109 | Your Organisational Culture is Your USP (Unique Selling Point) | Dan Sodergren

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

Believe you me, your employees staying and becoming a marketing tool for you will be the difference between success and failure in the next 5 years. The companies that don't get this better have very, very deep pockets.

Hello there and welcome to this most recent episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. Before we get into today's guest, as I always do, first, a quick thank you to our friend and sponsor Workvivo. If you are struggling with communicating with your people now that we're working in more of a hybrid and dispersed world, then their platform is well worth a look. More on them at workvivo.com, and you'll hear a little bit more about them later on. So, as I said, hybrid and future of work and remote and all that good stuff is very much top of mind at the moment for many of us. And I think that many organizations, certainly the ones that we work with, are going through this state of flux as we move from being a very kind of black and white world of either everybody in the office pre-COVID or everybody completely out of the office mostly during COVID And now we're in this kind of gray world of people not really knowing. Where we are, what we're doing, the best way to do things. Employees have one perspective, leadership teams have another perspective. Sometimes they don't meet, sometimes they do. So, what can organizations do? What does really good future of work look like? And how does that impact on culture? And they're all questions that I'm hoping we'll get a perspective on from today's guest, who is Dan Sodergren. Now, Dan, I came across Dan's company back in 2018, YourFlock, which is very much a diagnostic, and I'll let I'll let Dan do a much better job of telling you about his company than I can, but a diagnostic that looks at the alignment of values in your organization, which I thought was really interesting. Dan and I then crossed paths recently on the Better Workplaces InspiRathon. He was up just before me and probably much better with a much bigger audience, but we can, we can talk about that later as well. He's also a futurist and he's done a TEDx, which is really good and well worth a look. And we'll make sure that we stick the link to that in the show notes in case you want to have a look at that as well. So, Dan, hello there. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon. Thank you very much for having me on, and thank you for such a lovely introduction. And, uh, you know, something I'm very proud of about BioHog. Thank you for it.

You're more than welcome. So listen, why don't we kick off? Tell me a little bit about you. Give me the quick Dan Sødergren, um, what you're doing today, and a little bit about your flock.

Cool. It all started in 1976 when my mother— I could have gone back 45, she used to do that. Because I'm a personal trainer as well, I do some other stuff with marketing and things. Ideally, I have like a 5-minute intro. I'm not gonna do that, but it's quite fun. Got a fun intro. Can't do that on the TED Talk, of course, because they only let me, you know, 15 minutes. Anyway, I'll do a very potted version. So I've had surely 9 or 10 different businesses. I tend to do stuff before other people do, which is why the BBC called me a futurist, which is nice. But as I always go, they always laugh with them. If I was, you know, they call me a tech futurist, but the other word of looking at that is, you know, a non-successful entrepreneur. Because of course, if I'd made billions of pounds, you'd just call me sir, wouldn't you? You wouldn't call me a tech futurist today. So I had augmented reality companies 15 years ago. I had an ecologically sound company doing stuff made out of hemp and hemp oil and all this CBD stuff 25 years ago. And I had an AI company technically. I mean, it was actually to do with algorithms well before people were calling them algorithms. Of course, that isn't true. Of course, the actual word algorithm comes from a 2,000-year-old person, from a Muslim guy, but that's a different thing entirely. It actually comes from a different word. That's not the point. Anyway, the point of it is, is that I've done stuff before other people. The first ride of the hype curve, I tend to get involved with things. And because of that, An old business mentor of mine said, "Look, Dan, looking at what you do, you tend to be a bit early. Why don't you look back at your notes and stuff you try to build and then go and find a company that's doing that right now, and you might well be on to something." And so that's what I did. I went out and by complete luck, I was doing a talk for another company and I bumped into a young entrepreneur who's making a team diagnostic and team engagement platform, which was called Macaulay at the time. It was more of a, a kind of consultation style with a little bit of tech behind it. And at the time I was teaching people how to digitally transform and digitally transform their companies. And so it kind of made sense to me. I said, well, I'll invest some money, I'll become an investor in this thing. It's now called YourFlock. It's a team engagement platform. And as you rightly say, Scott McInnes, it looks and investigates people's values to see how much alignment there is in the team. Because of course, we know at YourFlock, the more alignment there is in the team and the more you help the team become happier at work, the more productive they are. So my actual mission is to help a million people become happier at work. And before this mission, there was another mission to help tens of thousands of people start businesses. And I did that one with the government, some other organizations. And so yeah, my next one is helping a million people be happier at work. Because I think that happiness is actually the thing that's going to make the difference in the remote work revolution. So I hope that explains me. It might not explain your flock very well. I'm not the brains behind it. Michal Wiszniewski, my co-founder, is the brains behind it. If you want to have a look at how we do stuff and the people we work with, please do it. It basically increases your employment retention levels by 25% or more. Which is pretty cool and pretty astounding stuff. So it saves companies tens of thousands of pounds, and of course, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds actually from the last work we've just done with a client. And that's great because that's the point of technology. It's there to help people, to help managers become leaders and to help people be more emotionally aware. And that's the power of using technology in the right spot. So we're very lucky to have lived in this time because 5 years ago or 10 years ago, this would've been a crazy, wacky, left-field idea. But as you say now, Scott, 'cause of COVID and the instant digital transformation of a decade over a year, we're now pretty much on song for the interconnection of lots of different bits and pieces. So yeah, it's an exciting spot to be in. We are just one tool that you could use out of a whole array of different tools. I'm very, when I talk about future work, I have to keep explaining this to people that your flock is one answer. It's like taking vitamins, but you don't just take vitamins, you also run and you drink water and you do other things to become healthy. Vitamins is just one thing to do. So, YourFlock is just one of the suite of tools that you can use. Obviously, I'm slightly biased because I'm an investor and now I work with them. So, but it is just one of them. There are a variety of different things I think we've got to now do as leaders of small team, big teams, and large companies. We've got to change the way we've worked before. And of course, that change comes at a mental potential cost, as I was talking about with the client this morning, because it can be very hard to help Human beings change. It's quite a tricky thing to do, but it's not impossible because if it was impossible, we'd still all be in the fields and we're not. So, you know, the future of work is possible, but it's gonna take a lot of human beings to either have that change foisted upon them. And that's why there's a difference between remote first and remote forced, as I like to call it. But even, you know, even middle management and other people, we've gotta, at the moment, there seems to be this weird divide. And I love your analogy there about black and white and then the gray area. I'm gonna change it slightly if I can, if that's okay. I'm gonna say rainbow. I'm gonna say a rainbow world we now live in because it's not black and white and gray. I think that's what people are, but they're so used to binary opinions. It's like, but actually now it's a rainbow. And so how do you find out what the colors are? Well, you have to ask. Number one, you have to ask.

