Employee engagement and the power of moments | with Dan Heath

So yes, we can definitely go too far in ignoring potholes. But to me, the far bigger risk and the trap that people are falling into much more is they're not paying any attention to peaks. They're not. In other words, they're playing all defense and no offense.

You're very welcome to episode 83 of the Shortness. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm going to be your host for the next 45 minutes or so, the CEO and co founder of Social Talent. This week's show, show number 83 is on employee engagement and the Power of Moments. Creating positive employee engagement can be actually a rather complex situation. When people are asked to survey on how they feel about their current job and are they engaged, it's kind of hard to pin down what exactly drives their answer. What are all the complicated things that might drive their opinion on Do I feel engaged at work right now? But one thing's kind of for sure is that most companies aren't doing a decent enough job on this already. From the hiring process to onboarding, developing your career, moving jobs, dealing with conflict and situations, organizations are presented with the plethora of opportunities to make work richer and more memorable. But they also have opportunities to make it really horrible and negative for employees. Joining us to discuss this topic is the New York Times best selling author and renowned speaker Dan Heath. We're really honored to have Dan join us on the show today. But he's also the latest addition to social Talent's platform faculty of experts with his content focusing on a book he wrote a couple of years ago and co wrote with his brother Chip, the Power of Moments. Dan is somebody who you're a social talent user. You've heard me reference Dan and Chip's books many times over the last decade because I've always been a big fan and a big fanboy here in Minnegate. Having Dan Heath on the show this week, but with this backdrop, what I want to do is have a chat around. What are the practical insights and stories that we can basically leverage into how we can create better moments that drive better feelings of employee engagement and therefore retention and happiness in the workplace. Workplace. Dan, you're really welcome to the show. So good to have you here. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about where you're joining us from what you've been working on recently and maybe some context to why the Power of Moments. Why did that become the topic for you and Chip a few years ago?

Got it.

Yeah.

Thank you, Johnny. Thanks for having me on the show. Good to see you Again, I am dialing in today from Durham, North Carolina, for those of you coming in from around the world, North Carolina is known for basically two things. Our history as the global epicenter of tobacco. So real proud heritage there. And of course, this is where Michael Jordan played college basketball, which is a little more proud history for us. I'm a writer. I have written or co written five books. One called Made to Stick, Another Switch Decisive Upstream, and the one we're here to talk about today called the Power of Moments. And what I think these books all have in common is a practical bent. They're all essentially designed to answer a question that's of relevance to people in the organizational world. How do I make my ideas stick with people? How do I change things in difficult situations? How do I make better decisions? And to answer your question about the Power of Moments, that's really a book that was designed to answer the question, how do I improve the experience of the people I care about, whether that's patients and healthcare or students in academia or, you know, your kids, if you're a parent, or the employees in your organization? And so that was the departure point for this book is what can we learn about how experience can be shaped to make it more memorable, more meaningful?

When most people think about things like employee engagement, they often focus on process, things that will improve things, always in every moment or every second. But when I think of moments and. And perhaps you can dig into this a bit more. Moments is perhaps the. Is different to that. It's not about creating something that is, you know, always in the background, making it a little bit better. It's something that's maybe one time are distinct. Can you maybe share with us what you mean by moments and how it's different so others think about talent?

