CHRO Insights with Lars Schmidt

Foreign. We're live and welcome to this shortlist with me, Johnny Campbell, your host CEO of Social Talent. It is May 13th and this is our. I know, shortlist number four, I think. And I'm super excited this week to have a good friend and an amazing member of our community in the talent acquisition world, Lars Schmidt joining us this week. We're going to be chatting with Lars over the next 40, 45 minutes. We're going to get through the news, we're going to get into some of the initiatives Lars has been working on and talk to him about some of the insights he's gained speaking to tons of people over the last eight weeks. Lars runs his own show podcast. He's going to talk about that as well. You aren't subscribing already? You will have to the end of this, I hope. But maybe before I do you an injustice, Lars, tell the world about yourself. What do what's your background? What have you been up to over the last few weeks?

Yeah, well, Johnny, it's great to be here on the show and always good to catch up. I'm Lars Schmidt. I'm the founder of Amplify. Amplify is a boutique consulting firm that does both talent and branding and recruiting, strategy consulting and HR executive search based outside of Washington D.C. in the US. I've been in the space for a little over 20 years. Most of that time has been in house running global recruiting and talent teams for Ticketmaster and Magento and NPR and a few other companies. And then kind of around that. I host a podcast called 21st Century HR and write for Fast Company where I get to nerd out on modern HR practices, people practices, talent practices, and work on projects like this. So excited to be on and spend some time with you all.

So, Lars, we're going to start with the news. We're going to pick up three articles we've seen in the news in the last week and see what you think of them. So Niall will cue some news stories. The news this week. So I don't know if you saw this article, Lars, most HR teams aren't ready for the transition back to normal. What is your sense on this? What did you pick up from the article or what are you hearing from HR leaders you're talking to around the world, around their readiness for getting back to normal. Is there a normal even to become after this? What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, I think that if that was a true or false question, the answer would be true. Look, I don't think. I think we have to Recalibrate what normal is. If people have an expectation that we're going to be going back to a period that we were in through January of this year, they're going to be mistaken. We're never going back to exactly how the world of work in every aspect operated at that time. And HR leaders aren't ready. Right. We're making plans. We're developing transition. We're developing the big thing right now that we're seeing in the big conversations within CHRs right now are return to work plans. But what does that look like? When do you time it? When is it safe? What resources do you need to ensure that you can ensure the safety of your employees who are coming back to an office? How do you deal with employees with underlying health conditions or kids at home or other circumstances that won't allow them to come back in the office? It's an incredibly dynamic situation that, you know, is just. It's massively complex. And so anybody who thinks that, you know, we kind of flipped the switch and everybody stayed home and sheltered a place and now we're going to flip the switch, everything is going to go back the way it was, you're wrong. It's not going to happen that way. We don't know exactly how it's going to happen, but it's going to be complicated, it's going to be messy, and likely it's going to be, you know, in kind of a staccato form where you kind of go back and do some things and then so you'll find out some things won't work. But when it comes to maintaining social distancing, you know, just how the safeguards you need in place to have people back in an office, you know, nobody's offices were set up like that for the most part before they left. And so that there has to be a whole reconfiguration that happens before you can even bring people back to an office. For employees who were in office, I'm.

Calling you from Ireland, Right? So it's different in every country, it seems. And you, you're in Virginia, you're in the states. It's different in every state. What's your general sense from the US Anyway, state by state? Give any examples of states that maybe in your opinion, are going too fast, going too slow, doing it just right, or organizations like Twitter this morning with their announcement. What do you see?

Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we had this complicated situation where like every, you know, there are loose federal guidelines for the country, but then every state is they're making, you know, the determination within that state when and how they're going to open and kind of what their phases are. I think most countries and regions are looking at a phased approach, and you have to hit certain milestones before you move to the next phase. You know, a lot of states in the US Are beginning their moving, their plans to move, opening before they hit those milestones. So what's that going to mean? We don't know. You know, we don't know exactly. You know, there's lots of conversations around, you know, second wave or spikes. We just don't know. It's. It's too soon to tell. So, you know, states like Georgia, I think, are certainly moving too fast from what we've seen so far. You know, I can't think of any state that's being too conservative. You know, I'm fortunate. Where I live in Virginia, our governor is a doctor, so he's allowing science to, you know, be a predominant. I mean, it's a hard balance. Like, let's be honest, I mean, you're. You're balancing, you know, economic factors, you're by, you're balancing epidemiological and scientific factors, you know, health factors. There's a lot of things that you have to weigh. And because of the complexity of all of those variables, there is no definitive. This is absolutely the right. This is absolutely wrong. Like, you have to make the most informed choice you can make. But everybody's drivers from a state perspective are ultimately influencing a decision. I think I love Twitter's move yesterday. I think giving people the option, the challenge. When you think about employees, they don't know what their return to work plans are right now. And so they don't know when they're going back in office. And every individual is going through this at their own based on their own circumstances. So we mentioned, you know, again, underlying health conditions, kids at home, taking care of older parents. You know, for Twitter, for them to come out and just say, hey, look, if you want to remain working from home, you can. And that just takes so much uncertainty and pressure off those employees that have those factors that are like, how can I possibly go back into an office under these circumstances? Now they don't have to worry about that. That's a massive stress off their shoulders. I'd love to see more companies follow suit. And, you know, we gotta be honest, there are also employees that are desperate to get back into an office. Right. They'd be there tomorrow if they could. And so I think giving, you know, it's not A situation where we go all remote and all distributed. It's not a situation where everybody goes back in an office. I think you have to have flexibility. But what I'd love to see more companies do like Twitter did, is provide choice. Right? Let the employees choose if for their situation, at least for the time being. Remaining work remote indefinitely is the best thing for them. Allow them to do that if they're in a job, obviously that can. That can allow that. Let them do that. Don't force them to go back into an office for your perception of where they need to be to be productive if that's gonna disrupt their whole family situation.

And I didn't say it at the top of the hour, but for those of you listening live, whether it was on LinkedIn or YouTube or elsewhere, please do jump in with your comments, your questions for Lars, we'll happily take them. We'd love to take them. If they're good comments or bad comments. We particularly wanna hear from you and we'll tackle any question, don't you worry. Lars, I've been thinking about this for our employees as well. Again, giving some sort of not, but giving them an idea of where we're going. Right? Because people can then plan. And I found myself gravitating towards or navigating towards the resource page you put together. You at the start of this whole crazy time we're living through at the moment, you started putting together resources for organizations to share the most HR teams and HR leaders. I wonder, could you tell me about that resource page? How can people find it? What kind of things are in there around this particular topic?

Yeah, so the. It's an open Google Doc. I believe your team will be sharing out the link bit Ly link so people can access it. Really kind of the origin of that is, you know, I'm in some different Chrome CPO networks and I've been tracking this since December in Wuhan. I was just curious about, okay, what is, what is this? And I'm not an epidemiologist, but I'm just curious about these kind of activities. And so as I saw, you know, it's starting to spread in Europe. I'm like, okay, this is, you know, this is going to impact us in some way. I had no idea we'd be where we are now. But I started seeing conversations escalating in the Chro networks that I'm in, especially for people with operations in APAC and Europe that were being impacted. And so right around that time, Coinbase open sourced their COVID 19 preparedness. Document, which is the, you know, the first one I think anybody had created specific to this, this was in February and it was a masterpiece. And so I was like, this is something people are desperate for because nobody in the field of HR has gone through something quite like this at this scale. And so I wanted to amplify that. And so I wrote an article for Fast Company that included that article. And then I curated other resources around things like shifting to remote work, canceling travel, just different aspects of what I knew businesses and HR executives were going to be going through. As this continued to spread, that article went out in Fast Company and within about three days it was dated because the thing was just moving so fast. And so, you know, I have open source roots. I was like, that's really the way to go here. We need to create a crowdsourced open source document where everybody can add their thoughts and perspectives and then I can kind of be an activator and tap into my network and ask them, hey, if you're hearing news about how companies are responding to this, add it in here. And then more specifically and most importantly then, if you're willing to share your COVID 19 playbook, you know, as a company, in terms of how you're responding to this, you know, please do so because others are going to be looking to other companies for inspiration and ideas. And so, you know, really it was kind of this, this was like a microcosm of open source because you had the, you know, coinbase uploaded theirs first, right? Like a piece of code. Other people took that, they made their own version based on that, then they re uploaded it to the repository, which is essentially this document. So really the way that it played out was exactly like open source software and it was brilliant to see that. So by the end we probably had 20 companies who had opened up their playbook and the document ended up going viral around the world, I think because there was just such an appetite for having an understanding of what other companies were doing and how they were guiding through this. So it was great to see the HR community and the people community really come together and get out of what had traditionally been, you know, for many of them, siloed roles where you don't share how you do what you do and said no. Like, you know, the greater good is that people need to see this and they're willing to do that.

