The Role of HR in Managing Organizational Change

Cathy Manginelli: Hello. Welcome. We're in the final stretch of People for People, PeopleForce. It's a lot of people. There's a lot of people in that. Anyway, I'm delighted to be with you today. But before I introduce Tony, my copilot for today's session, I thought we'd have a little fun. Are you guys up for a little afternoon fun?

Yeah, me too. Well, it's going to be fun for me. I don't know how much fun it's going to be for you. Okay, so on your chairs, most of the chairs, I think, have a piece of paper and a writing instrument. So I'd like you to pick that up for us if you wouldn't mind. And what I'd like you to do is with your writing hand, the hand you normally write with, your dominant hand, as they would say, I want you to write your name. I'll give you a minute, and then write your name. Okay. All right. Looks like everybody's done. Hopefully that wasn't too stressful. What I'd like you to do now is switch hands and write your name again.

Tony Woods: You've been practicing.

Cathy: You might be ambidextrous. All right. So admittedly, many of you are still trying to write your name with your non dominant hand. So, I'm gonna ask my mic runners to help me because I'm gonna ask for some feedback here from the audience. So, how did that feel to write your name with your non-dominant hand or the other hand? Anybody wanna? So I heard awkward. Heard awkward. Frustrating. Boring. Oh, foreign. That could be boring as well. Yeah. Empowering. Oh, you were like, I'm going to try this. And what did you do? Just different. Uncomfortable, right? Well, guess what? You just experienced change. And that's what we're here to talk about today.

A very simple exercise. When we do things that we're used to, writing our names with our dominant hand, it's easy. It's quick, seamless. Guess what? We're unconsciously competent. We don't think about it. We're like, I write my name all the time. But when I ask you to do something different or change it up a bit, it's more difficult.

It takes us to think, well, this is really awkward. How do I hold the pen with my left hand? I'm not really sure. It feels awkward. It takes a minute. We have to think it through. And so, Tony Woods and I are going to talk to you today about change in HR organizations. Of course, this is a little simple activity, but if you magnify that to the change that folks, that either you might be experiencing or your business is experiencing and how to get through that, how to help them through changes as an organization. So, ready to dive in?

Tony: Let's go.

Cathy: Alright, so, I got my little bio. So, Tony, I'm not even going to read this because as we got to know Tony, he's a cool cat. So, Tony is recently joined MTI. Yeah. Fairly, right?

Tony: For years.

Cathy: Yep. So, as the chief people officer, chief human resource officer, but his background is vast and expansive. He, like me, started, I'm the chief talent officer, I think, maybe y'all know that, for TriNet. Forgot to introduce who I am. But he started his career like me in training and development. So, started out as a facilitator, trainer, and then grew up through the ranks in different HR roles. And now you are head of the helm, as they say, focusing on HR change management. You do engagement recognition, you run the gamut.

Tony: Everything, payroll.

Cathy: Payroll, everything. Okay. He's here from Oregon. So, coast to coast. Happy that you made it. I just drove up from Delaware. So it's good to see you. So we're going to dive in. So, tell me a little bit about, so I told him when we first started that I didn't really know what MTI did too much. I tried to do some research and I was like, "Oh, I saw a lot about internet of things and technology." And I recently just bought a cell phone and he gave me a little secret about what his company does. So what I thought we could do is start there. You talk a little bit about your company, then maybe some of the changes that your company is facing.

Tony: Absolutely. So, MTI. Hi everybody, thanks for coming. MTI is Mobile Technologies Incorporated. Retail security is our focus. So, if you go into an AT&T store, Verizon store, Best Buy, Costco, Target, all of the rest, and you pick up the new iPhone, it's on that little tether so you can't walk out with it. That's us.

Cathy: Right? That's pretty cool.

Tony: You go into the coffee shop.

Cathy: That was me last week.

Tony: You go into the coffee shop. And there's a tablet, right? And they take your order and they flip it over to pressure you into leaving a tip. That's us. That's right, that's right. If you want to hate us more, if you go to, there's a coffee shop on the west coast called Dutch Bros. I don't know if anybody knows it. They only hire hyperactive people, right Brian. So, you'll be in line, and there's always a line, people love Dutch Bros., and the young lady will come up "Hi, great, nice to meet you. I love your jacket. Where'd you get your jacket? Can I get you a drink?" It's like, "Not if I'm gonna be like that." But she's got a tablet, right? She takes your order and off she goes. But when she goes back in she puts that tablet up on the wall and it locks in. That's us.