Yeah, absolutely. Because notice I did a little sleight of hand there. Like, the book is called the Power of Moments, and I said it was a book about experience. So what's the conversion back and forth between moments and experience? So if you'll permit me here, I've got a little sketch pad I use sometimes, and I know a lot of you are listening on podcasts, so don't worry, I'm going to narrate what I'm drawing here. I just want to draw what we might think of as a typical experience, a typical good experience. Maybe you've decided to take your family to Disney World. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to sketch out your experience over the course of that day. And so if we Just kind of walk through your day. I'm just drawing a chart of your happiness level at different times of the day. So it might start out kind of high. Like, let's say this is the neutral line. So you start out kind of happy. You see Cinderella's castle, and you come in, and then you ride It's a Small World and it's really not that great, so you're a little disappointed. And then you have lunch and it cost $17, so that's a little bit of a bummer. But then you ride Space Mountain and it's such a great roller coaster. Your happiness level just shoots up. And then you spend like an hour in 95 degree humid heat waiting to ride something that lasts three minutes. And then on your way out of the park, you stop in a little souvenir store and your kids try on those mouse ear hats that are so cute and you forgive them all of their past sins over the course of the day. So what I've drawn out here is a day with some curves, right? There are some little ups like It's a Small World. There's a huge increase when we rode Space Mountain. There's a huge dip when we stood in that long, humid line. And then there's another upward moment toward the end of the day when we left the park and tried in those mouse ear hats. So what's the point of this? The point is, this is what experience looks like. This is what patient experiences look like. It's what employee experiences look like. They're mixed. There were highs, there were lows. Here's what's interesting, though. If you ask a researcher in psychology which of these moments you're likely to remember, they'll say, you're not in memory. Going to take a sort of average of all of these moments. If we averaged out all those peaks and valleys I just drew, we might get something that's kind of barely positive. They're going to say, that's not what you're going to remember. When you look back on this trip six months later or a year later, a lot of what happened is going to fade out. You know, all of those lines, all of that sweatiness, all of the crowds, you're going to kind of forget about that. And what's going to cling to memory are what psychologists call the peaks and the endings. So the peak in this case was the Space Mountain roller coaster. The ending, of course, was the cute mouse ears moment. And if those are the two moments we disproportionately recall, we're going to have a much rosier picture of this experience. And so this is the resolution to something I think of as like the Disney paradox, which is if we were literally monitoring your happiness on a second by second basis when you were at Disney World, my guess is it would be worse ratings than if you were at home binging something on Netflix, right? On a second by second basis, it's not that great. And believe me, as the parent of two young girls, I can attest to this. But, and this is a big but in memory, it delivers the kind of moments that far exceed anything that would have happened on your couch watching Netflix, right? It gives you something to hold on to, something to cherish. And so this is where we get to the crux of the argument we make in the book that great experiences hinge on peak moments and peak moments don't create themselves. We've got to be thoughtful about them, we've got to be intentional about them. And if we don't create those moments, we're just creating that kind of forgettable stream of consciousness like you get binge watching on your couch at home. And I think the same lesson applies to the design of experiences in all sorts of different sectors.

I think it runs counterintuitive to how most of us operate down. Like if I'm designing a theme park experience, or if I'm designing a candidate experience in a hiring process or an employee experience, what I might do is focus on removing the negatives. We might reduce the lines. You might say, let's reduce those one and a half hour lines. And that's going to improve people's experience at Disney or the theme park. And in reality, according to the psychology on this, that doesn't make a difference. And again, when I think about when I first read your book and started thinking about this, because I know a lot of folks in the talent area look at candid experience that they're hiring. They look at employee experience as employees. They focus on removing the dips, right, the valleys. And what I woke up to was, hang on a second, don't spend your time doing that necessarily. Do it if you can, but create more hills, more mountains if you can. That's what's going to win. And again, I can't recall if it was mentioned in your book or it was a follow on book I read which talked about the concept of customer experience and looked at the data from, you know, do you focus on, you know, if you have customers who rate you from 0 to 5, 0 being worst, 5 being great, do you spend your effort on trying to get the threes to a four, are you trying to get the fours to a five? And an empirical research on this, there was almost no value in getting the threes to a 4 or the twos to a 3. The real value is getting the 4 is to a 5. Again, don't focus on reducing the bad stuff. Focusing on enhancing more of those moments. Is that essentially what you're saying? Is that the concept of focusing on moments, or am I missing something there?

No, you got it. Exactly. And in fact, if I can just tell one other quick story, I think it illustrates exactly the conceptual argument you just made. So we write about a hotel in Los Angeles called the Magic Castle Hotel. And despite the name, it is actually not very magical or very Castle ish looking. It looks like a deeply average budget motel. It used to be a two story apartment complex. I assure you, if you saw pictures of this place and feel free to google it, you would not be impressed. The rooms are quite average. I stayed there as part of the research. The, the lobby where you check in looks a little bit like the lobby of, like a place you would get your oil changed. So this is not a luxury property. And yet the reason I'm bringing it up is it's consistently rated in the top five hotels in all of Los Angeles. It consistently outranks the Four Seasons, the Ritz Carlton. And so the obvious question is, how does a very mediocre place end up trumping the Ritz Carlton? And the answer is they pay attention to moments. So my favorite example of this, there's a pool, again, average and mediocre, in the courtyard. But what's not mediocre is there's a mysterious looking cherry red phone mounted on the wall by the pool. And there's a sign above it that says Popsicle Hotline. And if you pick up the phone, somebody answers it and says popsicle Hotline will be right out. Within a matter of minutes, somebody comes out wearing a suit, holding a silver tray loaded up with grape and cherry and orange popsicles. They delivered them to you right at poolside, all for free, just because you asked why nobody was demanding a popsicle hotline. They did it just to be fun, just to be playful. And what could be more fun and memorable than popsicles on a hot Southern California day? So here's why I bring that up. Back to your point about fixing problems. I think what I would describe as the departure point of our book is as follows. In the real world, when you think about people crafting a customer experience or employee Experience, they tend to proceed in two stages. Number one, you've got to eliminate the pits in the experience. These are things that would basically render your experience something that people would not enjoy, something that people would actively try to avoid. If the Magic Castle had the hardest mattresses on the west coast, or if they didn't have running water, if they didn't have hot water, nobody's going to stay there. Nobody's going to care that there was a Popsicle hotline. Doesn't matter. You didn't check the boxes. Those are removing the pits. But in the real world, the next step most people go to is filling the potholes. These are not terminal problems. These are just little nuisances like the lamp wasn't bright enough in my room, or the pillow was too squishy, or it took a few minutes too long to check in, and it was annoying. Those are the potholes. And I think in the work world, when we try to improve experiences, that's what we're playing with. We're surveying people. We're looking at what they're complaining about, and then we rush around to fix all of those things. But the deal is, that's a trap. If humanity stays the way it is today, there are never going to be times when we run out of complaints. There are infinite complaints. We can spend our whole lives just, you know, running in circles, filling potholes. The point of the book is we've got to learn not to go from pits to potholes. We've got to learn to go from pits to peaks. So once you have filled the pits, once you've delivered the core level of service that people expect, then turn your attention to building the kind of peaks that linger in memory, that provide the meaning of the experience. And I think that's what the Magic Castle illustrates, right?