Yeah.

So, and finding out the values of your company, yes, that's important. I'm not talking about values that are on your, on the wall of your office. I'm talking about the individual's personal values and what they stand for and what do they feel and what motivates them and what keeps them feeling like they should be part of an organization because Lots of people leave businesses and the Great Resignation we know is happening, but it will happen again, by the way. We're only at the start of the Great Resignation, I think. I think we're going to have another tranche of this. Now, I can't as a futurist talk about economics too much because it's not my forte. But if we're heading into recession, it's going to be fascinating how much more pressure that's going to put on businesses, but also on individuals. Because if you start asking them to do a tremendous amount more work, then they better like your company because they're going to leave. As soon as that pressure is applied to them, and you might say, well, it's their fault, they lack resilience. No, it's not. It's not their fault. It's your fault for not being a good enough manager or a leader at the time. And I think there's very famous people we could talk about, which we won't, very famous people right now that might find that they're acting like a boss of 10 years ago might well not have been the best thing to do. However, I'm also not going to argue against the richest man in the world because he's the richest guy in the world.

He is, he certainly is. Let's take a step back for a second because you left me with about 17 potential segues there. And the one that I'm gonna pick up on is this idea that you mentioned there of a remote work revolution. And if, you know, and I love that idea of it not being black and white, of it being a rainbow. I'm going to steal that back from you if that's okay. But tell me a little bit about what your thoughts are on this whole future of work hybrid thing, you know, what does it look like and where are we going to get to? What are your thoughts?

Well, I mean, it's really interesting that you say the word hybrid. I think that's one of the words we're gonna have to get rid of in our lexicon, I'm afraid. Hybrid was definitely something we said about 2 or 3 years ago because there was a hybrid, but now it's just called work, you know? So we've gotta be really careful with the word. We'll say, well, this new hybrid work thing, it's not new, it's just called work and it's where people work now. Long, long time ago. So I was talking about the future of work, obviously as a futurist, you know, 10 years ago and telling people that the future might be like it is now. Did I know that we were going to be— because of a global pandemic, it would instantly accelerate everything? Of course not. Otherwise, I would have bought shares in Zoom and then sold them right afterwards. But no. So the point being is that this actually is a logical progression where we're headed. It's just the speed of change that's got rapid, which we couldn't have guessed as a black swan event. But if you look back at history, you see a variety of black swan events that happen. It's often to do with nature, by the way. Nature does this exerted pressure on us. Because people often believe it's technology. Technology creates this thing. And then because we use technology, the world changes. True. But actually, we've had Zoom calls for a very long time. We've had the potential to go hybrid. And again, not to pull you up on this, but it's hybrid work, but normally in the knowledge sector.

Okay.