Cathy: That's crazy. Very, very, very, very cool. So, I have so many questions. I want to talk to you so much about the changes you're having in your organization, the transformation you're seeing, but really, I want you to share a lot about as SMB, you know, small business owners or HR professionals, since this is the HR track, like how can they be successful leading change?

We are going to take questions throughout. We want this to be interactive. So feel free to raise your hand. We will have mic runners. Or if you're kind of like a little shy, that's fine. You can use the QR code, I think they showed it up a couple minutes ago, and type in, it's on their badge. Okay, I'm getting a signal it's on your badge. You can type in your questions as well. We'll make sure we get to them for everybody. So, let's dive in. Let's talk about about change. So, what changes has your organization really seen, and what's your role been in leading through those changes?

Tony: Well, you know, if you watch any news article, anytime now, you're going to see stories about retail theft.

Cathy: Yeah.

Tony: That drives our business.

Cathy: Yeah.

Tony: So, I hate to say it, but that's good for us.

Cathy: You want the theft?

Tony: No. We want to prevent the theft. We want people to try.

Cathy: Okay. Where are we going with this, Tony?

Tony: And so, that has expanded our catalog. Okay. Right? Which has created a lot of change. A change in staffing, change in process. And at MTI and everywhere I've ever worked, any change, it doesn't matter what it is, it's a new process, it's a new forklift, it's a new vendor for pens, HR is involved in that change.

Cathy: And how are you, talk to me a little bit about how you're involved. Like, what's your role? What are you?

Tony: Well, the key to look at it, anything the business does that affects its people, HR should be involved. There's no one change you can make that doesn't touch people at some point.

Cathy: I'm seeing a lot of heads nodding in the audience.

Tony: I mean, literally, everything touches the people.

Cathy: Yeah, yeah. So, talk to me a little bit about a recent change that you had and what your approach was. How did you know? So, let's assume we all agree to that statement, that HR should be involved because it's all going to touch people some way or how.

Tony: You don't have to agree with it. It's okay. It's okay to be wrong.

Cathy: As HR professionals, how do you know? Your CEO, your business leader comes to you, or maybe you are the business leader and you know that you're on the precipice of some change. How do you know what to do, how to go about it?

Tony: It's all about support, right? You've got the primary focus through every change. It's support, right? I teach my staff that we're like waitstaff in a restaurant, right? I'll bring you your knife, your fork. I'll bring you a drink. I'll bring you your food. When it comes time to eat it, I'm getting out the way because that's yours. And it all looks very calm and lovely. And if you go in the back room, it's chaos.

And that's HR's role, right? So we're in from the beginning. We're looking at how does it affect the people. If somebody brings up a change and they want to talk budgets, I'm not the guy to talk to about that. If you want to talk, it's going to affect headcount, yeah, I'm the guy you want to talk to about that. And so it's making yourself available for those meetings, being at those meetings in a supportive manner. I'm not in there to tell anybody what to do. I hate the word 'no'. I can give you more options, and just be involved from the start.

Cathy: So, I love that, and I think HR has a huge role in supporting the organization.

Tony: A hundred percent.

Cathy: In many facets, certainly with change. I know what I have found, especially at TriNet, is a big component of that change is communication. Right? Because I think back to years and years and years ago, and I'm probably out dating myself, but there was this comic that I saw once of, I think it was Linus, the Peanuts character, when, that was the one that carried the blankie around, is that right? And his blankie was in the dryer, and he's staring at the dryer like, "Please, please, I just need my blankie, please let it dry." That's how change feels to some people. It's uncomfortable, it's frustrating. What did we say earlier, right?

Tony: Foreign.

Cathy: It's foreign, and you just want something to hold on to, to feel safe and supported. And so, can you talk a little bit about communication's role in that process?

Tony: If you imagine this exercise we did here, right hand, left hand, left hand, right hand, whichever way you went, just imagine if you were doing that under pressure. Yeah. I'm judging you now.

Cathy: Oh, yeah. And you're going to get evaluated on that, right?

Tony: Yeah, exactly. Now, that pressure, you're going to be worse. You just are. So the communication, here's the simplest way I can put it. Don't let your employees be three-year-olds. If anyone's ever had a three-year-old, absolutely, because what does a three-year-old do?

Cathy: Tantrums?