Yeah, I agree. You've been leading the HR open source movement for a number of years and you know, I've seen it move at a certain pace that, you know, maybe you and I probably wouldn't, wouldn't have been as happy with that pace as we, you know, we'd like to see it go faster. COVID 19 has given a reason for people to genuinely, you know, crowdsource stuff because it's never been done before. I'm going to move on quickly to article number two or we'll never get through the news today. There's so much happening. So let's talk about stress. Right, so this article in the Independent, the UK talked about how they surveyed UK workers and found half of UK workers were feeling more stressed or anxious during lockdown. Right. Maybe this isn't a surprise, right, but this article spoke to the fact that people are feeling pressure to be at their desks. This presenteeism concept, they kind of working on this high adrenaline kind of mode and that's just not sustainable and it's causing anxiety, it's causing stress for people above and beyond what perhaps they need right now. What are your thoughts on this or what are you hearing about HR leaders? What are they doing to try and combat this stuff?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say absolutely, I agree with that. I think when you look at these circumstances, these are just weird circumstances. Right? An understatement alert. But like we're, you know, we're home, we're locked down. For those of us who are parents, our kids are home. For those of us taking care of, you know, our own parents are having a, they may be around, we can't go anywhere, our plans are upside down. You know, our companies are varying degrees of effective in terms of, like, how they're being empathetic to our individual situations and circumstances. You know, we're worried about our jobs, we're worried about job security. So, you know, we're concerned about our own productivity. So, you know, we're kind of burning the candle, both ends. Then that's creating, you know, internal stress and anxiety around like, you know, am I spending enough time with my kids? Am I spending enough time on my job? Am I doing anything to take care of myself? Right. I mean, there's so, there's so much complexity bottled up inside this. And so I think it's really important for companies to understand this is the state that their, their teams are in, that their employees are in and acknowledge that.

Right.

And try to, try to say, hey, look, you know, we're, you're not giving us eight hours, you know, a day, you know, and this, like, you just, you can't. Well, you know, here are the things that are really important. Try to do those when you can, when you can fit them in. Right. Everybody's different in terms of like their own circumstances and when they can be productive. But like, tell them that you are understanding of that. Acknowledge the situation that they're in. You know, be, be, be open to different ways of doing things. I think that, that, that becomes really important because there's this stress that the situation just automatically creates when you have the added stress of not knowing if you're going to be able to maintain your job. And you think you have to kill yourself on the hours department to show how productive you can be when you're at home. It's a weird thing. We're talking about this massive shift to remote and this massive shift to distributed work. And hey, it's just like we're not working in an office. But this isn't typical remote work. We've got all of these other circumstances around us. This is not. I work remotely, I've been working remotely for years. Like this isn't a typical work day as a remote employee because of all those other things. So like, despite that, I think people are being as productive as they possibly can. But it takes to communicate that.

But there's also, like, we were researching this for a course that we're, I think we're launching tomorrow on the socialtown platform where we're talking about remote working and what all of us are, most of us are doing, those of us who are as organizations new to kind of everyone doing remote work. It isn't quite true remote work because this is office work replicated online. People are still sticking to the similar hours they would have worked. Like maybe it's 8:30 to 5:30 or whatever. They still do the same meetings and talk about, talk verbally about how they're getting things done. True remote work and organizations that have been doing this for this for a decade, they actually, you know, the research I've seen, certainly, and people I've talked to, you don't have such set hours. And you know, a lot more of your communication is written because you have to commit in writing. Things are done because people or different time zones, they check at different times. It isn't an office environment replicated online. I think there's a stress there because we haven't quite moved to that next phase in remote working because most organizations are still just doing office work in a remote environment.

Yeah, that's a great point.

I mean a lot of these crazy shit happening in the background.

To your point, it's kind of like synchronous versus asynchronous. Right. It's like people kind of work when they can and we have to, we have to as companies and as leaders, we have to adapt to be more outcome oriented than kind of hours and process oriented. And that's a shift, right? That's a shift for leaders who have always been working in an office and have always had teams. And I've had people that can pop over to their desk and say, hey, where are you on X project? Right. It's just, it's not. We don't have that right now. And so, yeah, I think you're right. I think it's a great point. We kind of adapted our in office practices to, you know, remote practices without really recalibrating them based on not just the fact that they're remote, but that they're also remote under these bizarre circumstances.