The.

As I said, there's a lot to complain about there. It's pretty average. It's pretty dumpy. There's not a lot of great decor. But they deliver those magical moments like the Popsicle hotline, that are so good, it makes you forget everything else. And that's, of course, the story of Disney that we just talked through the Space Mountain roller coaster. The moment when Minnie Mouse comes up and gives your daughter a hug and she smiles from ear to ear like that's what gets you to forgive all. All of the little peccadilloes and annoyances that happen over the course of the day. And so I think there's something we can learn from that, right, when it comes to employees is we need to Stop investing so much in potholes and start investing more in peaks.

I'll tell you this. From being in Orlando two and a half years ago, my whole family, including my four boys and young baby at the time, I can remember the peaks. I can remember very few of those of those potholes. So going from pits to peaks and kind of try to force yourself to move on from the potholes. Dan, I imagine there's a. You've uncovered in your research a good way of doing it and a bad way of approaching it. What can you share with us about your insights on the elements that make up the best moments, the best peaks as such?

Yeah. So what we argue in the book, and this is really the structure of the book, if anyone chooses to read it, is that there are four elements that seem to characterize peak moments in our lives that just recur again and again. And memorable moments don't have to have all four, but it's fair to say the more the better. And those four elements are elevation, insight, pride, and connection. So let me just talk through those. Elevation, in the sense that we are lifted above the everyday. These moments spark positive emotions like joy, surprise, delight. They literally lift us above our everyday experience. Not literally, actually, we're not floating around when they happen, but they are metaphorically lifting us above the everyday. Then there are moments of insight where in an instant we realize something about ourselves or the world that we live in. I remember talking to a lot of people who knew in. In a flash that they were going to quit their job and never be part of that profession again. People that knew in a flash they were going to marry the person that was across the dinner table from them. Sometimes great insights come quickly. The third element is pride. And I think this is particularly important at work. If you think about. There's probably a box of personal treasures somewhere in your house full of ribbons or trophies or thank you notes or certificates or the accomplishments you've had, the things you don't want to forget. And those are really mementos from moments of pride. You know, times when you were at your best, times when people recognized you for the work you did. And I think there are ways that we can be diligent and thoughtful about creating more of those moments of pride. And then the final element, connection, probably speaks for itself. But so often the moments that linger in memory are those that have brought us closer to other people. Whether that's in personal relationships, it can also happen among groups that accomplish something great together and build memories that last a lifetime. So those are the Four elements of peak moments.

So in thinking about where you could deploy moments in a workplace setting, what are some of the obvious targets that you think? If you were going to go into a workplace, several thousand employees, and deploy this concept of moments and creating these peaks, where would you look first? Where would you think you could find the greatest value in creating those magical moments?