Tony: Hey, go, go pick up your toys. Why?

Cathy: Oh.

Tony: Okay. Because it's a mess. Why? Because they're all over the floor. Why? Because you left them there. Don't let your employees get to the point where we're changing this process. Why?

Cathy: And I'm assuming you don't want HR to say, "because I said so."

Tony: Don't do that. Don't do it. That was a last resort. Okay. I'm going home for the day. Okay. So, communication. And, you can't over communicate. You can't use too many channels to communicate to. Don't rely on, "I sent an email."

Cathy: Well, because, right, because there's the formal networks that we all use, but really the way things get communicated is the informal networks. The influencers, who knows who, who knows what, who's talking to who.

Tony: So I can do an email and a Teams message and I hear everybody at HQ. Okay. If they read it.

Cathy: Yeah.

Tony: What about the guys in the warehouse? What about the production operator?

Cathy: And I also have seen situations where if you do that, I'll call it the HQ email. The translation to the front line, sometimes hits the spot, sometimes not so much.

Tony: Absolutely. And it will turn into a three-year-old if you rely on that method, right? So I take it out to you guys, I say, this is a change we're doing, and all I know is what's in that email. And you say, why?

Cathy: Okay. So I'm starting to get a picture here.

Tony: HQ said so.

Cathy: So, HR needs to lead this. HR is supportive, HR helps with communications.

Tony: Absolutely.

Cathy: I'm going to bring us back to PeopleForce last year. Okay. So, Gloria Steinem actually talked about change a little bit in her talk, and she said it's like a tree. It grows from the bottom up, not necessarily top down. Can you talk a little bit about your perspective of that from the seat you sit in?

Tony: Yeah, I'd agree, to a certain extent.

Cathy: Okay. Let's mix it up. Let's talk about it.

Tony: Acorns don't only fall from high branches. Okay. They don't only fall from low branches. They come from everywhere.

Cathy: So maybe it's a bit of both.

Tony: A bit of both. Okay. Absolutely. Having the employees on board, committed, engaged, is what's going to drive change. I can sit there, crack a whip all day. You can sit there, crack a whip all day. It's not gonna happen. You gotta have the employees engaged. And while you're going through this change, be prepared to fail fast. You may have got it wrong, because you don't do it every day. They do. And if they come and say, "But Cathy, if I put it here, they're actually better, and it won't fall." You better go change the SOP, because that was a good idea. If you don't listen to your employees, you're gonna end up with a whole bunch of people working for you have nothing to say.

Cathy: Well, and essentially, they're the ones that have to change. Absolutely. Right. So, you need to engage them in the process.

Tony: You get them involved. And it will work.

Cathy: Yeah. Because, you know, it's the old adage that I know you and I learned years ago when we went into training. It's, you know, "If you tell me it's one thing, but if you show me, it's another. But if you bring me along and engage me through the process it's a whole other level of learning."

Tony: And so that's where, that's another area where HR is stepping in. I don't care what organization you work for. It could be a car dealership, could be Amazon, could be Microsoft. I'll tell you right now, a good HR professional is the best salesman in that organization.

Cathy: Yeah, yeah. A lot of heads nodding here too.

Tony: Absolutely. We don't only, you sell a car to me once every four years. I've got to sell, this is the place you want to work today. Yeah, all the time, because I need you back tomorrow.

Cathy: That's right, that's right.

Tony: And tomorrow I got to sell it again.

Cathy: For that engagement, right? Yeah.

Tony: Absolutely. Yeah. So if you get ahead of the change, you roll out the change early, you get people involved, you ask opinions, you get input.

Cathy: So, that leads me to think about resistance to change, right? I do think that people respond really differently to change, right, on an individual level, but also on an organizational level. And, so, I'd love your thoughts on, like, why do you think people resist? And then, what do you do when they resist? Like, how do you work through that?

Tony: Yeah, absolutely. So, again, going back to the training and development, what I teach my staff is, our employees are like water bottles. Not a metal one, because I'm not that strong. But they're like plastic water bottles. Right? So if I take the lid off, I release the pressure. And I squeeze it, I've changed its shape. And I put the lid back on. As long as I keep that pressure on, it will stay in that shape.

Cathy: I never thought of it that way.

Tony: The minute I take the lid off, I release the pressure, it'll go back to how it was. And you'll roll out change and be like, we're done. You ain't done.

Cathy: No.