So we're going to take our last news item here, Niall. Let's throw it up on screen there. And this is probably one that speaks to your heart the most. There is or has been an outpouring of fantastic work being done by HR and recruiting and talent acquisition folks around how we can help restart the economy. I've seen brilliant examples. This forum articles picks out four, I think, but so many more examples of where people in our sector have just gone above and beyond their roles within their organizations or within their communities to try and help. What are you seeing? What inspiring stories are interesting stories have you come across of HR and recruiting folks who've gone above and beyond to really help their business or help their community or economy?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that's been most interesting that I've kind of observed, and it's funny because I kind of experienced this firsthand and then I saw it at scale, which is basically people saying, God, this circumstance would really benefit if this thing existed. Okay, it doesn't exist. Cool. I'm going to build it. Right. And so I've seen that happen in a lot of different cases. That was really the origin of that open source doc you mentioned. A lot of the projects that I've created were really based on that. Be like, oh, it really, it would be awesome if we had this. Okay, we don't. Let's build that. And I've seen that happen time and time again where people have kind of just taken the initiative to build things, people coming together, you know, the recruiters recruiting recruiters initiative there was, you know, brought in a variety of different stakeholders from different areas together with a common goal of seeing if they can help furloughed employees, you know, find positions, you know, and kind of commit to a process around that. I think if you, you know, one of the early open source docs that stood out to me, and this is, this is before companies even started laying off, right? This is probably in mid March, somebody just a developer in I believe in the Ukraine created this Google Doc of 1500 plus remote jobs curated because, you know, that person just had the foresight and said, look, people probably uneasy about their jobs, they likely will probably be less Lorenzo layoff soon. And so there's a need for this. I'm just going to build it. And this, this is just a person on their own, you know, just built it. Not, you know, I know what goes into those things, like hours and hours of time goes into that. So that's another piece. And then another thing that I'm really seeing that has been great. You know, certainly in the US we've had a lot of companies go through rounds of layoffs. And a practice that I've seen developed is that companies are creating, you know, layoff lists where impacted employees can opt in to, including their role, LinkedIn profile, email, kind of jobs in cities they're open to, et cetera, et cetera. And then the TA teams are compiling those into a massive list and then making them publicly available so that recruiters can easily find talent. I mean, these are companies like Airbnb, Lyft, Uber companies that have a pretty high talent bar that. So the people being impacted, there's. It's a false assumption to assume that anybody being laid off are the underperformers. I think that we need to squash that because that's, you know, sure, if there's opportunities to do that, they might, but the numbers of these layoffs are going way deeper than just that. So, you know, it gives you an opportunity to easily see talent that's available. And I think, you know, going back to last week, you know, Airbnb, to me it was just a masterclass in empathy. What they did is, you know, they've been pretty public about this. I imagine most viewers have seen this. But, you know, they gave, I think it was 13 weeks of severance for employees and this additional week per year of service, one full year of benefits, which in the US our healthcare system is garbage. So that's a huge deal. The ability to, you know, keep your laptops, which is a small thing, but for people that don't have them, they have all their contacts and information on that does make it easier. But what they also did, which was fascinating to me is they, you know, they weren't doing a lot of external hiring. Obviously as they were contracting, they redeployed their recruiting team as basically agents to help their laid off employees find jobs. So they created the best layoff list I've seen. Most of them are built in Google Docs. This one was built in Coda, which is like Google Docs on steroids. Much more interactive. You can basically build microsites with it. They built it on that and then they also built their own within their Airbnb domain, an outplacement portal that had profile details of all the employees who were impacted. So it's fascinating for recruiting teams specifically them pivot from again in January, booming global economy, lots of people are hiring. Recruiters are balancing 20, 30, 40 recs now. Not hiring now, actually asked to go the other way and tap into the recruiting networks to help their employees who are laid off find jobs elsewhere. That's a fascinating case study. I think we're going to be talking about that for years to come.

I'm going to ask you about a Coda project in a couple of minutes time. I'm going to take some questions and comments from our audience. So a good friend of ours, Draga Misko, who's president of HRO Today magazine and conference organizer, if anyone knows them, they're awesome organization. So he wants to know Lars, your thoughts on what technologies are companies leveraging to better able them to work in remote environments to or what technologies do you think we'll be seeing Surface soon? So some of the. What are you seeing as the hot technologies that are helping remote working? And what do you think maybe isn't there yet that we might be seeing further down the line?

