Skot Waldron:
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How do you create a happy place where your employees want to be? Wouldn't that be awesome? Everybody loves being there all of the time. Leaders, the employees, collaboration, success, advancement, profitability, it's awesome. That is the secret to creating happy people that want to be there, that want to produce that work. This is what we're going to talk about today. Jared Olsen, who is the Utah Business Magazine first-ever HR Disruptor of the Year is going to tell his little secret to making that happen and what he has seen and why HR has what we call a brand problem. HR needs to be rethought and he is in the process of doing that. This is going to be awesome. Jared drops some amazing knowledge and I am super excited to have him on the show. I hope you enjoy this. I think you will. Let's do this.
Jared, what's up, my man? How are you doing?
Jared Olsen:
Hey, I'm good, Skot. Thank you so much for having me.
SKOT WALDRON:
This is going to be fun. We've spoken before and I was like, "This guy has got to be on the show," just because you're a disruptor. We all like disruptors, and just-
JARED OLSEN:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
... the fact that you have that title is just super rad, so I love having you here.
JARED OLSEN:
I'm so excited to be here. I love talking about forward-thinking ideas and the way really to reinvent the perspective of culture, employee experience, HR, and everything else as well, so any chance to talk about that, especially with you, sign me up. I'm all-in.
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh man, oh man, and flattery. That's awesome. Well done. Appreciate that. Well, and hey, let's just get right into it. Utah Business Magazine labeled you as the first-ever HR Disruptor. I'm just going to get right into it. What does [crosstalk 00:02:56] that mean? Why did they give you, out of everybody in Salt Lake City, they said, "This guy?" You weren't the only nominee, right?
JARED OLSEN:
Not that I'm aware of. I don't know, maybe that's it. Maybe I was the only person.
SKOT WALDRON:
No way, no way.
JARED OLSEN:
Anyhow, I was nominated by that. It was in partnership with Utah Business Magazine, Utah SHRM, and also Disrupt HR SLC. They had a selection committee. They got together and kind of reviewed nominations and for some reason they liked my outside-the-box thinking, and so it's an annual award that they do now. There's been three people that have been selected and I was just really fortunate to be the first one that was chosen. Now, the three of us like to get together and just talk about crazy things that are happening in the industry and how we can really advance the profession, which is pretty fun.
SKOT WALDRON:
The reason why is because you guys are thinking about HR and culture not like everybody else. You are-
JARED OLSEN:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
... standing out in some way, shape, or form because you think differently about this. I always say HR has a brand problem, human resources has a brand problem. We always think about them as just the babysitters, as the people with the red tape, as the people that say, "No, we can't do that," as the people that give you some kind of big booklet when you get hired and slap it on your desk and say, "Read this." How do you think about HR?
JARED OLSEN:
I agree, so I'll kind of give you my perspective of the progression that the industry has made. Originally it was called administration, and so that gives you some good understanding of what they did, and then personnel, and there's this human element, and then human resources. Now, we see it being called people operations. I think the next iteration will probably be called something like employee experience. My favorite definition or rebrand of HR is called human experience. As you start talking about inclusion and diversity and about what matters, it works.
What motivates people from a leadership perspective, trying to get the most out of your team and also just about caring for the people that we work with, there's this huge human element where HR says, "Here's what you can and can't say." I think we need to blow that up and talk about opportunity costs. What advantages do we gain as we have difficult conversations on those taboo subjects at work? It could be politics, it could be religion. It could be intrinsic motivators. It could be family. It could be challenges that we are dealing with.
When we really get to know a human and what they're experiencing in their life, it totally changes the way that we guide and lead and how they align with our values and our mission and the productivity that they make as well, and we accomplish a lot more as a business. I think HR has a huge branding challenge, and my favorite definition of it, and there's a lot of great thought leaders in the space that are saying the same thing, is calling it human experience.
SKOT WALDRON:
I like that. They're dealing with humans, right?