So again, we can be really a bit silly about this when we just talk about work and actually be like, well, no, you can't be a pilot remotely. Well, actually you can, they're called drones. But the point being, you can do most things remotely. But the thing, You could argue 55% of jobs that can be done remotely, the rest can't, fine. But let's concentrate purely on the people, the who. Simon Sinek's talk talks about start with your why. I don't believe that. I think you start with the who. Who are we really talking about? Now, if we're talking about tech companies and knowledge workers and information workers, yeah, then that is a huge potential. You interview them, you ask them, as the survey did last year, and I think it was something ridiculous like 73% of people wanted the freedom of where they worked and 93% wanted it when they worked. Yeah, now the remote work revolution brings in a variety of different things. And this thing about async working is a huge one. It's a huge element that people aren't really thinking about. The ability to use technology, the ability to bring in more diverse and inclusive groups, the ability to do all this stuff isn't possible when location is your key factor. The ability to get the talent from the world isn't the thing when you're purely talking about companies that are geolocated and culturally bound by that location. Yeah. Now, remote work revolution. Why is it such a revolution? Well, because we've now got the technology, but it's not about technology. As I've explained, we've always had technology for 5 or 10 years, but now we've got a desire. And the big thing is, is because we trialed it for a year and a half or maybe even 2 years, we now don't have the logical excuse because it was logical to say, oh, we can't do this as a company. You just did do it as a company. People were more productive. They weren't potentially more happier, but they were more productive. But please remember, They weren't happier because we had a pandemic, which we believe killed people, and it was airborne. The fact that people did any work at all is astounding. What a great testament to the company culture if people didn't just go, bye, I'm going to go live with my grandma and whatever. Obviously, we couldn't go that, but you can see what I mean. We've got two big things. Productivity went up, not down during the pandemic. 73% of people believe they were more efficient while they're working from home during the pandemic. This is during a pandemic. Yeah. And so this remote work revolution happens. It was happening. It happened without us thinking about it. We'd already talked— I'd already been talking about remote work and hybrid work for 5 years. Everyone's like, don't be crazy, that's never going to happen. We already had the technology. COVID then made it happen. And of course, the problem with revolutions is that people are left behind. And those people that are left behind, it's normally because they can't change their minds. Okay, so you can even talk to middle managers now who are saying that I like it better back in the office when everyone's back and I can see them. Just imagine that thinking you'd have to have to believe that thing. Just imagine how much data you have to argue against for that to be your viewpoint. But don't get wrong, with Your Flock, we're totally agnostic. Your Flock works inside an office because it talks about values, so stuff you wouldn't normally talk about. It works from this hybrid idea.

Of course it does.

It works in remote when we don't We don't really have a viewpoint on this. I personally do because I think it helps diversity, inclusion, and a whole lot of things. I also think it's better for life-work balance. It's better for the environment. It's better for it politically. It's better socially. There's thousands of things it's better for. But the remote work revolution has the potential to come unstuck, but only because people are going to try to force people back into the offices. Now, if you've then got a cost of living crisis and you're panicking about money, then you might say, okay, cool, I'll come back to the office. But let's not kid ourselves, that person is coming under duress. That person is not coming because they love your company, they're coming under duress. And again, the very famous chap whose name we won't mention more than 5 times, he's made a certain amount of plays on this, and he might be right. He might be right that you want to destroy a company culture to rebuild it. He might be right to say that I only want my best staff, and therefore I'm going to give you an ultimatum, and half of you can leave, about 80% now actually, which is insane. But he also might be horribly wrong because the staff he might have, and if you look to— it'd be fascinating to see what the actual data is. I've only seen pictures, so I don't know the actual data. If you look at the people who are sticking around, I'd love to know how many people are sticking around because they have visas. It's the thing that people don't think about. Honestly, the technical, the visa requirement for tech companies in America and what those people have to do to stay there is awful.

Yeah.

So those people cannot— they can't even be fired. They don't dare to lose their jobs. So is it a lot of people that don't dare to lose their jobs that are sticking around? Is that the best workforce?

As opposed to the best people?

Well, precisely. Yeah. I'm not going to say that in any way I've got not the gum of the plater for it, but if you are keeping your best people, it's not normally because they have to work for you. It's because they want to work for you. And there's a purpose and there's values and there's autonomy and there's mastery and there's all these other things. The other thing I find fascinating, Scott, is people kind of look at it and go, Yeah, but he's done it with Tesla and he's done it with Starship or whatever it's called. He's done it with all these other companies. A lot of those companies have very, very different cultures where I bet he fits in like a glove because they're high-pressure, high-wage, high-intensity, high-risk places where if you make too many mistakes, you can risk it. You're meant to experiment, et cetera. But I bet they all work pretty long hours. That's why we say it's not hard, it's not rocket science. I bet rocket science is really hard.

Yeah.

And I bet if you think that people are going to die because your AI doesn't work properly, I bet you work pretty hard at that AI. Or you think that you're going to save the planet because you're going to get them to Mars, I bet you work pretty hard just because you're excited. Yeah. So I would imagine that it's the purpose and the values and the vision of those other companies, whether Elon Musk is there or not, because they have much bigger aims that keeps people there that's exciting. And that's not to comment on So please don't get back on this one. Whether it's a good place to work in Tesla, I have no idea. I don't think it's ranked too highly. Microsoft is ranked pretty highly. But I suppose the thing I was trying to get to is that just because you buy a company and you've been successful with other companies, it doesn't mean you're going to be successful with that company.

Of course not.

And it doesn't mean that you can bring in— it doesn't mean you can bring in your own company culture with your personality and expect everyone else to follow suit. It's kind of the opposite of what your flock's about.