Tony: Because the minute you take your eye off it, it starts to drift back the way it was.

Cathy: And it makes those noises, like the crackling noises. They always freak me out.

Tony: Which is frustrating.

Cathy: They freak you out? Cause you think that it's done and then you hear the crackle noise and you're like, "Oh, I thought it was all settled." And I think sometimes employee feedback through change can be that crackly noise, which is unsettling. You think you're done, the top's back on and then somebody's.

Tony: Yeah. And so best way to avoid that is build KPIs around the change.

Cathy: KPIs. So your acronym, KPIs are?

Tony: Key processing indicators.

Cathy: All right. So we'll make everybody knows.

Tony: So you're tracking the change.

Cathy: Okay.

Tony: Was it successful? Are we drifting? Where's our baseline? What are we shooting for? Are we achieving it? If we're not, why are we not? Are we shooting too high? Is the process wrong?

Cathy: And I assume you're wanting to get that feedback all along the process. You don't want to wait until it's all with a bow and then…

Tony: No.

Cathy: Because you can't course correct at that point.

Tony: Every step. Every step.

Cathy: Yeah. Yeah. I believe truly that mindsets matter when you're going into change. And, you know, Carol Dweck has this book, I'm sure you've all read it. Yes, yes, I hear a yes. Growth mindsets, right, versus fixed mindsets. She is the one that kind of first coined, I mean, I think intellectually we kind of knew it was there, but she really coined the concept of growth mindset versus fix. Brilliant. In the way that she's, she casts sort of, the mindsets of possibility, right? And us feeling okay with looking at things differently and not being afraid or, you know, fearful of change. So can you talk a little bit about the importance of, I'll call it a growth mindset or positive mindset through change? And how do you create that in an organization or with your folks?

Tony: You lead by example. You have to. You have to, right? So, you're out there, you're supporting the change. What we do as a leadership team, I'm sure everybody does this, behind closed doors, I'll tell you, "I hate your cap," and you can say, "Well, your shoes are ugly." But the minute we go out the door.

Cathy: I like my shoes!

Tony: The minute we go out the door, we're a united front. And in front of the employees, we're supporting them. We're supporting the process. We're supporting the change.

Cathy: So I'm going to be a little provocative here for a moment. So, well, I totally subscribe to that and I believe that's true. What happens when the crackling bottle is so loud that they want you know that you've heard them. At what point do you acknowledge, "Man, we kind of messed this up, and we we implemented this change, and it's not going too good," as opposed to the, "Yeah, this is great, let's just keep charging ahead with this terrible change on the united front." When do you, like, know when to kind of acknowledge some of that stuff?

Tony: It's blatantly obvious. It really is. It's right in your face and there's nothing wrong with failing fast. Fail as fast as you can. If you're going to fail, fail fast. And then you either go back to point A or you move on to plan B.

Cathy: So fail fast. Some of you might've heard that term before. Yeah. I'm seeing some heads nod. Can you describe for maybe others that don't really know kind of what you're talking about, what that really means?

Tony: You don't push it on, right? If you notice a trend that is not working, call it. Just be done.

Cathy: Yeah. Listen to those crackling bottles and say, "Listen, this is not working out." Just cut your losses and move on and find, yeah.

Tony: We tried it.

Cathy: Yeah, we tried it. And, and so that's why pilots are always good when you want to go through change.

Tony: And then you've got to get across to the employees that we're going to see if this works and need you to support it. Do your best. Don't let it fail because of you. If it fails, I'm ripping it out. Just don't let it fail because of you.

Cathy: So how do you, I mean, I guess it's kinda an obvious question, but I wanna dig into it a little bit. How do you know if there's resistance? There's the obvious stuff, which is the…

Tony: Oh, absolutely.

Cathy: The groaning and the grumbling and you know, this sucks.

Tony: And yeah.

Cathy: But beyond that, what else can it, some other.

Tony: You can see it through KPIs. Because if you're watching the KPIs through a whole process, you'll see…

Cathy: In terms of performance? So you'll see. Yeah. What about those silent resistors, those that are, have you ever been around these people? Everything's great. Yeah, we're great. Right. And, yeah, and you know they're not on board. What do you do with them?

Tony: Nobody's silent.

Cathy: Ah, nobody's silent. Because they tell you nonverbally?

Tony: Absolutely.

Cathy: You get it. You see it. Yeah. Yeah, you tap into it.

