In this episode of the No Ego podcast, host Sai Wakeman sits down with Jackie Freund, HR Director at Homestead Senior Care (Home Instead Senior Care), to discuss a four‑year partnership implementing Reality‑Based Leadership (RBL). They explore how the RBL philosophy—centered on personal accountability, shared responsibility, and a four‑factor accountability model—has reshaped the organization’s culture. The conversation covers the Reality‑Based Employee Engagement Survey, which filters responses by high, medium, and low accountability, enabling targeted action planning rather than generic data collection. Jackie describes how leaders use the survey insights to co‑create solutions with employees, fostering commitment, resilience, and continuous learning. The episode highlights concrete outcomes, such as a 4 % increase in high‑accountable employees, and discusses the broader impact on employee relations, manager‑employee interactions, and reduced drama. They also detail the rollout process, including large‑group trainings, franchise‑owner engagement, and the use of social‑media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) to sustain the RBL “tribe” and encourage peer‑to‑peer nudging—where colleagues gently remind each other to stay in their lane. Throughout, Jackie and Sai emphasize that RBL is not about labeling or fixing “bad” employees but about helping everyone improve, both at work and at home.
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Hi, I'm Sai Wakeman, and you're listening to No Ego, a podcast where we teach you how to ditch the drama, end entitlement, and drive big results in your workplace and your workplace. In this show's roundtable, I am thrilled, Jackie, that you stopped by. This is Jackie Freund. She's from Homestead Senior Care, and I am not even lying when I say they're absolutely one of my favorite clients. So we've been working together for about 4 years, and the cool thing about Homestead Senior Care is they already were an amazing company started by some amazing founders who have wonderful values, and you've really tried to create a great place for employees. And I got to come in and help them make great even So Jackie's HR director, and welcome. I'm so glad you're here.
Thank you, Sy. I'm delighted to be here.
Perfect. So you've been using Reality-Based Leadership philosophy for about 4 years, and what differences have you seen?
Oh, it's really been amazing. We've been a fan of yours for a long time, followed you.
That's right.
So when we brought it into our workplace just at the right time, the employees were hungry for that next level, how they could improve themselves, how they could get better.
And you guys were really growing at the time too.
Yeah, very much so. So one of the things that employees really latched onto was that idea of personal accountability. And that's been so impactful in our organization. As people have conversations around that, we hear people talking about commitment, about resilience, about continuous learning and ownership. So it's just been wonderful. It's given the employees the opportunity to really even step it up to the next level.
That's fabulous. You know, you're talking about the 4 factors of accountability that we promote, and so many people are talking about accountability, but few Few people understand it in the workplace. And so when you can give employees this checkpoint, if they know the factors, then they can check, am I committed? Am I needing to be resilient? What part of this is mine? Like, what do I need to learn from this? And it just feeds that self-reflection. So I love that you've got even employees that are talking about that. Wonderful, wonderful. Is there some specific things besides the conversation? I know the language has really changed. Mm-hmm. I see, because we've worked a lot on accountability. You've even used our engagement survey that filters on accountability. How is that different than other surveys you've used in the past? What did it add to your kind of HR repertoire?
What we love about it is we can really focus in on what's important to our high accountables. And so when we rolled it out and shared it with people and said, this is a different way of doing things, we want to see where our engagement is, and we also want to see where do we need to focus our efforts on. Because what we found with other employee engagement surveys is you just get all the data, and you're not sure if you're making the right decisions. Right. You're not sure if you're focusing on what's really important, what's really going to drive engagement. So with the Reality-Based Employee Engagement Survey, we can really hone in and focus on what we need to do differently and even drill down to our different departments because we have some departments that one department may need to work on. They hear back from their employees, oh, we want more collaboration. So in that instance, it's the leader sitting down and saying, okay, we've heard you want more collaboration, so what does that look like? What do you plan to do to help make that happen? And
that's the key. That's the key, because what you guys have been able to do is to basically ditch the drama by not listening as much to your low accountables and really hearing the high accountables. But what you said, I love that you guys have done this, is when you're asking for action planning, you're not just asking like, what do you want different? You're asking, what can you do to make that happen? So it's not just a list you give the leaders. It's the leaders really saying, folks, if you want that, how do you create that? How do you make that happen? And your leaders have used that so well. And so how do employees respond to that? Because basically they want the leaders just to fix it, and you're not doing that.
Our employees have been so open to it because, one, they, they love being asked. They love that we listen because not only do we survey, we action plan, we follow up, we respond. And then They've just really latched onto, you know what, we're all in this together. This is a partnership. So what do you bring to the table and what can we bring to the table to make change? And so when we measure our engagement survey every year, what we found over this last year is our number of high accountables has increased by 4%.
That's an amazing gain. So what we're able to show companies, just for viewers, is what percent of your employees are high accountable, medium, and low accountable. And we want to work on 2 things, pleasing the high accountables, engaging the the high accountables, but growing accountability. And you guys have increased that piece of the pie 4%. That may not sound like a lot, folks, but a lot of people only have 10% high accountables. And if you increase that 4%, I mean, that can be like a 40% gain in the number of people you have that share responsibility with their leaders and the organization to make things better. That's awesome. That's awesome. What do you think, as you've watched leaders use this philosophy kind of on the daily? So being in HR— Yeah. You guys get to do tons of great strategic You deal with the strategic stuff, but you also deal with the day-to-day employee relations issues. Have you seen a change in your leaders using some of these techniques and how it's affecting the people walking in for employee relations?