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Yeah, so let's build on that. Let's build on that idea of company culture, because you've mentioned that a couple of times, and you also said something interesting about that whole idea of, of middle managers perhaps being a bit of a barrier to the next world of work, if you like. Because I'm going to try really hard not to call it hybrid working anymore because I'll get told off. Um, but this whole idea was interesting. I saw a piece of research the other day from Gartner and we'll stick the link, if we can find the link, we'll stick the link in the show notes, that the CEO's top 3 concerns about office and home working policy for knowledge workers are these. Number 1, culture and connectivity. Number 2, collaboration and innovation. Number 3, wellbeing and fatigue. So just working a little bit too hard. I wonder from your perspective, I certainly have a view on this. I wonder from your perspective, Dan, if CEOs are right to be concerned about those those things, or do you believe that that fear is based on them thinking that we need to get back to where we were, as opposed to having a really good, strong perspective on where we could be if we let this next phase of work run its natural course?

Again, it's an absolutely fantastic question. I'm just going to slightly take it apart because, uh, the things— the difference between CEO and leaders, um, some CEOs aren't leaders and that's the problem. So it's a much more innate problem. If your CEO is going, I'm worried about the future because I want it to go back to the way it was, that most probably says that they're not a leader. They're not a good CEO. Sorry, no disrespect to them at all. They might be a great people manager of the C-suite. They might be brilliant at managing the business. But when it actually comes to people, people don't want you to say, actually, I wish it was like it was yesterday. Yeah. And I don't think, and again, I've got to be careful with words again, but I don't think that's a very, if that's, I just have a feeling that innately progression is a good thing in businesses. Yeah. The businesses are moving forward, they're changing things, grow and become better. And I'm mainly doing that because I talk about the tech sector. But if you look at every sector, retail companies that don't evolve die. Look at every sector in business. If you don't evolve and change and don't innovate, you die. Yeah. You know, so the idea that you have a CEO or a leader who's saying, oh my goodness, I really want us to go back the way we were 3 years ago, even though we've had a fundamental Literally, you know, I don't, I hate this thing, but it's a thing. It is, isn't it? It is a prism, it's a prism change. It's a whole different seismic thing. It's just a huge change. Like it used to be 4% of people would review remote working, yeah? People actually had policies against remote work. And now, at the very height of the pandemic, people, it's like 80% of people were, even more, 94% of people were remote working and doing so successfully. So it's a huge change. Now it's about 4% of people, by the way, who want to go back to the office full-time, which is why I'm saying we have to get rid of hybrid work. A, 'cause hybrid is a terrible word and it's completely unnecessary as well, because all you're saying is we don't work in the office very much, but that's okay because you still work. And this is the thing that really boiled my whatever during the pandemic and then even afterwards, people were saying, well, it's great, we're gonna have to go back to work. You were already working all the time, increasing productivity during a pandemic. That's— you should— everyone should have all got a year off because of the rubbish we had to go through. Vicky should have said, stop everything, have 3 months off because you've all been great. Come back refreshed, awesome. I don't think that would've, obviously, never would've happened. I'm a massive hippie, so I can be a bit of an idealist, but you have to give people something. And if all you are giving them is, oh, get back in the thing now. The thing you just talked about, which is a really interesting piece of research, what it does from a data point, does annoy me when people, culture and connectivity, collaborate together. It's just, there's two terms there. So really, that's just naughty. You're just covering, just do six. Yeah, just gimme the top five. Yeah, that's the best I can do. I don't know, right? Culture. Culture's a key one because, and it is exactly why Your Flock exists and exactly the whole point of Your Flock is to help the manager, help the manager who's not potentially a leader because you can't have those emotional connection points when there isn't a cultural center point, which was the office. That is now the fire pit or whatever you call it in a tribe, whatever you wanna replace it with, the church in the small village, whatever you wanna replace it is, I don't care what it is. You had places where you went and you went there Loads of time. And that's why we were so more productive when we weren't going there. Because most of the time you actually connected together. You didn't work, you just connected. Let's not kid ourselves. You went to work, and by the way, I don't know because I have remote work for so long, but the office that I knew, and when I popped into offices, the thing that annoyed me about offices is, my God, no one does anything. But they did. They connected and talked to each other and liked each other. Because really at the end, a company is just this collection of people. It's just the people. And the people are like, "Oh, I didn't really like my boss, but I love the people I worked with." But the reason why most people leave a company is actually to do with their boss and bad management. That's a real blind spot for leaders is they always— I can give you some stats on it, but they always overpredict how well they're doing at everything in a company, almost no matter how big the company. In fact, actually, companies get smaller so that those numbers go up, but that's a different point entirely. So culture, yes. How do you create a culture without having this center point, without having this