Tony: Yeah. You just take them, buy them a coffee.

Cathy: Oh.

Tony: Sit down, you get them talking about themselves, and the next thing you know, phew.

Cathy: They tell you everything, right? Everything. You have to be that sort of trusted advisor, consultant, right?

Tony: Yeah, absolutely. Nobody's silent.

Cathy: Okay.

Tony: If they are, you made them that way.

Cathy: Interesting. They don't feel safe.

Tony: Yeah.

Cathy: They don't have the psychological safety.

Tony: Absolutely.

Cathy: So, can we talk about the importance of safety, psychological safety and trust through change?

Tony: It doesn't matter what we're doing. And so, everyone in here knows how tough it is to hire right now, right? It's kind of a task. Three months ago, we had 487 employees. And two and a half months later, we had 1,600.

Cathy: 1,600. You went from 400 to... Wow, that's a lot.

Tony: Yeah. That's a lot of hiring.

Cathy: That's a lot of hiring.

Tony: So, this guy, he wasn't so smart. He told the leadership team he could do it. Walked out of there and was like, "I don't know. I don't know what I just volunteered for." That was me. I went to my team.

Cathy: Love the confidence, however.

Tony: Went to my team and said, "Hey, guess what? We're going to hire a thousand people." They were like, "what? A thousand people?" They did it, they pulled it off. It was ugly, right? It was so ugly, but we did it. But what you gotta get across is, while we're going through a process like that, you can imagine it was all hands on deck for two and a half months, going crazy, nobody's gonna lose their job over this. You're gonna get something wrong, you really are. No one's losing their job. It's like storming the beach, we're gonna leave some wood behind and we'll come back and get you. But we're moving and we're rocking and rolling.

Cathy: So you were supportive. We keep hearing this theme and communicating. Yeah.

Tony: Communicating, supportive and just being there, being in it. Right? And how's everyone doing? I'm swamped. Okay. Give me some.

Cathy: Yeah.

Tony: Let me help.

Cathy: Not being just the ultimate delegator, but being in there with your troops.

Tony: Feet up on the desk, sipping drinks with umbrellas in.

Cathy: I don't do that in TriNet. I don't do that.

Tony: I saw the TriNet flyer.

Cathy: So as we, I'm looking at the time. I want to make sure we have enough time for questions. I'm sure y'all have a lot of questions. So, but I want to ask one more, if you'll indulge me for a minute. So what advice do you have for small business owners and our HR leaders as they're starting to storm that beach or go through change? What advice do you have for them on how to do it successfully?

Tony: So, if you Google change methods, right, you'll get that big, long list.

Cathy: Oh yeah.

Tony: Big long list. As an HR professional, the only one, this is only my opinion. I'm not telling you what to do. The only one to pay attention to is the nudge theory.

Cathy: Is the which one?

Tony: Nudge.

Cathy: The nudge? Mm hmm. Oh, I know ProSci. I haven't heard nudge, so tell me a little bit about that.

Tony: So nudge is selling and encouraging and supporting and

Cathy: Okay.

Tony: It outlines basically everything I've been talking about.

Cathy: Okay.

Tony: It's getting buy in, getting the employees engaged.

Cathy: Yeah.

Tony: And getting, I mean, if you do it right, you can step back and the employees will just run it.

Cathy: Yeah. And the other thing I'm hearing in that is like, we heard a little bit yesterday on sort of standing on the side with, right? Like we're in this together.

Tony: You got to be a player coach.

Cathy: Yeah. Yeah. We're in this together. Yeah.

Tony: Change is not a spectator sport.

Cathy: No, it's not. And it's the only constant always, always. Right. So how many of you experienced change in the last year? Raise your hand. Yeah, well, and you, everybody should raise their hands because you experienced it at the beginning of the session, right? I mean, change is the only constant, right? And it is just not easy, and it's going to keep coming faster and more furiously, right, towards us. So thank you too.

I want to make sure we have enough time for questions. So, audience, what questions do you have? And I don't know if any came in. Yeah, so we have a mic. We've got a couple right here, hands, the gentleman with the hat on first.

Audience member #1: Okay. My question is, what's the key component of building a team, an HR team?

Cathy: Ooh.

Tony: That's a great question. So, alright. This is the world according to Tony.

Audience member #1: Alright, Tony.