I've got two answers for that. The first is the first day of work. So earlier I talked about the peak end rule in psychology in the book Chip and I, my brother Chip, who I wrote the book with, we've expanded that to peaks and transitions. The reason being that in life, endings often blur together with beginnings. Like if you take a new job in a different city and you move, is that the end of an experience, the beginning of an experience? It's sort of both. And so transition points are natural occasions when we should be paying attention to experience. And there is no greater transition point in the life of your employees than the first day. I mean, remember those. Those nervous jitters we all got on the first day of school? I mean, especially if you were starting at a new school and you were terrified, like, am I going to make any friends? Am I going to like my teachers? Am I going to get lost in the hallways? I mean, that is reenacted with a new employee. And yet in so many organizations, it's treated as this kind of afterthought, right? It's like a set of bureaucratic processes that you have to tick through for an employee's first day. And you got to get them their Internet account and their security badge and whatever. It's not that. It's an opportunity for a peak moment. And so in a second, we can talk about some people who did recognize the promise in that. But for now, I want to get to my second opportunity. And that is moments of recognition. So the first day is kind of an organically important day for everyone, for every new employee. But it's one time, right? Recognition is something that's more evergreen. And I think that organizations catastrophically under invest in recognition. Like, there's a classic study that asked bosses, do you frequently recognize and celebrate the good work of the people who report to you? And 80% of the bosses said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yep, yep, yep, we do that. And then the researchers went and talked to their direct reports, and they said, do your bosses frequently recognize you and celebrate the good work you do? And guess how many agreed? 20%. 20% agree with us. The bosses thought they were nailing it. 80% of the time employees thought they were getting it right 20% of the time. That's a huge gap. And over and over and over we see that employees demand they crave more recognition than we're providing. And so those would be two bits of low hanging fruit for me is get the first day right and then start thinking really seriously about how to multiply moments of recognition and you're bang on.

And to recognize is so important. I'm going to recognize Aaron Dillard, who's on live. Hey, Aaron, good to have you on the show again, listening. And we see this in the reports from different generations which suggest that, you know, Gen Y, gen Z, gen Alpha coming behind them and seem to have more of a need for recognition. We talk about this, that they grew up as children of parents who perhaps were helicopter parents and gave them so much, you know, positive reinforcement that although we all want recognition, there is probably even more of a focus to this growing part of our workplace that needs that. But let me go back to your first example. They're both excellent. Dan, you hinted that there was a company whose story you might be able to share with us. Wonder if you could share that story about the onboarding experience with us.

This is such a great story that we discovered. I happened to meet a woman named Loni Lawrence Fry, and she had recognized the opportunity that that first day represented. So she worked for John Deere in their internal branding department. John Deere, you know, in the US Especially, we have very nostalgic associations with John Deere because probably a lot of us have a grandfather, an uncle or somebody that's a farmer. And so those associations are close at hand. But John Deere, of course, is a global company. And in a lot of the markets where they operated, especially in Asia, people didn't have those associations. And so they were thinking we got to up our game to be able to attract the kind of talent we want. And so they designed this beautiful first day. I'll just kind of quickly talk you through how this would look from the perspective of a new hire. So the experience actually began even before the employee did. You would start to get emails from someone who was going to be on your team as kind of a buddy, and they would forewarn you. Here's what people usually wear to work. Here's where we go to lunch, here's where you're going to park on your first day. And so already there's someone paying attention to you. And then you show up on your first day, your buddy is there at the front door, you recognize them from a photo they sent and they've got a cup of coffee waiting for you and you're thinking, wow, that was thoughtful. And you come into the lobby and then on the flat screen monitors mounted in the lobby, your name is there. It says, welcome, Johnny. You think, gosh, that's cool. They show you up to your desk and there's a tall banner next to your workstation that's visible from across the floor. So people come over the course of the day to say hello to you and introduce themselves. And you've got your first email in your inbox from the CEO of John Deere. He sent along a little video in which he recounts his own career at John Deere. He talks about the mission of John Deere, to provide the food and the shelter and the infrastructure that's going to be needed by a growing global population. And then they take you off site to lunch and they pepper you with questions about your background. They tell you what's going on at work. In the afternoon, your boss comes by to set up a coffee date with you, just one on one in the next week. And then your boss's boss comes by and does the same thing and, and so on and on and on it goes. And you walk out of there that day just thinking, man, the work we're doing here is important. And number two, I seem to matter to them. I belong here. And so they start to roll this out across Asia and in places like Beijing. Some of the longtime employees start asking, can I quit and rejoin so I can get this first day experience? And so that to me is like a quintessential example of how to create a peak out of nothing. It's got all of those elements we talked about, the elevation, the insight, the pride, the connection, the connection of having a friend before you even walked in the door. And yet to most organizations, it's just. It's nothing. It's not even a failure. It's a lack of an attempt. We treat employees like a bureaucratic problem. Instead of recognizing that this is the kind of moment that's going to last in memory, do we want it to be a good one or a bad one?