JARED OLSEN:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
The way we interact, human interaction, human communication, human satisfaction, and the way we act will definitely have an impact on our productivity and the way we operate inside the business model, right?
JARED OLSEN:
Yeah, and when you look at a human, you don't ever look at them through like just one lens, like this lens of in an employee or at work. We look at a human in the full context who they are and what their needs are and what makes them tick and what excites them. I think we really need to do a much better job of blending this world of finding their motivators, finding their interests, finding their passions, finding what do they do inside and outside of work. There's a lot of that conversation happening during COVID before and we'll continue to see that work-life conversation evolve because we're all humans.
I'm a dad of three kids. I'm a husband. I like to hustle on the side and do some other things when I'm not working at Motivosity. I have three callings for my church that I volunteer with. I like to do podcasts. The list of things we as individuals like to do just goes on and on and so when we just look at one aspect, we're really negating everything else that that person can bring as their whole self. Those skills are also skills that can help the rest of the business and business can also help me as a father and can help me in my parenting and in my church service and other things as well.
I just really think we need to pause and look more at the full individual instead of just what happens between eight and five when you're at a desk or while you're clocked in working on a job site or whatever your job is.
SKOT WALDRON:
I think that's part of the problem is that as leaders or as maybe even some of the HR representatives that are out there working in that world in that role, are looking at people as a number, employee number 463, and they're not really taking the time to think, to care, to really ask, to listen. They're just checking off the boxes of my task list today and making sure this person has their paycheck and whatnot. The way we see human resources and employee experience and all of these things shifting is that it's taking a turn to the person. What am I experiencing at work? Is it making me happy? If it's not, then we got problems.
JARED OLSEN:
Totally. A good illustration, just this morning, I was listening to Marcus Buckingham's book Nine Lies About Work, and one of those lies is about cascading goals. As he talks about goals and how goals factor in at work, when you talk about a goal you normally talk about it after the goal has been accomplished because when an employee goes to work every single day, they're not thinking, "Hey, what's this goal I need to make?" They're really thinking about what work needs to happen. When the manager sits down with an employee and says, "How are your goals progressing?", they're really just saying, "How's your work going right now?" When you are doing that, you're progressing through the work that you're doing every single day and you're getting feedback from your leader about how you're doing. When that goal is done and you say, "Did you check off your goals?", you're really just doing this look back at things that are in the past.
The way he positions this is that goals are in the past and work is in the future. How often do we as leaders focus so much on, "What are you doing? How are you spending your time?" instead of, "What's the work that's happening right now? What are you focused on? What obstacles do you have? How can I help you move forward?" It's simple things like that that instead make us say, "You're an employee that has goals and I have to check this box that I ask you about your cascading goal." Now, we're just saying, "Hey, you're a human and you're doing work all of the time. What can I help you with?"
It sounds really simple to do, but HR is so good at saying, "We have to have cascading goals," and your bonus, there's a small portion that's based on how well you're tracking people's goals and how they progress. That's why performance management has so many areas that could use improvement as well. It's because we are grooming leaders to focus on a job description and focus on an employee number, not on the human experience and the obstacles that people are facing.
An obstacle for me to accomplish my daily tasks today may be that I've got a family member who's sick, or I've got something else in my life that's holding me down or distracting me. Maybe I need to go take care of that and then come back to work. It just changes the whole paradigm of when you're at work you have to be at work. No, we just need to be humans all of the time and we need to find out how to help people get the most out of what they're doing every single day.
SKOT WALDRON:
What is #thanksmatters?
JARED OLSEN:
Yes-
SKOT WALDRON:
Does that tie into this?
JARED OLSEN:
Yeah, it absolutely does, and a little bit of context and background to start. I want to talk just a little bit about defining culture. If you look at the origin for the word "culture," it's actually Latin and the word is "cultus." When you translate cultus into English, it actually translates into "care." When we talk about a workplace culture, a lot of time our minds go to games, activities, perks, ping pong, stuff like that. That doesn't necessarily mean that we care about an individual. As we think about our culture being this culture of caring where we care about an individual, where we see the good things that we do, Thanks Matters comes into play.
