally didn't even know that I should be searching for it or finding it. What if we could do that kind of predictability and understanding of our people? Are they planning to leave and I don't know it? Do they not have the right support and I don't know it? Are they frustrated with an obstacle and I don't know it? All of these things around insights and people are true today and we can actually get that predictability. One of the key things around insights that I think is really interesting. And I spend a lot of time in my career in big enterprises and I'm now in a company that is a mid market company and focuses on selling solutions to mid market companies. And mid market companies are companies around the size probably of many of the companies that you either work for for lead in this room. They have a different set of issues around how you make decisions for your customers and how you make decisions for your talent because you're competing with talent from these humongous brands who are coming to all of our cities and opening recs and recruiting the best of. So what do we do? Well, we know insights today around mid market companies that I think are incredibly compelling to take action against. For example, we know that leaders in organizations and mid market companies who have more than eight direct reports have a higher probability of leaving the company in the short term. Because what we tend to do is say oh they're our best people, let's give them more. We don't necessarily focus on the discipline of span of control and all of the things that you need to do to make sure a leader is set up for success. We give them more. They aren't able to produce the way that they have in the past. They, they tend to leave. So if you knew that insight, which we do, you would spend more time right in your organization figuring out how do I make sure all of my leaders have less than eight direct reports? Because we know statistically the probability of them being dissatisfied, frustrated and leaving is higher if we don't do that. We also know in mid market companies that almost half of the turnover in mid market companies is from people who report the number one reason that they're leaving besides their boss, because that's always the number one reason is that they not sure about how they're connected and their work is clear on how it drives to their mission or their purpose. So back to the first concept on purpose. And so we know that we have to spend time with that clarity so that we can keep people actually motivated in their seats. Now here's a good one. Of all the people that we studied in the mid market and this is like over 200,000 employees every single day working in their workplaces, we know that men and women are both recognized by their peers about the same frequency. But we know that men are recognized about 50% from colleagues who are women and 50% from colleagues that are male. So that seems pretty cool, right? You kind of have a good distribution. But we also know that women, although recognized as much as men are recognized 65% of the time by other women. Okay guys, you all have an action item to come Fix this statistic with us and recognize a female colleague today. Isn't that super insightful and interesting around the dynamics in an organization that has to do with unconscious bias? Okay, so the list of insights could go on and on. And what I would say to you in terms of practical advice, make sure that not only your own company has the data you need, but you're partnering with the companies who have the ability to take that data and make it actionable for you so that you're running your workplace in a way that retains your talent better than your competition. Now, most of our insights around people are important around talent acquisition. But the other insight that's really important, of course you do every day, is what are the insights you want to act around your business? And these are just as important in terms of retaining your people because it ladders back up to what you're trying to accomplish. Another Skype example, we knew at Skype that if you downloaded the app and registered, if you didn't make a video call and in the first seven days of onboarding, we lost you. You were not going to be a valuable user, you were not going to be an engaged user. So we took our whole team and we spent all of our time on how do we make that seven day experience awesome. Because we knew if we did that it was the predictor of the future. Another example, and this is another consumer example, but it certainly applies to B2B. Was it Yahoo? We knew that if you visited three properties each day, even if it was only for a very short period of time, we knew we had you. We knew that we had content that was compelling to you, that made it part of your lifestyle. And then we knew how to attract the right advertisers with the right connection on products to that demographic. So we focused our time on how do we make sure as many users as possible are engaged with at least three properties a day at namely, which is more of a business provider. Our insight is if you have a fantastic implementation experience, you're not going to churn. We pretty much have you for your renewal because it's an extension of that implementation into your total experience. We also know if we screw that up and we don't do it well, you're likely not to renew with us the following year. So we focus now, the last six months we've taken our resources and said how do we make sure that no one can touch us on implementation because that's the most important customer experience to be able to drive that long term customer value. We could talk a Lot more about insights. But you get my point, right? What are the key insights on your people? What are the key insights on your business? And how do you rally that to drive up to your purpose? So we've discussed purpose, we've discussed insights, and now I want to move to experiences. This concept of the consumerization of business. Think about your lifestyle, what you and your colleagues want as a part of your lifestyle in the workplace, and you start to go, wow, let's look at all the examples we know in our life today. We don't even think about transportation. We just push a button on our phone. We do Lyft, we do Uber, whatever we choose, and we get where we want to go. And that started as a consumer lifestyle and now we all have standard business accounts because this is how we actually conduct business. Consumer experiences, predicting what business is going to adopt. Same thing with physical and shared spaces, right? We all started going on vacation and using Airbnb and realizing, wait a second, this would be better if we did it this way on business trips. And sparks this huge change in how we do shared space at work with WeWork and other companies like that, which most of us now have some kind of connection to physical spaces, virtual spaces, consumer driving business experiences. I think another part of consumerization of business has been the adoption of video. So it's the number one consumed content methodology in the consumer world. Whether you're looking for your news or your entertainment or it's Netflix or it's infotainment, we're all consuming video at the highest rate now in business. How do you connect your geographic teams, your dispersed teams, your virtual teams, your teams who need to connect across global offices. It's all about either real time video or connected video, right? For you to have those relationships. So those predictors in what is going to create the right workforce environment for your team. Look to the consumer trends and it's coming to business. I mean, think about it as software companies or technology companies. Why are snacks so important to all of us? Why is snacks such a big thing at our companies? It's because it connects to the person. It's because it makes people feel connected and valued. I'm gluten free, you're allergic to nuts, someone else is vegan, and you want to be comfortable and open and cared for in your work environment, just like you do in your home environment. So lifestyle, the predictor of work style, how do you think about that for your businesses? And for me, a quick story. I mean, earlier in my career, my experience was, and it actually still is, but I handle it differently. My experience earlier was I would get very nervous about answering the question that everyone asked me first, which was, how do you handle your work life balance? They didn't ask me about my business or ask me about things that around the presentation they asked me, how do you handle work life balance? Because it's pretty apparent, you've got two kids, you've got this job, et cetera, et cetera. And I never knew how to answer that question because inside I was like, well, I don't and I don't know how. And I think it's quite impossible. So it was kind of this impossible question and how to deal with it. And it just kind of turned over and over with me for actually years. And then I realized, actually this isn't about answering this question. It's about how I live my life. It's about not work life balance, it's just about life. And this is the life that I've chosen. And so I wake up every day and I prioritize and I do this and I do that and I figure it out. And now that I don't feel obligated to answer that question, I can actually just live my lifestyle, which has a big part of it around work. And as a CEO, I do think a lot about in the environment, whether it's the physical or the virtual environment, how do you make it so people do feel that their lifestyle and their work style is compatible. And it's not about frankly having fun all the time or being cared for all the time. It's about getting our best work. And these are the environments we create where people can rise above what even they thought they could accomplish as part of the talent community in your businesses. So purpose insights. Excuse me, and experiences. And that's what I'll leave you with in terms of how you think about your talent community, how you compete, it's an incredible example of a very simple demand and supply issue in terms of talent. And so how do you get the best for your company? And how do you work with colleagues who are the best at what they do? Review the time you spend on purpose and how clear you make that drive not only in your company, but have partnerships with the companies that can help you create actionable insights around how you manage your business, both for the work environment, for your talent and for your business and growing your business and your customers. And three, creating those experiences that are led by understanding those consumer trends. And that's the whole pie, purpose insights, experiences. I hope you enjoy your time at saster and thanks for coming.