Yeah, I mean I think that a lot of it is leveraging tech stacks that existed, they were already in place. So Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Hangouts. Right. Obviously video is massive now because this is how most of us are communicating. You know, inter office communication platforms again like Microsoft Teams or Slack, you know, are also heavily being leaned upon, you know, more so even I think than before. So I think it's not necessarily yet creating a new category. I think what we are going to look at is more of learning based platforms. So knowledge sharing, information sharing platform, Slack's not great for that. Microsoft Teams isn't really great for that. So something built specifically for internal learning and knowledge sharing, I think another technology and this isn't necessarily for companies moving remote, but obviously for conferences and events. You know, I don't know when we're going to be doing those again, certainly at scale. And so I think a lot of event organizers have moved to, you know, use technology that's meant for different things and repurposing it for conferences, which can work. I mean, you're seeing, you know, companies do virtual events on Zoom. I've done some of those, but it's not the same thing. I think I would imagine soon we're going to see a technology platform built for video streaming, actual conferences, right, where you have the event, you have rooms with other events. All the events are being recorded in real time so you can watch them on demand afterwards. If you miss it, you can rewind and go back. If you missed a part, there's a community chat, you know, forum where again, you know, in obviously in events, you know, typically the audience members are hanging out, they're making connections. You're able to replicate that as much as you can in a digital way. I think whoever's first to market with a platform truly like that is going to kill it because again, I just don't. I don't see us getting back to having events of any size, certainly this year, next year is a question. So I think there'll be a real need for that. And there's just, there's obviously an appetite for connection and community, right? I mean, you know, our friend Hung Lee did his 24 hours of brain food, you know, live a couple of weeks back and there was 2200 concurrent viewers at the same time. I mean, that's insane.

Insane.

And so there's a massive thirst for connection. And so I would expect to see that, like, to me, like, that's the next unicorn in waiting, is somebody who can build that in a real effective way, specifically catered to the event space and replicating that experience.

And please, if somebody's listening and wants to design it, make sure you put a button there to get you a beer delivered to your home in two hours when you click the button or less. That'd be super helpful. So some comments from Alice Goffredo. Such a good point, Lars, earlier point you made. It's not about the number of hours employee gives you during this time, but knowing the priorities and focusing, getting those done when it's best for the employee to work and not necessarily 9 to 5. I think this ties into the technology question a little bit. Like I was checking out recently the stock price of Atlassian, who are famous for productivity tools like Trello and Jira, and they dipped like everybody did in the first couple of weeks, but they've rocketed in terms of their stock price because. And it's not just collaboration tools where you basically, you know, go on video or send chat, but it's measurement tools to say the work is done, it's complete market done work. In Sprints, all those things. Yeah. I think, you know, you'll see more, a more diverse range of companies using those for maybe purposes that they weren't originally designed for. We'll see people working in Sprints or things like that so that you can measure, you can quantify your small tasks, see who's got stuff done. And you're less worried about trying to see work in action and instead measure the output of action, which is awesome for sure. Another comment here from. Yeah, and then go back to you.

Yeah, here's what, here's what I don't want to see on the technology side is companies leveraging spyware. Right. And like tools that like, you know, take a picture of your webcam every hour to see if you're at your desk. Like, if you're working a company that's doing that, kill it. Kill that software.

Someone's gonna build it. If someone's gonna put in there using.

Now like it exists today and some companies are using it, I think it's. It' the worst piece of HR software that exists. So if you're working in a company that's using that, please kill it. Do, do, do society a favor and kill it.

Yes. And show others how to kill it too. So we got a good comment from our friend Dylan Redmond. Hey, Dylan. Working from home definitely takes its toll, but it's highly dependable on what sector you work in. I found one day a week in the past has broke the week up nicely and allowed you to focus on certain areas. However, lately I've got back into the office as I just wasn't as productive from home. Change of scenery is always nice and simple. Things such as traveling to work has become a luxury. Like, I think there's three categories of people out there. Sorry, there's more than that. But let's say on this topic of returning to work, you know, you have people who go, I love working from home. Want to do it forever. People go, hate it. Want to go back to an office. People go, I'd like a bit of both. And I think the, you know, we've talked about innovative techniques and how the world will change. I've, I've had conversations with people recently about models like WeWork. Right. I think WeWork's model for a virtual effort for like, you know, having temporary desks and renting desks for the new world is wrong because it's still fundamentally built on big buildings in the middle of cities. And I think the new model, and I want to take it, take this in a direction in a second with you, Lars. The new kind of world of work, which arrived all of a sudden six weeks ago, this future world of work just hit us straight away. I think that world of work doesn't require you renting office space in a. We work in the middle of a city. It requires probably tiny weworks in towns every five miles and the right to have a passport to go into any of those and take a desk for the day. Those kind of real estate models, they haven't, they haven't come out yet. But I feel like there's going to be so many different ways of innovating out of. Because crises like this lead to innovation and lead to new ideas. In fact, you put together, and this week you've put together a kind of a crowdsourced list of new ways you think that the world's going to be basically working. So tell us about that, maybe give us your comments on some of the older ideas you've seen there. Seen there already.

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, I was having conversations within my network of just, I was actually working on my next Fast Company story and it was about how this whole situation might be an opportunity for us to just reimagine work altogether. Right. I think if you look at how the world of work has evolved and how, you know, people practices have evolved, for the most part it's been pretty iterative, right. Incremental advancements. But for the most part the fundamentals and the foundation is still from, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, it's just more, maybe more technical, technology enabled process. I think there's an opportunity for a lot of us to really just rethink it.