At Motivosity, what we like to do is help shine a light on silver lining moments and celebrate key highlights and company milestones and the good things that are happening at work every single day. There's so much negativity in the world and it's so easy to say, "You didn't hit this objective that you're focused on," or, "We're behind target on this," or, "COVID's impact made it so that our ARR's in a different place and our customer acquisition cost has changed." There's so much negative things that we focus on that we really need to take a moment to just celebrate the good things that happen.
When we do that and we pause to look for the good in another and publicly appreciate them and thank them for the work that they do, it matters more than just about anything else because we as humans are built and designed to crave human connection and to crave validation. Maybe it's not just validation on what we're doing at work or our personal opinions, but it's validation that we matter as an individual. When a peer appreciates you for the good work that you're doing, and let's just say that you get a review on this podcast. Somebody comments and says, "Hey, awesome podcast. Thanks so much." That's going to mean a lot to you, but at the end of the day when you get a really great one, you might want to go to the person who you want the validation the most from.
For me, that's my wife. I would want to show that review to my wife and be like, "Cassidy, look at what somebody said about this podcast that happened." She's going to be like, "No way, that's incredible. You are awesome." When she says that to me, I'm beside myself because I get the validation from the person that I want it from because we crave that as humans. We also crave that from certain people. We crave it from our leaders, we crave it from people that we look up to and aspire to be, and we crave it from the people who matter most to us, which is typically our family, but it also just depends on the individual and who that validations should come from.
Just a quick example. I was talking to a Motivosity customer and it was a receptionist as we were waiting for an appointment last year. I just said, "Hey, what's your favorite thing about being appreciated at work?" She said, "I love when my peers call out the good work that I do, but I don't really get a lot of face time with my manager. To be totally honest, I want my manager to see the things that I'm doing when they're not around. What I love about public forms of appreciation is that I know that my manager will be able to see it, and when they see it, they know that I'm working even when they're not here. They see the cool things that are happening in our organization and how I'm an integral part or piece of that entire puzzle."
I talk to CEOs all of the time and they say, "Hey, the only visual insight I have to our company's culture are the appreciations that are shared within the organization as well." That's a huge statement. If you think about Thanks Matters just for a second, a CEO saying, "The only cultural pulse I have is when somebody appreciates somebody else." Now, that means that the CEO is going to see the good, is going to see that people are going above and beyond. They're going to reinforce those positive behaviors. They're going to demonstrate what good work looks like and they're going to help people feel like a million bucks.
I think that Thanks Matters is so important in helping create that culture of caring that kind of we initially talked a little bit about on how e can help people be happier about being at work. How can we help people be happier in life? Appreciate them. Thank them. Look for the good. Don't look for the bad, look for the positive things that happen. I'll just give you one other example and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and it's just from the world of parenting.
I love this parenting book by Dr. Glenn Latham and it's called Parenting With Love. In that book, it talks about how we need to have frequent, regular, positive appreciations for our kids. We are so quick as parents to reinforce negative behaviors. When my oldest son hits his brother Ollie, I say, "Graham, don't hit your brother." He knows every time he does that, I am going to say, "Don't hit your brother." He gets my attention and it's a negative reinforcement every single time.
What Dr. Latham says we're supposed to do is to ignore the negative behavior, the hit, and when they make up after and start playing again nicely, then I come in and say, "Thank you guys for making things work out and for playing so good with Lego right now." We need to have eight positive interactions to every one negative interaction that we have because it sends this message of, "If you want my attention, if you want my validation, I will validate the good things that you are doing."