I love that example, and it reminds me of example I've used myself having read your book and sought out some examples in recruiting of the speaker company Sonos in their Dutch head office. Several years ago, a good friend of mine, Oscar Mager, was working there in the recruiting team and he told me the story of how they applied this peak end rule to their process. First focusing on a Peak. When folks came to the office in Amsterdam to interview with Sonos, you were welcomed, of course, by your host and asked first question, what's your favorite song? Right. So you asked, what's the favorite song? And some might go, I know, born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen. They go, well, Mr. Heath, come on in here. And they bring you into a big room filled with beautiful Sonos speakers everywhere and say, one second. They load up Born in the USA and blast it beautifully, sonically fantastic going. That's what we make. Then you go off to your interview. You're like, wow, right? So that's fantastic. You go do the interview, it's all fine. Then maybe two weeks later you get a regret letter. Sorry, Dan, you're not for us. We're not going to proceed. And you feel you have that valley, Right? But what they did was they included in the rejection letter a voucher for 50% off any Sonus equipment. One item. They're expensive. So rather than just leaving with this negative experience, they end it with, oh, that's a joy. A peak and an end. Highly applicable to this. Dan, I'm going to go to a question from a user here, if you don't mind. Dan, don't you think those potholes you're talking about have a cumulative effect? Too many of them are ignored by the organization. People will get frustrated. They feel like their organization is a big entertainer and not very serious about their basic needs. And the second thought is that the peak moments are very subjective. Something is a highlight for you, but might be tacky and unwanted. Thing for me. So there's two things to unpack there, Dan. First is the question to do with the psychology. Would the number of potholes build? And therefore there's a point at which you've got to fix the potholes because that experience is not great. And then how do you create moments, I guess, that are universally good for everybody, or is that possible?

Yeah, I think both. Great questions. I think the first thing I would say is, I mean, there definitely is a threshold at which you get enough potholes in the road and you've effectively created a pit. Right? So I would just acknowledge that. I think the reason I'm on the side of the fence that I am is because in my experience researching organizations, they're spending 90% of their attention on potholes and maybe 10% on peaks. It's just the proportion is all wrong. So, yes, we can definitely go too far in ignoring potholes, but to me, the far bigger risk and the trap that people are falling into Much more is they're not paying any attention to Peaks. They're not. In other words, they're playing all defense and no offense at the Magic castle. Again, there's 100 different things that they can improve. There are lots of little annoyances, lots of little mediocrities, but the fact that they have these brilliant moments that last in memory make people forget about all the little things. And so that's the case I'm making. I think your second point is a really good one, which is not all peaks are created equal. We're different people. We like different things. I think something like the John Deere first day is darn near universal. I think it would be the very rare human being who wouldn't feel honored and appreciated with an experience like that. But you're certainly right that there are different kinds of experiences with, with a radically different reception. There are employees who would love to be held up in public for acclaim. And there are others, perhaps introverted, who would rather shrink under the rug than be called out in that way. And that's something we talk about in the book under the notion of responsiveness, which is a word that we've borrowed from the social psychologist Harry Rees. So Harry Rees says that the way to strengthen relationships is to be responsive to the people we're in the relationship with, whether that's our spouse or our business partner or our employee. And he defines responsiveness in an interesting way. He says there are three parts of it that we are understood, that we are validated and that we are cared for. So understood in the sense that our relationship partners take the time to understand what we want and how we define ourselves. And they don't just understand those things. They signal to us that they respect those self definitions, even if they might want something different for us than we want for ourselves. And then they exert effort. They care for us. That's the third part. And so I think that's where the magic really comes in, is in organizations. It's not the Popsicle hotline that's going to do the trick. I don't mean to suggest that if you start a cookie club in the lobby that makes all your employee problems go away. It ain't that simple. I wish it was, but I think that something about the blend of being responsive, treating people as individuals, understanding them well enough to know what they appreciate, that coupled with Peaks, is really where the magic comes in.

I totally agree with that, Dan. In social talent, with our workforce, we're constantly working on the. On the. Sometimes potholes, sometimes pits but we're also trying to focus on those peaks. We are all going skiing next month in Austria as a celebration for our success last year.

I didn't get my invitation, Johnny. I don't know what's happening here.

We'll get you there. Right.

Lost in the mail.