thing that human beings need? Well, the answer is use technology. Create different job titles and be better and don't be dicks and be servant leaders. That's the actual answer. The answer that most people don't want because it means they have to change. They don't like that. It's a bit like when you talk about people like, oh, what are we going to do about millennials? Well, millennials aren't going to change, you all have to. But Gen Z, they're so entitled. No, it's your viewpoint. You need to change where you're looking from so you understand them. I refuse to. Then the problem is with you, not with them. The problem is deeply with you. Connectivity can be broken into several different points. But I'm guessing it's what we just talked about. How do you create rapport and trust and liking, which is what is the basis of most companies? Without that trust, liking, rapport, everyone doesn't have any connection. And then the problem is you have an employee contract problem where people leave because they don't feel they belong. And it's scary because this is actually is a generational difference. So 1 in 4 people who are over the age of 35 don't feel they belong in their workplace. 1 in 4, that's a quarter of people. Okay. Oh, the way around, sorry. 1 in 5 if they're over 35. Yeah. Businesses like. And then 1 in 4, uh, is there— whichever one the highest is— if they're under 35, so it goes up to 1 in 4. So it's worse. Yeah, so that's a quarter of younger people, and I'm 46, so I can say younger, um, believe they don't feel— they don't feel they belong at work. Now you might be old-fashioned, you might go, I don't care what people feel because I pay them. Well, that is going to be a problem because that is the reason people are leaving. And then you say things like quiet quitting, which by the way is one of the most vile terms you can use. If you're using that term, you honestly know what that means and you're using it, you shouldn't be a manager of people. Okay, sorry to be mean. Use your flock, they're more emotionally intelligent, manage people better. Quiet quitting is, like, literally, it's something like, it's something ridiculous nowadays. Like something like 85% of people are not highly engaged at work. Yeah, that includes your boss, by the way. Yeah, that includes your boss. Yeah, very few people say they're highly engaged at work. Yeah, now the CEOs might say that, and the C-suite might say that, but there might be 100 people in their organizations, only 5 of them, they're highly engaged. The team leaders, highly engaged people, might not be, they might be disengaged completely. Point being is, is that high engagement level normally comes with seniority, sometimes a little bit more wage, and with mastery, autonomy, and purpose. That's how you get high engagement levels, yeah? But everyone else isn't highly engaged. Now you could miss the fact that if people don't feel that they belong at work, then they leave and they will leave. The only reason they're sticking around is for the money. Now, if you don't see them and they're remote working, they're not gonna do very much actual productive work because they're not engaged at work. So you bring 'em to the office, you get into the office, yeah, 'cause we need to do more collaboration and innovation, so get into the office, but they're not engaged anyway. They're still gonna be not engaged at work. They're still gonna be on Facebook at work. Ban Facebook. Okay, cool. They're still not engaged. They're looking out the window. Ban windows. They're still not engaged. Ban non-engagement. You shouldn't be talking like that. That's madness. Give them something else. The abundance number 2, which is collaboration and innovation, that is actually the reason why I think we should be consciously gathering in workplaces, but I'm gonna call them workplaces, not offices, because I think human beings need to connect. We need to collaborate and we need to have innovation. We do that normally face-to-face better than anything else. Yeah, but that could be face-to-face on a beach in Bali. You know, that could be face-to-face in a restaurant, that can be face-to-face anywhere, doesn't have to be an office. So let's not use collaboration and innovation to hide behind the fact that you wanna get people back to the offices 'cause you can micromanage them. They're very separate things. And then the last one, which unfortunately we don't touch at YourFlock because we can't do everything, we work on values and helping team leaders save time by managing their people better. But wellbeing and fatigue is a huge one because if you're working from home and you're not disconnecting and you aren't lucky enough to have a different, like a different room, or you're using your kitchen table, number one, if you've got a remote team, do you give them a decent chair? Do you give them a decent desk? Do you give 'em a decent computer? Treat it like it's a mini office in their house, because you're— that's what they're doing, and you're not renting it. So thank your lucky stars employers are not saying, give me more money to rent out part of my house, because technically they should do, because your office cost has just gone down to almost null. Anyway, that's a separate one. But take the money that you've saved not having an office, potentially, into things like wellbeing and fatigue, into the wellbeing technologies, into people who go around talking to your team about this kind of stuff. Into human beings helping them manage their own times better, because that's what you have to do. You don't have to, but believe you me, if you want to have a decent employee brand for the future, you want to have good people working for you, this is table stakes now. If you turn up, you just feel like if they turned up on the day in the office and they didn't have a desk, you know, you'd know that's bad management. You know, if they turned up on the day and said, oh, onboarding, oh sorry, I haven't got a desk ready for you yet. No, we haven't got anything actually, there's no one here, just crack on. I'll give you— in fact, you can borrow my computer. I'm going to go out now. Or I'll hand you a password. In fact, don't worry about the computer. Just sit next to that phone.