This idea of Thanks Matters transcends just work. It's definitely all aspects of life as we look for, reinforce, and validate the good things that are happening.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's amazing. There are people, when I work with groups, teams, individuals and I'm coaching them in life and at work and we talk about their personality profile and their communication style, there's a lot of people out there that crave that I would say probably more than others. There's some of those people out in the world that don't need a ton of validation from other people. They know their competent, they know they're good at their job. They know what they know, but there's the credibility aspect. They want people to recognize them for the achievements they make. That is some recognition.
Then, you have other people on the other end of the spectrum that have to have that validation, have to have that appreciation, have to have it in order to function to say, "Hey, this is what gives me energy. This is what gives me that satisfaction in life is knowing that you recognize me for my ability. You recognize me for the contribution that I made. Now, I want to give it even more and now I want to pour way back into you even more."
As leaders, understanding the people of our team. As parents, understanding what our kids need and our spouse needs. Being empathetic and listening and thinking about that aspect of things is going to make us so much more aware of the people around us because then we get more out of them. We get more out of the relationship, we get more loyalty out of them, whether it's family or friends or whatever, or team members. We get that loyalty that we crave from other individuals in our life.
JARED OLSEN:
Yeah, and even as you talk about that first group, I would kind of define it as the Love Languages that are out there. I would say that they are like words of affirmation. There are some people that that's not their Love Language. They don't need a lot of it. They have that confidence, but they do have other needs. It may be physical touch or gift giving or... I forget what all of them are, but that still is their form of validation and they don't need it from everyone, but they do need it from a few specific people.
SKOT WALDRON:
Right.
JARED OLSEN:
They still want something, but flip that concept on its head for just a second. What will happen when those people who maybe don't need words of affirmation or that kind of Love Language for themself give it to other people? It's just the concept of paying it forward. It's just like at Christmas. Yeah, it's awesome when you get a gift, but it's so much better when you give a great gift to somebody else. We have so much negativity in the world today. I think about the recent Presidential debates and how that has just really shined a light on how much divide there is and how we aren't looking for the good, and instead of saying, "Hey, here's my beliefs," we're saying, "Well, you don't believe this and you don't," and there's so much fingerpointing. If we can change the fingerpointing from the don'ts to the fingerpointing to the goods.
Here's where I do agree. Here's what I love that you're thinking. Here's something positive that you're doing. It really just changes, I think, our entire ecosystem. It changes the happiness level around the world as we look for the good in other people. When you apply that to a business context, imagine it from just a recruiting your talent acquisition perspective. When I see a full person for what they're capable of doing, not just somebody for a graphic designer or a specific position, they're going to start a lot more excited to join the company.
On their first day, where we look for the good contributions they make and we call that out, and after week one and after month three, continuously, frequently, and regularly looking for the good, those people have a lot more loyalty. They have a lot more energy. They have a lot more engagement. They're more willing to experiment and try new things because they know that if they fail, it's not going to be a negative reinforcement, it's going to be, "Hey, thanks for learning from that and from moving forward even quicker." It really helps our businesses succeed when we look for the good.
I have performance managed people. I have had leaders come to me and say, "Hey, we need to fire this person and here's the reason." There's always three sides to the story, the side you're hearing, the other side, and then the truth. I want to like change the angles of, what if we all look at this from the angle of positivity? We look at the good that could happen and we really try to connect and use a lot of emotional intelligence with the person that may or may not be terminated from employment.
As I've been able to do that, I've really been able to connect with some of those low performers and our conversations go to their entire human experience. "Why are you coming in late to work?" "Well, I'm coming in late because I feel like I'm a failure every time I come in." "Well, why do you feel like that?" "I don't get a lot of reinforcement from my manager." "Well, where does that stem from?" "Well, I actually don't feel like I get a lot of approval from anyone in a authority figure." "Oh, that's interesting. Tell me about that." "Well, my Dad, I've always wanted his approval and I've never had it." "Oh, why?" "Well, when I was a baby, he was in a car accident and he's been highly medicated his entire life and I've never felt like I've had a father figure."