Right?

Is that still, does that still work?

Is there?

And so, you know, we're in these current times again. That idea of going back to normal is off the table, right? Like that's not gonna exist anymore. So what, what will exist? And I think it's an opportunity for us in the field of HR and recruiting and talent to really think about that, to really be thoughtful around how are we going to design what's next? You know, adapt, you know, adopt design thinking approaches to kind of like how do people want to work? How do we build prod processes that serve how people want to work in these times that we're in now. And so it started with me having some conversations with my network and, you know, just putting a ask out to my Facebook and LinkedIn networks. Hey, if you're rebuilding work from the ground up today, what would you do? What would it look like? And I started boom, boom, boom, getting all these ideas, all this feedback, and, and it was great. So at first I kind of took all of those, you know, basically paragraphs of feedback and put them all in a Google Doc because again, that's kind of my first instinct. And so I did that. It was fine. But then I was like, from a utility standpoint, can we go deeper? Can we go bigger? Can we create a more dynamic interactive platform where anybody around the world can come and add an idea and then the community can upvote those ideas, similar to Reddit. So we can bring the best ideas to the top and then also organize them by category of different functions within recruiting and talent to make it easy. Like if I'm a recruiting girl and I want to go and I just want to see ideas around recruiting, boom, I can do that easily, see all the ideas, hopefully maybe take inspiration from some of them. As I'm working with my executive team on how we're redesigning our operations, thinking about work and all these other things, I worked with the head of people at CODA to basically build this platform. It's an interactive live database. I believe you have the link that you'll be sharing out, but it's basically a platform for practitioners all around the world to come, add their ideas, review other ideas, upvote ideas. And basically my aim is to really kind of lean into that, encourage ideas and feedback from all over the world for all different kinds of roles and positions, and then basically have that as an ongoing kind of living platform, particularly as executive teams are beginning to think about what their operations will look like in what's next. And so, yeah, I'm really excited about that. I think this is again another, you know, open source project that I think can really allow great ideas anywhere, right? So people who maybe don't have a platform, they don't work for a big brand. You know, they don't, they wouldn't, their, their ideas wouldn't necessarily be visible otherwise. Now it's all democratized. Anybody can add an idea and if it's a great idea, the community will upvote it and it'll surface it. So, yeah, I'm really excited yesterday.