What?

You'd be like, what the eff is that? That's a bad company. Yeah. Now we've got to do the exact same things. Now the last one, which is fatigue, I'm not going to touch that with a barge pole only because I think it's too deep a subject to be covered in. You need to do something separate just about that because it's a big, big, big one. That is a— huge, not red herring, huge elephant in the room post-COVID that we are all gonna be tired. And because we've all gone through a traumatic experience and so many people in businesses aren't doing this, I actually think that this is potentially something that might come out of the 4-day work week. We might be doing it, but from a slightly different angle. You know, we might be realizing people need a bit more time off.

Yeah.

And, and it's really interesting the point about wellbeing, well worth a listen. Listeners, if you want to hear a little bit more about wellbeing during or post-COVID as we move into this next world of work. Donna Riley was on a few episodes ago on the pod. She's well worth a listen to have, have a quick listen there. I love that point, Dan, about consciously getting into workplaces and that they're not necessarily offices. And I've been saying this for ages, and I think it sits really nicely with your point about we need people in organizations to do things differently. I think one of the biggest challenges with this way of working that we've now found ourselves in is that people are still trying to work the same way they always worked, but do it with half the people at home and half the people together in a workplace somewhere, and it doesn't work. So actually what we need to do is think differently about how and where we get together and being, and you said it again, more purposeful about the type of work we are doing when we're working. I was only in with a client yesterday and saying to them, if you've got people coming into the office, spending an hour traveling into this workplace, and they're spending most of the day on Teams calls. That is nonsensical, absolutely nonsensical. So, you know, but I think what that takes is a conversation around Teams to say, well, if we're going, if we're all, if we all agree, let's go in on Tuesday and Wednesday, let's agree that on Tuesday and Wednesday we're gonna do X, Y, and Z, cuz they're the things that are better done together, better done face to face. And also, you know, we have to, I look at a lot, you know, I look at an organization's expenses policy and it'll say you can do this, you can't do that. You can book this, you can't book that. You can't do this, you can do that. Actually, We need to get much more flexible around things like that. We need to be saying to leaders, you've now got up to a grand a month to basically go out and find somewhere where your teams can work together. Because you know what? We don't have space for you in the offices anyway. And actually the office might not be the workplace that best suits you. So go and find a hotel in Nottingham, go and find, you know, a spa in Athlone, take the room out of the back of a pub in Galway, wherever it is that works for you and do your team stuff there. And that works really, really well.

You know, absolutely. And Scott, you know, he's easy to write, he says, the worst thing you can do is bring people in and then replicate their experience they were having at home anyway, because that is the worst thing you can do. And this is why I say it's not black and white and gray, it's a rainbow. And that rainbow, you've gotta work out what the colors are yourself. And every, this is what we talk about with your flock, every team has a different culture. And those cultures all come together to create this kind of rainbow idea. And you can, metaphor of course instantly breaks down, but point being is every team has a different culture. Yeah, normally slightly coming from the team leader, but also slightly by their functions, but also from the sector they're in. Law firms work completely differently to tech firms. Actually, bizarrely enough, quite— and also in some sectors quite similarly because they're very technical people. But, you know, like marketing agencies are very different to law firms. Marketing agencies, lots of young people, lots of creative, lots of innovation, collaboration. They want to be back in the office. They're actually 3 days a week back in the office. Law firms, for some of them in Manchester anyway, and we do know this from the data from your flock, and they're, you know, but law firms with their values, highly autonomous. You try to drag a load of lawyers back into the office when they don't want to come, they just won't. They just won't come. They'll just say, no, I'm not coming back into the office.

I don't need to.

And they'll One day a week. Now, then you look at it from a generational point of view and you say, yeah, but we need the young people to look at what the older people are doing, so to speak, or the more experienced people are doing. That's how they learn. Awesome. Factor that in as a point of why you're coming into the office. Yeah. You're coming into the office today.

Why?

Because so-and-so needs to shadow you. Awesome. Great. Yeah. Awesome. Do that. But as you say, be conscious. This comes from Priya Parker. This is a great book, Conscious Gathering. That is the point. We have to be conscious. And this is the bit that abrogate— this is the thing where people try to abrogate their responsibility and they say, no, we don't, we're just going to crack on. Those businesses will fail exactly the same way with all industrial revolutions. Yeah, the remote work revolution is an industrial revolution. It is just the fact that it's about people. So people, they don't get it, but they don't— they sometimes don't seem to be able to see it because— but if you remember, like, the Agricultural Revolution was about people. Of course it was. The Industrial Revolution was about people. It was about where people moved and where they worked. Well, it's the exact same now. We have a decentralization of stuff. It's going to affect everything. Yeah, but it better affect the way that you are a manager and the way you deal with people. 'Cause if it doesn't, your people will leave or even worse, they'll stay and not do any work. Now that's a real cost. That's a real cost. That's worse. Yeah, exactly. I won't do the old classic of, you know, the CFO talks about, you know, how much it costs to train people and use things like YourFlock. And of course the CEO goes, yeah, but what if they, what if these people stay and they're even worse? You know, that is the reality. And if you're a leader, you've gotta understand that. Practically, you must invest in culture. Your company culture now is your unique selling point. It always has been, by the way, deep down. But your employee retention, if you don't have an employee retention strategy, you better get one. Because honestly, the cost you're about to incur of people leaving, and even if you do it now and you say it's the industry standard, don't let that be the case. Don't let's say, well, industry standard is 22% in law firms that people leave. Awesome, except it's costing you £150,000. That £150,000 could be saved and reinvested in culture. It can be reinvested not in the office space, but other things, other perks that you could give the people who have stayed. It can be reinvested in somebody whose sole job is a people person, is a happiness person, someone whose sole job with metrics around it is to keep people happy and staying in the company because we have those on the C-suite for everything else. But believe you me, your employees staying and becoming a marketing tool for you will be the difference between success and failure in the next 5 years.

Mm-hmm.

The companies that don't get this better have very, very deep pockets.

And I see now there's a growth in people having Chief Remote Working Officers, which is effectively, I guess, very much along the lines of how do we make sure that people are happy at work, that we've got those processes and systems in place, that we have our managers skilled up and our leaders skilled up to be able to have those conversations and manage people and do that really effectively remotely. So that's at least a positive move in that direction. At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie. For more. YourFlock is plainly one of many diagnostics that are out there. You said it yourself at the top of the episode, Dan. And I just wonder, what role do you see in the whole world of work now for diagnostics and the role that they play? How do they help to track the ever-changing cultural needs of people in an organization?