Okay, so in a short amount of time by asking probing questions, you can find that a child's traumatic experience of not having a father figure in their life is what's causing them to be late to work. Now, that might seem like a big leap, but I've seen that, a specific example, in real life. What do we do? We validate. We show the good that the person's doing. Instead of focusing on them being a little late to work, we focus on the key objectives that they're accomplishing. As they have that validation, they're more eager to come in earlier and they know that they're seen and they're cared and loved about, and so that helps to resolve the issue that they're dealing with.
That's why we've got to have this bigger picture perspective about an individual, their human experience, and we have to reinforce those positive things because that manager may not need the reinforcement, but that employee does.
SKOT WALDRON:
Jared, I don't have time for that, man. I don't [crosstalk 00:23:25]-
JARED OLSEN:
Then you can't be a manager.
SKOT WALDRON:
I don't have time to ask questions. I don't have time to probe into... you know? It's like, "I'm a busy guy. I got things to do." That's the mentality of a lot of leaders out there is like, "I don't have time to babysit. I don't have time to get deep into this person's concerns about why they are late to work. They're just late to work and they need to get here on time." What do you say to that?
JARED OLSEN:
I think of Kim Scott's book Radical Candor. She gives this example of how she walks into the office one day and she sees someone who says, "Kim, I have to talk to you. I've got this family issue going on." She talks to her for 20, 30 minutes and then she walks around the corner, polar opposite. "Kim, I've got to tell you about what my kid just won, like this huge competition at school. Let me tell you all about it." They celebrate, and then she turns a corner and it's someone else with this really heavy, demanding question of their personal needs and how Kim can help. By the time she gets to her office, it's an hour and a half after she entered the front door. Hasn't even made it into her office and she sits down and she thinks to herself, "I have accomplished nothing today."
She calls her mentor and she says, "How do I like even get to my office?" Her mentor says, "You're missing the entire point." The purpose and the reason you are a leader is to care about your people. That's all that matters at the ene of the day. It's up to the employees to help make the business run forward, and your job as a leader is to remove roadblocks and to facilitate their ability to do their job better and to have difficult conversations and to be a shoulder to cry on some of the time.
I would say if you don't have time for that, you really don't have time to be a manager. We talk about brand awareness of HR, there's this big brand issue with managers where people think, "If I get in management, I'm just going to be able to lead people, do what I want, and get paid a bunch of money." That's not true for top performers. If you love your job and a great top performer, keep doing that. If you want to be a leader of people, then this is what you will be spending your time doing.
I do think on that HR brand awareness side, we need HR less involved in facilitating these conversations. We need colleges and higher ed and everybody else to provide this education to managers and to first-time managers so that they are the ones facilitating the conversation, not, "Well, I'm just going to call HR and have them come help me figure out how to fire this person." No, we need the emotional intelligence with our leaders to facilitate that conversation with their employees.
SKOT WALDRON:
It would reshape the way our country works, our business enterprise works if we could train leaders whether they're getting their MBA or whatever, these students that come out thinking this way. It's going to come natural for some, and it's not going to come natural for others. It's all about being intentional about your communication and your understanding of what you're trying to do.
Jared, this was amazing. That last little snippet was solid. I really, really appreciate this. How can... You guys just launched an E-book recently. What's that about it?
JARED OLSEN:
We didn't just do any E-book, we did the E-book with the Skot Waldron. It's like [crosstalk 00:26:50]-
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh, okay. Oh, you-
JARED OLSEN:
... amazing right here-
SKOT WALDRON:
... oh, okay. That's right. Oh, I did-
JARED OLSEN:
Yeah-
SKOT WALDRON:
... write something.
JARED OLSEN:
We had five experts and basically what we did is we wanted to sit down and find out, what's the secret to working in a post-COVID world? What do workplace trends look like? You were one of those experts and I'd love for you to maybe just share a little bit about what your thoughts are in this post-COVID world of like, what does the workplace look like? What are some of your key things that you contributed? I'd love to hear your thoughts as well.