Covid. I'm not blamed. Covid. Yeah, it's important to focus on those. It's easy to say, well, you know what, let's fix these other small things because they're long lasting. It should be let's do that and do the other things or let's do as many of those as possible but still leave room for this peak. This is a big, big question in society, in the media today, Dan. Right. A lot of folks talking about it. I'm going to jump into some recent news articles that talked about some of these challenges that I think, I'm sure you think can be helped by focusing on moments. I'm going to jump in and start with a Forbes article from just before Christmas entitled Three Strategies for Building Employee Engagement. We'll share the link out in the podcast notes. And the article starts with saying that employee engagement has fallen 7% since January and it wasn't high to begin with. Right. Just to be clear. And the author calls out three strategies for building employee engagement, but it particularly focuses on the pandemic or post pandemic environment, depending on your perspective. Right. Because some of the examples you gave there included physical workspaces and, you know, coming to I gave an example that was a physical interview and the world's changed a bit for a lot of folks in the last couple of years. So what is your take on perhaps this article and maybe, you know, how would you adapt some of these moments for a more virtual professional world?

Yeah, it's a good question. I thought, I thought the article was great. Highly recommended to viewers and listeners. The author calls out kind of three clusters of areas to think about when we think about employee engagement. There's work life balance and health and well being and then recognition as a third. And so, you know, already I'm a champion of the third. I guess what I would point out is I might just, I don't know if this is pedantic, but I might just alter the framing a bit because I think those first two factors, the work life balance and the health and well being, to me those are kind of, those are defensive factors. It's like those are potential pits that employers wisely should look out for. But to me the effect of those is to avoid disengagement as opposed to promoting engagement. That's the distinction I would like to draw. It doesn't mean they're unimportant. They're vitally important, especially back in the spirit of step one is to fill pits. If you don't fill pits, you don't have anything. And I think in many cases the work life balance is so bad that pressures are so bad you don't have the right to advance to peaks. But I think we should draw a distinction. Like what gets people happy and bouncing out of bed in the morning is not that you've resolved work life balance issues. What gets them happy to bounce out of bed is they're going to go do something that's fun. They're going to work with the team that they like. They're going to do work that has purpose and meaning. And I think those are on more of the. The offense side of the scoreboard.

I totally agree. It's table stake stuff these days to have a work life balance. The companies who said we were hybrid, you can work from remotely from anywhere. Before 2020, they were unique. That was a peak, but now that's just table stakes. You have to offer that to everybody just to show up. But the point of the article, I think the example given by the author here, employee recognition, was a. An online bingo game. And I was like, oh, we've done that online bingo game. But no, it was actually quite different. It was quite personalized. It showed real listening and having to get to know your team under pressure. Over two days you to fill out a bingo card, I think where you to go find out something about very unique about somebody and fill in the bingo card to fill your card over two days. And the first person to do that one, it was quite different. You know, it was got that connection piece. There was a challenge to it. You had to work together again. A lot of the attributes you mentioned in terms of creating a great moment were embedded there. So I think you're right. I hadn't thought about that context, but you're dead right. The first two are just kind of defensive, fill the pits and only the third was arguably focused on that, on that creation of a peak.

I want to remind me of. Sorry, it reminds me of. I think it was maybe a year or two ago I was going to give a keynote for this healthcare association or this health system rather. And I had a briefing call with them to kind of learn the context before I spoke. And I was going to be talking about moments. And it very quickly became clear that the reason they had brought me in was because they were having a real problem with nurse burnout and disengagement and they thought we're going to sprinkle some of this moment's dust and help our problem go away. And so I was digging into what are the, what are the barriers to nurse engagement. This was pre Covid, by the way. I think it'd be pretty obvious what the barriers are today. But in those days they said one of the biggest complaints was around scheduling. And as we dug in, I came to understand that they had adopted a scheduling system no doubt promoted by some MBA looking for efficiency. I say that as a self hating MBA that essentially left nurses in suspense what hours they would work for from week to week it was allocated by the algorithm. And furthermore, they might show up for a shift, discover that for whatever reason the ward was underpopulated on that day and then be sent home. So the nurses had complete mystery and ambiguity about how many hours they were gonna work, when they were gonna work. And we're talking about moments. And so back to the point of the article. If you've got a really serious imbalance of that kind of thing, you got to fix, you got to get the stone out of your shoe before you can start talking about getting people skipping down the street 100%.