Well, again, this all comes down to people rather than technology, but obviously technology allows you to do stuff. Yeah, so you've got this whole, knowledge is power moment. Yeah, it really depends on what your belief system is around a lot of this stuff. Now I've got a very much a growth mindset. So I do sometimes worry when people are like, I'm, well, to be fair, I've tried to stop being an ENTP for about 20 years, 'cause they're annoying as people. And I just, it doesn't matter how many therapy sessions I have and the amount of personal growth I go through, I still become an ENTP at the end of the test. I've been trying to change it. ENTJs make a lot more money, but there you go. I employ people that are ENTJs as well. See, that's a very ENTP thing to say. So the point being is that all these things, Myers-Briggs and all these other things, Insights and the color systems, all these things are just ways of giving ourselves more knowledge and understanding. Yeah, finding out about individuals' values on your teams and what's your top core value is tremendously important, but we're just a piece of technology that can do so. But with your flock, it then also helps by giving people learning and development packages behind it and some other clever stuff and some machine learning stuff. So it's very clever in what it does. But the actual principle behind it is the same. If you were a great leader and everyone was around the campfire together and you knew all the team inside and out, they'd be a highly productive, fantastic place to work and you'd have a great culture, all the rest of it. Awesome. You most probably don't need technology to help you do that. Problem with that though is if you're not. Yep. And you'll know if you're not because people leave. So if you're in a company where nobody ever leaves and everyone's always happy, it's highly productive, you're gonna know because it's gonna make lots of money, be very, very successful. You have no problems and everyone comes to work and you don't even need to ask them to come back to the office because they go, oh my God, I'd love to. I've got to meet James. We're gonna have a collaboration meeting. They do it by themselves. You don't have to tell them what to do because they love each other and it's great and it's a funky place to work. If that's the case, hey, good on you. And I think there are places like that and we could most probably even know which ones they are because they're topping rankings in different things.

Yeah.

But technology allows you to do lots of things. Like for example, we don't all need to use Slack to communicate. We can talk to each other. Yeah, we don't all need to use Miro or Miro to do stuff on the whiteboard. We don't all need to use Trello to remember what we're doing today. But we use all those things because they're tools. We don't need to use Excel, we could use a calculator or be really good at maths. I mean, how far back do you want to go? We don't need to use Microsoft Word, we could just write each other letters. We don't need to use email because we could just shout each other through the building. I mean, like, how far back do you want to go? Technology's whole point is to help you save time so you can become better at whatever it is you do. Your flock is like, I don't know, if you had a laundrette, you had no washing machines. You just went down to the river and you washed your stuff in the river. You could do that, great. But why? You'd have a mangle and then you'd most probably have a washing machine. I don't know where I'm going with this metaphor, it doesn't work. But it's the use of technology to save time is what I'm trying to say. The problem or the issue is around the misunderstanding. Because if you're sitting there using a mangle and you've never seen a washing machine, you might not be able to conceptually understand what a washing machine can do. That makes sense.

Yeah.

So you'd have to trial stuff first. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this. So what I'm trying to say is there are hundreds of different ways of doing this with different pieces of technology. But just like if you were doing marketing, much better, Mike Madsen, you nowadays have to have at least 10 different tools that you use to do marketing, to do your digital marketing. You didn't used to have to, but now you do. And that's because there's something like 111,000 different SaaS companies that are aimed at marketing tech groups. Like in the lab I was looking after the last 20 years, I think it was like 1,000. It's insane how many there are now. Yeah. Now you just got to use a few. So your job actually is part technologist because you need to find out about what technology is out there and part using the technology. Well, I'm sorry, everybody's jobs got slightly more techie. Everyone's now technology. Every tech, every company is now a technology company. Everyone is because technology is so important. Human beings, however, cannot be replaced in this. We're just trying to help. We're just helping. We're not like a washing machine, 'cause we're just helping you become better at your job. But we're one thing. You know, there's lots of other things that you could use. One is onboarding. If your onboarding is not great, use technology to help it. Yeah, if you don't know about your team and haven't done diagnostic checks on people, do that before you hire them, for goodness sake. Yeah, do your exit interviews as they're leaving, but my goodness, that's most probably already too late. You know, empower your leadership and also your team leaders with the technologies that they need to become more successful. You can't blame them. Great example, a great thing I read on LinkedIn, not an example, but a great way of looking at it is you can't give someone a bag of cement and say, go build me a cathedral. And that's what we're doing at the moment. We're just giving people bags of cement and go on, go and do it. And then we're like, why can't they do it? It's like, because it's impossible. You've not given them any architecture. You've not given them a team. You've given them nothing. You've just said, our company culture's rubbish. People are leaving, go and fix it. In fact, sometimes you don't even say that, you just go, people are leaving, it's awful. This company's done. Then we've gotta remember team leaders are also leaving, you know, in the back of their mind, they're like, this place is not a good place to work. No one likes me, no one likes this, and I hate doing this job. One of the biggest things that happens in technology often is that somebody who's very, very good at doing coding then becomes a manager and they're very bad at managing or potentially bad at managing because you've never trained them, you've never developed them. Yeah. And then you blame them. You said, but you were a great coder. What's wrong, Jim? He's like, I hate managing people. But Jim won't say that, Jim will just leave. Sharon won't say anything, she'll just leave. Because Sharon is an amazing coder and somebody else wants an amazing coder. So we've gotta be really careful that we don't blame the individuals when we haven't found out their motivations and what they care about and how they feel. And I know it might sound a little bit immaterial and it's not important, but honestly, without the knowledge, you know, the truth sets you free, without this data point, If you're just going on gut instincts and feel, the problem with going on gut instincts and feel, especially at the moment, is you don't have any because they haven't got an office where people are all the time. So you have no, you've got no touchpoints, and you can't do it. I know we did in the pandemic when we went, well, people have turned off their camera, that must mean they're gonna leave. We have to be a bit more nuanced now, I'm afraid. That's not a flag for, it might be a red flag, but only if you know that person pretty well. It's not necessarily, so I think diagnostic tools, I personally believe that they should become more and more important and will become more and more important. Just a quick on though, however, is diagnostics tools do not mean artificial intelligence.