SKOT WALDRON:
Man, flipping the interview. I love this. The main point of what I brought into that was not that it's just something that we do in a post-COVID world, we've been doing this but in a pre-COVID world, but it's just I think it's how we do it. Now, it's a little bit about identifying our communication style. The way was communicate through technology is different. If I communicate through texts or email, which a lot of us are doing a lot more of probably now. It's hard to say. I mean, it's weird to say that. We were doing a lot it before, but now I can't just jump over the cubicle and talk to somebody or whatever.
It's shaping how we communicate and the medium of which we communicate and understanding that I can't lead everybody the same. I cannot lead Jared the same way I lead John and Nancy. They're different people. They need different things and I have to be aware of that. It's all about awareness and then managing your time in a way that is productive and healthy for you. If your office is now the room next to the kitchen and you've got kids digital learning at home or homeschooling or whatever, how do you manage that time in a way that helps you be productive and present at the same time.
Our work and life are now even more so like this 24/7. We're on all of the time. How do we separate those and be present and productive at the same? That was just my little snippet that I put in there [crosstalk 00:28:57]-
JARED OLSEN:
Perfect.
SKOT WALDRON:
... thoughts that I loved from some of the other contributors, but I think people should check it out. It's really powerful. You guys did a good job with that.
JARED OLSEN:
Yeah, it's [inaudible 00:29:06] money. Thank you for your contributions and everyone else as well. Like I said, free E-book just on motivosity.com. You can go grab that and see what everyone else is saying and dive little bit more into what Skot has shared here, so-
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, man [crosstalk 00:29:19]-
JARED OLSEN:
You're highly, highly recommended.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yes, yes. How can other people get in touch with you? If they want to know more about you or even Motivosity, what's the way they should go about doing that?
JARED OLSEN:
If you want to get in touch with me, LinkedIn. I'm LinkedIn all of the way. Oh my gosh, it's a playground, it's a sandbox, it's the fun place to experiment, to share ideas. I love me some LinkedIn. Hit me up, Jared Olsen, on LinkedIn, and I'll connect with you immediately and happy to share any thoughts or continue to kind of dive into this conversations and then thoughts that any listeners have as well.
If you want to check out Motivosity, check us out online at motivosity.com. We are doing some amazing things and helping employees be happier about being at work. We do that through connecting employees, recognizing the good things that they do, listening to what they have to say, and helping managers become leaders, and so motivosity.com is the best place to learn a little bit more. Hit me up on LinkedIn and I can introduce you to some people who can give you a free demo as well.
SKOT WALDRON:
You guys do have an awesome product. I was really impressed with what I saw on that and I think people would get a lot out of it. It's all about thanks, recognition and paying that forward. Jared, rockstar, HR Disruptor.
JARED OLSEN:
Oh, thank you.
SKOT WALDRON:
Nice job, man. I appreciate you.
JARED OLSEN:
Well, thanks a lot. Have a great one.
SKOT WALDRON:
Did anybody just hear that? Right, what? Yeah, exactly. Jared, that last little snippet there was really, really amazing. If we aren't in the position mindset-wise to think about other people, to appreciate other people, to engage with other people on not only a work level but also a personal level to understand who they are as people, then we should probably rethink our role. We should rethink our role as a leader because that is what is going to help people thrive. That's what's going to help people feel appreciated, understood, valued, is not only the worked that I do, but the person I am.
That is where we need some help, I believe, in this world of HR and this world of leadership, is not only focusing on the goal, the end result, but focusing on, "How do we get there and the journey and the people that make that happen?" It's all about unlocking the potential of our people so that we can unlock the potential of our businesses.
Thank you, Jared, again for your thoughts. If you want to find more of these interviews, you can look on YouTube. On my YouTube channel they are there. You can also find me at skotwaldron.com. On my blog, you'll find those there as well. I am super grateful that you are tuning into this. Please like, subscribe, do all of those things, and I will see you next time. Thanks.
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