I'm going to jump in, by the way, to another point you made earlier, which is around onboarding. The great example you gave him, John Deere. And by the way, John Deere is a known brand in Ireland. In Ireland, probably the same in the US You've got blue, red and green when it comes to farming equipment. And you know, you're in one of those camps and we've got a big farming community obviously here in Ireland. So I think my, my brother in law runs a big farm and they're a blue shop. We've others who are the red, I think red Ford, not mistaken, red is Massey, blue is Ford and green is John Deere. So but let me jump into onboarding, which you discussed already. Right. Because this is an article that came out from Inc. Recently and it's quite timely and pertinent. It talks about onboarding new hybrid employees, which I think most of us recognize isn't a temporary thing anymore. It's just how we do things. Whether it's, you know, they're fully virtual, they're a mix of virtual, it's just different. Right. So and this is trying to address retention from the perspective of how you onboard folks in the business. I thought this was interesting. Keith, get your thoughts on it. Right. Because again, it talks about that really important transition. I agree with you. You know, expanding on Kahneman's research when you just talked about peak end to further that, to really be peak transition, I think is important here and not just see it as the end of something. This is a transition moment and this is one of those vital ones. And it changed because companies have had an onboarding experience for a year, as most companies have, and in 2020 it didn't work anymore because it was so hinged on the physical in person experience. Love to get your thoughts on the Inc article, its recommendations on virtual onboarding. And did you see any good moments in there? Anything that had the ingredients you're looking for?

Yeah. I will confess to being a realist about the virtual presence in the workplace today. I think we're all trained to be both and people we want to look on the positive side and say, well, virtual, it's just different. It's neither better nor worse. And I think the reality is no, when it comes to experience, it's worse. I'm sorry to be defeatist about it, but I think that there is something just essential about face to face interaction when it comes to relationships. Now that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, and that doesn't mean that if a B is as high as we can go, we should aspire to a B for goodness sakes. But I think we should try to preserve as much of that face to face legacy as we can. So one of the things that I thought was right on in the article was to think about how to use face to face, even if it's just in short spans or certain time periods. And I would certainly lobby for that first day or that first week to be one of those time periods. I did a workshop last fall in the COVID era for a bank, and it was actually the first day that a lot of the senior executives had come back together. And it had just this. This incredible feeling. It was almost like a high school reunion or something. Was the vibe in the room just people so happy to see each other's faces. And I was thinking in the back of my mind, like, I bet a lot of these people didn't even get along before the COVID era. And they come together and it's just like just seeing those familiar faces and smiles was its own reward. So I would challenge onboarding managers. I know there are a lot of constraints in this world. I know there are things you can't affect, but to the extent you can really prioritize face to face time for that early period because I think there is just an imprinting, a short lived time, limited imprinting period that you can't get back. And so be thoughtful about how to use just short, short periods of face to face time to ensure that that experience lasts.

Yeah. Something I liked in the article Dan, because I think your point around in person is very relevant. It's often discussed in the last two years we extended that or experimented with extending that by saying that in the absence of in person meetings bring physicality to the relationship. Because physical world and the virtual world are different worlds. Maybe you can't both be in the same place, but can you do anything physical? The article mentions and the previous article we discussed also mentioned this concept of sending gifts. And this article says send something your first day, swag your gift. We did that when we couldn't be together. Last Christmas, for example, we sent 12 presents wrapped in a big box each. You opened and we all went online and we unwrapped them all together. So we tried to bridge that physical that's brilliant virtual world and create a moment out of it even if you couldn't be in person. I think it's so easy, right? But sending some stuff in the post, maybe it's sending a donut and a coffee to someone on the first morning and you both go online and you got the same donut and the same coffee and you the feeling of being connected physically even though you can't. And I think you know, in, in you're right and I agree with you in that in person is better for those things. But it's, it's pushing yourself to, to your point, get a B plus. You know, any something physical might be a B plus moment compared to the A moment. But don't settle for a D just because you can't get to a. Amen.

Yeah, I could not agree more. I think if people just took one lesson away from improving the virtual experience, it would be don't forget you can blend analog and digital. You know, the presenting problem is not how do I design an awesome experience in Zoom, because that may well be an unanswerable question. But just as if I asked you, what if I asked you to design a world class training experience in a small, cramped, dimly lit conference room with no windows and the participants can't go outside the whole time. I mean that you couldn't get an A on that either. Right? But that is not the constraint we've got to be thoughtful about. Like you said, the gift in the mail. I Have a friend named Dustin Liu who created like a whole notebook of ways to kind of blend media. Can you get people to show the view from their window and talk about it, or hold up something in the room, the oldest thing in their room, and how they came to possess it? Or have people listen to a conference or a presentation on Zoom and then get on their mobiles and take a walk with one other colleague and talk about what they heard in terms of the strategy or the vision. There's lots of ways to mash up media, to mash up analog and digital. I think that's the route to a better experience.