Well, first of all, we're so blessed we don't have to deal with a lot of that, quite frankly, because—
I told you they were a good company, getting better.
And it's like, yes, but when we do have some times where people just need to have the conversation, and that's okay, What we're seeing our managers do is really, one, asking people for their commitment and how can I get you there. Asking the employee, you know, how can I help? Or if the employee is struggling with something, what did you do to help that situation? So it's just those tools in their toolbox. Again, it's really a shared responsibility between the employee and the manager.
Yeah. And that's the theme that you guys have really been able to create because you had this great set of leaders and associates and team members. And then you were able to really heighten that shared responsibility. So one wasn't being passive, waiting for another to deliver. Right. It was really, you know, how to get both people on board. Fabulous. You know, one of the things that I think is so important is when you do implement the whole stop judging, start helping, we try and give these tools. And a lot of people ask me, what is different about your philosophy? And you've hit on the shared responsibility piece. But I think one of the things I tell them is, One, it actually works. We teach a lot of things that don't work. I don't, but other people teach a lot of things that don't work. And 2, people will actually use it. So it's pretty easy to just the next day start to apply it. Have you found that to be true in your organization?
Absolutely. When employees hear the message, you can hear it in conversations around the office. In fact, people are now holding each other accountable but giving each other the permission to call each other out. So for instance, a coworker of mine, when we feel like we're struggling with something, and like you say, we all screw up on a daily basis, we're all human. We've given each other the permission to say, you know what, are you in your lane?
Nice.
What are you doing to help? And it's at that point in time where as an employee, you're like, you know what, you're right.
Which is so cool. The trust you can build in relationships by having a common language and peer-to-peer. I call it that nudging. So instead of like, going away, fretting, talking to other people about you, I have some tools to just nudge you back to say, you know, are you in your lane or are you in some drama here? And when colleagues can do that for one another, you're actually just holding space for people to be self-reflective and to make better choices because we're humans. We have this human condition. We will screw this up only daily. Mm-hmm. Our colleagues being able to nudge us back in when we're in ego and we can't see it Is so important. It's so important. So it might be interesting for viewers to know, like, what did the rollout look like in your organization? Because there's no perfect rollout, but you really started from a development perspective. So you want to speak a bit to— do you remember the details, our history together?
Oh, sure. Absolutely. So when we decided that we wanted to partner with you and bring Reality-Based Leadership to Home Instead, we were very thoughtful about that messaging behind that because for us, it's all about It's about that positive mindset of how can we help our employees get better.
Yeah, we're not here to fix bad employees. That's not what RBL is about.
No, not at all. It's how we can help you get better. And you know what? Those same concepts apply at work and at home as well.
Yeah, I get most emails— I get so many emails about this was great at work and it really helped at home. And I think you guys do such a nice job understanding that the person comes with their own spirit and their whole self to work. And I love how your organization works with that.
Yeah. Our employees were, were really open to it, and we came at it from a perspective of a place of growth and development and love. Particularly when you start talking about high accountables, average accountables, and low accountables, people are like, whoa, wait a minute. We're not running around labeling people by any means. It's just that thought process of how are you getting results as an employee? How can you get better? How can you add more value? Because that's gonna just be wonderful for us. And at the same time, you're growing and developing yourself and preparing yourself for that next step.
Absolutely. And I think that, you know, we tend to bucket people or their behaviors in states of like low accountability, medium accountability, and high accountability. And we do that because we can actually measure accountability. But the same person can actually be in different states of accountability throughout their career or throughout their day. And so what was wonderful is when we came in and we started doing some of the large group training, so we worked with the leaders, and then we're able to work with team members. And then because you have a model of majority of your businesses franchise owners and those business partners, we even were able to go out into the partners. And the thing I've loved about your franchise owners and your leaders and your associates is that they are very active on social media. So when we come in, one of the things we love to do is get people to join the tribe because this takes daily practice. This thinking. And so we really feed people on social media. And so whether it's on Facebook or Instagram or watching our Facebook Watch show, your people are always in there and they're active and they're commenting and they're sharing examples. And I just think it's great as an employer that you're not fearing that. I think we're like one of the, the few videos you really want your people watching at work. It's like, so I think that's been powerful.
When you spoke to our franchise owners, I had the opportunity just to watch the engagement and how they really latched onto your message. Because in our space, what we do is we're out helping seniors. We're passionate about what we do. We're driven by what we do. And sometimes with that, we can bring a little bit drama along with it. Yeah. And everybody comes with positive intent. But seeing those franchise owners go, oh, okay, this is how we can really take this back and impact it in our franchises.
And to learn to be more skillful in their leadership, because I think so many— I'm a business owner, and even though we teach leadership, I came in and you're so much working on the business and what you're passionate about, it's hard to really develop yourself from the leadership perspective. But they've really jumped in and we've tried to make it as easy as possible. So yeah, it's interesting that your folks, even though they had some trepidation around this whole accountability, it's not labeling but identification. I think you guys have handled it really well. As if I can identify where I am and own that, what I can't own, I can't change. And so having those ways to measure how much value I'm adding right now by how accountable I'm being and how emotionally expensive I'm not being, I think it's been really, really powerful. Jacque, it is just always a pleasure anytime I get to interact with you or any of the Home Instead Senior Care folks. They're fabulous. Again, one of my favorite clients. I love that you stopped by for the roundtable today. Make sure and tell everybody I said hello.
I will say thanks for having me.
You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining the episode today. If you're loving this podcast, just make sure that you check me out on Facebook and Instagram and especially YouTube.