I love that, I love that because it's a really good point. It's one woman, one vote you know, I mean, you go in there and you put your stamp on something and you are the same as Larry Schmidt, you're the same as, as, as Satya from Microsoft. Everybody gets that vote and we kind of see, we see what rises to the surface and you can contribute an idea and you haven't. I just reemphasize this. Check out that link. It's a really good project. It's full of inspiring ideas. And if you're working in the field of talent or hr, you need to see what the world is thinking about. Several ideas will be ones you've probably thought of yourself and be tons of new ideas. You're going, that's a really good point. That could happen or not will never happen. And it's good to upvote and downvote those things. So do check it out. There's some inspiring ideas. I think it's an awesome, awesome initiative, Lars. It's, it's what I would expect from you. I mean that in the, in the best possible way. You know, it's the, the, the, the, the great seen in this is that there's a real openness to share. People are so much more willing than they were before. I think being forced to be locked down, to be away from your colleagues, to be away from your family makes people realize how fragile these connections really are. And that, you know, it's more important than ever to give back, to touch somebody, to help them. And I know again, I would hope we come back better people and we've become better people. My fear is over time we go back to normal because that's unfortunately what tends to happen. But to be able to see these kind of initiatives and see people band together, as you mentioned, like Hong's 24 Hour Brain Food marathon was awesome. Free resource for the community. The links that you've provided, the two links today are fantastic resources for the community to provide those open source projects. I know, I can't remember the guy who put it together, but I got a link early on in this from a guy who put in a crowdsourced list of all the companies who'd laid off, laid off people to go if you're going to apply for jobs, here's who's laying off people, here's who's not laying off people and you could cross reference that and stuff so many of these initiatives. Beautifully though, you know, I love what you started with, was curating them together because it's hard to find them and hard to read all the articles. Whereas if we, someone like you is going out there and curating this stuff and finding it and putting it in there. It makes it easier for everyone to kind of get these fantastic resources, which is awesome. So we have another question on that. We've a practical one from Sonali, who's a TA specialist in Oracle. So Sonali is looking for some help on virtual interviewing techniques. Again, it's a real practical question a lot of people are having. And we have if I can help you, if you want to go to the SocialTalent.com website, we've got a free resources section and we've got tons of training videos we made recently on how to conduct virtual interviews. And hopefully that can help Sonali with your question. So we've got resources. Please take those. Go back to Lars's resource link that he shared at the top of the hour and it's got some cool stuff in there as well. So, Lars, like you mentioned, the conversations have begun moving to return to work and what the new future looks like. Right. Again, not back to the way it was, but what the new future looks like. What are some of the other themes that you're seeing that are probably different now than two, four, six weeks ago? Can you maybe talk me through that kind of summary of what you see, the trend in the conversation of the dialogue? What is that trend that you're seeing right now between HR leaders?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a couple of things. Like return to work is the dominant thing. Certainly. I think most companies are starting to either act on those plans or certainly develop them because they may be soon. And so and it's just such a complicated endeavor that I think that's taking a lot of headspace for CHOs and CPOs. You know, another piece is, you know, I think they're becoming the conversation and awareness around mental health of employees has certainly been elevated by the situation. Right. I think that, you know, for, you know, going back to just rewind to January, I mean, there are some companies in some industries. Right. Like in the Valley, a lot of companies had, you know, dedicated mental health vendors that they worked with, provided support. And that was kind of, you know, table stakes, I think is a benefit. But it was still, in the grand scheme of benefits overall, a niche benefit. I think that that's starting to expand and people are really starting to be more mindful of the stress and the anxiety and just the burden that a lot of employees are carrying and being a little bit more proactive around how they develop plans to address that. I think they're also looking at how to maintain, enhance support culture in a distributed world. Because let's be honest, a lot of companies who were not remote or maybe had one off remote employees, now everybody's remote. There's no water cooler, there's no all hands meetings, there's no cafeteria. And so how do you maintain culture? How do you maintain engagement, you know, in that environment in a way that is also, you know, authentic and honoring the times that we're in? Right? Because I think that it's, there's a balance. You have to walk there because you may say, okay, we're gonna do, you know, bring your kid to Zoom day and you know, dog happy hours on Zoom and like all this stuff, like a, zoom fatigue is real. But B, you know, again, like you may have some employees who are single and maybe they're sheltering in place in a studio apartment in London and they're desperate for whatever interaction they can get. And so they're going to be all over all those things. And then you're going to have some employees who are home and they're in an apartment with kids who are in school who are stressed or maybe have special needs. And they're like, it takes all their energy to give you a couple hours of work a day. And now you're putting a Zoom on their calendar. You know, now they feel obligated to attend that. So I think you have to really find that right balance. It's not easy and I don't want to, you know, pretend that it is. It's difficult. But I think you have to just kind of, you know, get a read on your people, get a read on where they are, meet them where they are when you can, and be sure if you are creating some of those culture programs, you're very clear that it's opt in and not expected. So you're not putting that added burden or pressure on employees that just don't have the space for it right now.

I think that comment meet people where they are is really important. And I encourage people to think about those words and not gloss over them too quickly because it's a fundamental attitude to your employees that we need to basically take. I think especially in these times is meet people where they are, each person, where they are, each individual person. This is really important. I had a recruiting leader tell me recently how you know, she had a staff member who was in a massive panic. She found out, unfortunately after the fact about an all hands that she called to try and get people together. And this leader had three kids at home in a small apartment and they were running around and the time that the all hands was on was gonna be really difficult time for her with the kids. They were gonna be wired full of sugar after lunch or something. And she had this enormous stress for two days leading up to. Because she was just, she didn't want to have to be on that call with all this noise and craziness, which she knew it was important and she'd want to tell her boss and you know, just to be able to, she needed someone just to reach out to her and go, is everything okay? And you know, to share that moment and feel okay that she could share that moment in advance so she could de stress it wasn't that important. But people, you know, you don't know what someone's circumstances are and you might think, well, it's fine, we're stuffing an old hands, what's the big deal? You know, it's going to be positive for everybody. That's not how everybody sees it. You know, to your point, by the way, I'm going to make a shout out to one of our partners here in Ireland, Blatant Plug. If you're looking for wellness initiatives for your organization, check out Pep Talk, an Irish owned software company. They've got a virtual platform for wellness which has really taken off in the last few months as well, which is a great sign for them. Great to see companies actually putting their money where their mouth is around wellness initiatives in their organization. In social talent, we've as an example, trying to come up with different ideas. We're doing a virtual 10k next month, so we're going to try and get team involved, whoever wants to get involved, to basically contribute. You go run your 10k during a certain day, share your times and you get to, you know, put it up and we have a bit of fun and it gets you out of the house at your own leisure, at your own pace, where we still have a team event where we can all participate in the real world if you like. And there's tons of those initiatives. And again, anyone who wants to share them, please do so. We'd love to hear your ideas, Lars. I'm going to move it into our final question for you as we begin to close out. And before I do, just to mention to anyone watching, please do check out our new shortlist page on the SocialTime website, socialtiment.com the shortlist where you can find previous episodes that we ran in the last few weeks. You can also subscribe to these episodes and we'll send you a full video recording of every episode the next day. So on Thursday in your inbox, you'll get the previous day's show and you can access all the previous shows as well. And you can also see what's coming up over the next few weeks and ask questions in advance of our future guest as well, if you've burning questions to ask them. So, Lars, my last question to you to add to our shortlist, and our shortlist is a list of advice from brilliant people we have on the show like yourself. What is the one piece of advice today, anyway, you would give those listening that you think can help them in their careers, in their life that you have or you've heard over the years?