That's a key note with regard to moments. Moments that are virtual and moments that are in person aren't on the opposite ends of the spectrum. They're moments. They cross over, they live in parallel. You can blend them together. You shouldn't see them as opposites. You shouldn't see them as we can't do in person. So we have to go something very different for a virtual. How can you just create a really good moment? And if anything, in the last two years, we've seen some great ingenuity around people and teams creating great moments that have really pushed the barriers of what we could do during this Covid crisis. And if you're in that company and you'd like to share the story with us, please reach out. We'd love to hear it in social, here in Social Talent. Dan, last couple of things before we close. We're super excited that as I mentioned at the start, your content's going to be launched to our users in the Social Talent platform beginning tomorrow, I believe, which is fantastic. End of January. What can users expect from this content? If you have a social talent license or gain access to it in your company, what can folks expect to learn on the platform from you?

They will experience a non stop peak experience, Johnny. I mean, just one everlasting peak. We worked really hard on this. It's an attempt to bring this kind of moments centric philosophy to some different domains that may be of relevance. We talk about how to spruce up the moments for new hires and even for interviewees. We talk about how to use moments for employee engagement. Part of what we've talked about today, we talk about how to use moments to improve training and events, even things like board meetings, to use moments to renew people's sense of purpose. So there are lots of different flavors of this treatment, but what they all have in common is just this attention to experience. You know, how can we get better at shaping the experience of the people we care about. So I hope you'll check it out.

I will. We're rolling it out as mandatory training for all of our leaders beginning next week. Dan, once it goes live. So I'm excited to get into it with the leadership team to kind of uncover what we can do and how we can create better moments in Dan. One last question before you leave us. We ask every guest every week who joins us. And this is the 83rd episode, so we're looking for our 83rd tip. If you were to leave our listeners and viewers live with one last tip, because you've given us many already, whether it's from something you've got from your own career that you've gathered through your own experience, or perhaps was handed down to you by somebody else, what would that tip be to.

Well, I will share with you. In writing the book the Power of Moments, we did a lot of kind of surveys of readers. We would have them try out different tips that we were advising. I'll share with you the most popular tip that we gave people in hopes that it might serve you as well, and that is this weekend with your family or your significant other. Break the script. Now, what that means is we all in our lives have these scripts that we've built up of how things usually work. Think about going to McDonald's. You go to McDonald's anywhere in the world, it's a very similar process. Similar things on the menu, similar way to order. The food tastes similar. That's a script. But lots of things have scripts. Your staff meeting probably has a script. You know, the boss has a. Has a preamble that goes on too long. And then there's always that one person who consumes too much of the oxygen and three other people stay quiet. And then you end seven minutes late every single time. You know, there are scripts in the world, and we have scripts in our families. You know, our Saturdays take on a very similar character. We get up and we eat the same kind of food, and then we hang around and then we do the same kind of activities. And what we challenged our readers to do was this Saturday break the script. Interpret that, however you mean. People did a lot of different things. You know, some of them, you know, went on a long drive, Some of them went on hikes. You know, somebody rented a bounce house just randomly for his kids. You know, it can be something grand, it can be something small. But the important thing is you're disrupting the expected flow of the day. And for whatever reason, people just got a huge kick out of this and I'll tell you what to expect. One thing is the day will seem longer in a good way, you know, because novelty actually stretches our sense of time. So it's like you will feel like there is more day to enjoy. You'll feel like you packed in a weekend's worth of memories into a single day just by trying. And I promise you, two weeks later, that is the day that you're going to remember. That's going to pop to mind because you paid attention to it. You made a conscious attempt to create some peaks out of thin air. So give that a shot, see what you think and let us know how it goes.

I'm redesigning my Saturday in my mind already around this time, so I'll let you know how I get on next week.

Please.

Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us today. So delighted to have you on the platform from tomorrow as one of our fantastic speakers and hopefully our users are going to enjoy your content as much as I have over the last few years. Dan, thanks for joining us.

Thanks Johnny. Thanks social talent and I hope all of you will check out the new courses.

Thanks everyone and we hope you'll come back next week as well. So next week we're going to have another great speaker join us. Larry Silvia might be known to you if you're in the recruiting marketing world as Larry runs one of the largest communities for recruiting marketers in the world. Larry's based out of the us. She's the Founder and CEO of Rally Recruitment Marketing and she is a former CMO of recruitment software company in the US and she has just such insight in terms of what to do around recruitment marketing, what best practice looks like, what are the pitfalls, how do you get around those things? She's got some fountain knowledge. She's even built her own brand new software to help recruitment marketeers better manage their days and get more out of their jobs as well. Larry will be joining us next week. That's Wednesday 19th of January, 4pm UK Ireland time, which is 11am in the east coast of the US, 8am on the west coast. You can find out more by going to socialtalent.com the shortlist or tune in on Apple, Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts until then. Hope you enjoyed that. And don't forget this weekend break the Script. Sam.