Okay?

Please, please, please, everyone, please listen to me here. Said this on the BBC the other day, and I did, I'm so passionate about it. Artificial intelligence has the intelligence of about a 10 or 12-year-old at the moment.

Okay?

Which by the way is awesome, is amazing. But you would not let a 12-year-old in charge of your recruitment process for your company. You wouldn't, you wouldn't, because it would just go, oh, I remember that person's good. And then you go, all right, no problem. But people are literally in a black box, which they don't even, they've not even seen the algorithm. They're just looking at the outputs at the end. By the way, this is recruitment companies, especially 'cause they love to save time and cut corners, which is great 'cause they use technology, awesome. But using AI recruitment, unless something's changed in the last year, which it might have 'cause AI always gets better, it was based on some pretty bad non-diverse datasets, okay? You know, large companies have had to turn off their AI recruitment tools not because they didn't have the data, but because the data was slightly racist and sexist and a lot of other stuff, and they had to turn them off. So, you know, I'd say you always use technology, but just be aware that not all of them— not because we could try to use your flock and let you do nothing at all, let a computer run the whole system. But I don't want to do that because I think that's dangerous, because we don't— because human beings, we don't necessarily need management. Like, you might not even ever see your manager if you're purely remote, so it could be a computer. Could be a computer, you know, and in the future, maybe it will be when it's nuanced enough to do so, you know, but it's not now. It's not right now. So please don't abrogate your responsibility by simply thinking that a black box will do it all for you. Because if, by the way, if that's the case, you don't really have a job.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You are, you are surplus to requirements, as a certain Mr. Musk might say.

Yeah. At some point, someone's going to realize and go, oh, we don't need you. Bye. Yeah, I know.

I, um, I was just going to follow up by saying, um, you know, when it— when I look at diagnostics, and I say this to clients often, is that diagnostics are only as good as what you do with the data that you get. So I, I often say to clients, and it sounds— I don't wish it to sound disrespectful to the diagnostic or churlish or throwaway or anything else, but my point is always, I don't really care what the data says. What I care about is what you will do with the data that will make a difference to get you to wherever it is that you need to be as an organization. That's the bit that I care about. What you've identified with that diagnostic is a benchmark or a line in the sand against which you can measure future progress. And that's great. So—

Absolutely. Which is the same thing with things like Google Analytics. You put Google Analytics on a website, You can benchmark and then you can see, but Google Analytics doesn't tell you what to do. And it, of course, from the data, if you're looking for action points, you could intuit what your next plan is. Yes, but that needs a human being to do so. Yeah. And it might not with digital marketing very soon because digital marketing is actually easier than people management is. So very, very soon AI may well conquer digital marketing, but not right now. It hasn't quite yet, but it might do. But I don't, we've got a long time before it Conquers people analytics, because people are too complicated. So that's exactly what YourFlot does. YourFlot then says, here's the data, here are 3 actions you can do as a manager, but it doesn't do anything else. It doesn't say, oh, by the way, the action should be, because that's your job. Your job is the, that's the human being bit. You know, do you need more houseplants? That's a human, you don't want a computer telling you, well, what you really need to do, which it could do, by the way, couldn't it? You could go geolocation nearest pub with this team that likes lager.

Bing, done, I'm in. And on that, you know what, on that note, we are gonna hang up. We're gonna, we could be, we could literally be here all day. And I'm gonna suggest to people that have gotten this far in this episode of the podcast, go back and re-listen to this at half speed so you can pick up every single one of the points that Dan made over the past 35 or so minutes. Dan, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thanks so much for taking the time.

No, no, very, very happy to do so. And you know, have a look at how we do this kind of stuff with Your Flock, go to www.yourflock.co.uk. Have a bit of a look at the how button and find out the how. The how is not me just ranting about the future of work. It's also some pretty clever stuff behind the scenes.

Brilliant stuff. Listen, Dan, thanks for your day.

Thank you.

Take care. Thanks, Scott.

Thanks for listening. To hear from other leaders on our podcasts, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do at Inspiring Change, please visit inspiringchange.ie.