Yeah, I mean, I think the best piece of advice I ever heard that certainly I've kind of leaned on heavily to shape my own career, is to build a good name. And what I mean by that is, you know, it sounds very simple, but the idea is, you know, in your own career, like, whatever you can do to be helpful, to give back to, you know, invest in others, support the community, support the spaces where you work and where you operate, you know, operate with, you know, ethics and morals, take good care of people, treat people kindly. You know, it's. It sounds simple, it's a little bit more complex, but really it's about just doing. Doing the right thing, taking care of people. And I think if you do that in your career, if you're consciously, if that's your North Star that you use to help you answer any question that's in front of you, right, then I think that you'll. You'll be, you know, you'll excel in your career, you'll build great relationships, you'll build great networks. And so, yeah, that, that would be my advice.

I think it's amazing advice for no matter where you are, what your belief system is, whether you're spiritual, if you're spiritual conscious, like karma and most religious religions conform to something of that. If you're not spiritual, you know, you've got behavioral psychology, principles of altruism, for example, that play into this. There isn't a perspective you can have in the world that counters that. I think it's. It's a great North Star to have do good, give back, and good will come to you. I think those of us who try to live our lives that way tend to find that's how it works out. So, yeah, in these times, we need more people to think like that. It's brilliant to hear that from you, dude. Great, Lars. How can people reach out to you if they want to know more about your show, your podcast, if they want to reach out to you to help them in their business, how can they find you?

Well, I'm massively overexposed on the Internet so it's not easy, it's not hard to find me. The best hub is my my company website is amplifytalent.com so amplify with a Y talent.com I'm on Twitter @lars. The podcast is at 21st centuryhr.com and that's syndicated Spotify, itunes, wherever you want to listen to that. But the hub for everything is amplifytalent.com and if you want to learn more about me and just how I operate in general, you can also check out my website, alarschmidt.com as well. So lots of easy ways. I'm not hidden on the Internet, but.

For those of our audience members who haven't come across your work before, I'm sure they'll be digging it out and I strongly recommend particularly I love your podcast. You've got some great interviews, great chats and you do this at night. Do so, so, so do check out a real pro work. For those of you who want to hear more, Lars, thank you so much for coming on the show this week. I know you're a busy man. It's been absolute pleasure. Keep fighting the good fight brother. And we'll talk soon where I will absolutely still prove that I have a better Spotify account than you with better playlists. Dude, you know.

In like 2022 I'll have a DJ off.

Well Lars, thank you and thanks for being our guest in the show this week. Next week we have another fantastic guest. We've got our good friend John Wilson, who is the CEO and co founder of Wilson hcg, one of the largest and most fastest growing recruitment process outsourcing organizations around the world. John's based out of Tampa. He has been a person to watch in the recruiting industry. He does not afraid to break the rules, not afraid to upset people. He is a fantastic firebomb of an individual who's got some really, really fantastic thoughts and ideas about what will the world look like as we ramp back up. And he's at the front line of this talking to leaders about their ramp up plans in different parts of the states and around the world. And he's done so in Asia for customers. He's done so in doing so in Europe and the US And I want to just kind of have a great chat with John and do join us because he's got some fantastic insights on how organizations are planning to ramp back up. And if you're a recruiter or if you're in talent acquisition, how you can help and what skills you might need for to help organizations in that ramp up. So you can you can come to same time next week which is 4pm UK time, 5pm Central European time, that's 11pm in Singapore. That is 11am on the east coast of the US and that is 8am on the west coast of the US and for those of you who don't know what time it is elsewhere in the world, go figure it out. But you'll find us on YouTube. YouTube is social talent or on my LinkedIn profile. Or you can go to the Shortlist page and sign up there. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening. Thanks for all your comments and questions. If you'd like to be on the show, I'd like to nominate some be on the show. Do reach out to us and we will see you next week. Thanks folks. We're out of here.