Tony: You ever been to a grocery store? You've gone through the checkout. You bought a box of Wheaties, a gallon of milk and some sugar. So it took you 30 seconds to check out. Do you ever do that and not like the checker? That's how you build your team. You get on the phone with people, you don't like them in 30 seconds, get off the phone. If you don't want to work with them, don't work with them.

Audience member #1: How do you identify that?

Tony: We all know who we like and who we don't. You have people talking about themselves, you'll learn everything you need to know about them.

Audience member #1: That's facts. Thank you.

Cathy: I take a little bit more disciplined approach.

Tony: Yeah, but my team is better than your team.

Cathy: At TriNet. And, for me, I think first of all you gotta be self-aware as to where you're good and where you're not. And then build the team around you that helps you be better.

Tony: Oh, a hundred percent. You've got to vet the skills.

Cathy: Yeah, you've got to vet the skills.

Tony: But you don't bring someone in who's going to be disruptive to the rest of the team just because they can do X.

Cathy: Oh, of course. For me, personally, humility is key. I just like someone who is a consummate learner and admits I don't know everything. I always say to my team, "I'm smarter tomorrow than I am today." And they laugh at that phrase. But it's sort of my way of acknowledging and allowing them to acknowledge that I don't have all the answers. You don't have all the answers. We just gotta figure it out together. And if you have that attitude, that mindset, we talked about mindsets, then we're gonna get through this together. Right?

You have to have a baseline of competence, obviously. But to me, the attitudinal things or the attributes are, in this day and age, a little bit more important than the competence. Because, we've been doing some really interesting stuff, actually, if I could just take two seconds, at TriNet to look at, kind of shifting our mental model for how we're bringing folks in. Because if you have years and years of background and experience in X, that works for you if the context in which you're going to be doing it is the same. But didn't we just admit we have all experienced changes? The contexts, they're very different.

So they require us to be more learning agile than ever before. So even though you might have 15 years experience in X, if you don't know how to learn, and you don't know how to take that experience and position it in a different context, you won't be successful. So for me, I kind of really pull that lever on potential and learning agility a little bit harder when I'm interviewing someone than I do on the, "Well I did this, well I did that, well I did this," which is sort of, as, you know, we were trained years ago to do as interviewers, right, as the behavioral interview, as they say.

Tony: Tell me about a time.

Cathy:
Yeah, tell me about a time, or, I mean, I always love to hear that question. So, you know, the thing about it is like really kind of pull that lever on sort of the potential side, I think, a little bit more.

Tony: You've got to be ready, and we're going deep into a rabbit hole now.

Cathy: Yeah.

Tony: You've got to be ready. You hire those people with potential who want to grow, want to learn, they're hungry.

Cathy: The mindset and the attitude stuff.

Tony: You've got to keep them engaged.

Cathy: You do. You do.

Tony: That's a lot of work.

Cathy: Because they're good people. Mm hmm. And other people are going to want good people. Right? Yeah. So we have another question, I think. Yeah. Right here in the front, Danielle.

Danielle: Well, you have good eyesight.

Cathy: Well, you're close.

Danielle: Hi, I'm Danielle Farage, like Garage with an F. If anyone is on LinkedIn, I'm pretty active there. So my question is around the multi-generational workforce. I talk a lot about Gen Z in the context of work. So I'm curious, how are you navigating change, of who's actually walking in the door and adapting, you know, to either fit, you know, what they want, or to find a way to meet in the middle, kind of, how are you navigating that?

Tony: Yeah, it's kind of a meeting in the middle, right, because you've got so many different generations in the workplace, and you've got to make everybody as happy as you can. You're never going to make everybody happy all the time, and so you look for the common denominator, and you just shoot for that medium. And be ready to get it wrong and re roll it out.

Cathy: Yeah, so, I'll add to that. So, for us at TriNet, we look at culture add, not culture fit. Which is a nuance, but behind that nuance is really saying, what are you going to bring different? What are you going to bring that's going to add more? We don't want to just indoctrinate you into our way of things. Although we have core values and we have standards and expectations, it's more about, you know, what can you bring to the table? And we don't care what generation you're from. We just want you to add value to the table.

So, you know, we don't really look at it from that generational perspective. I mean, we use eightfold, we blind resumes, we do a lot of things to drive the diversity of and representation of all kinds into the organization. But at the end of the day, it's about what can you personally bring.

Other questions? I saw some other hands. Yes, we have one right here. Thank you.

Audience member #2: Hi. My question is, how do you get buy in from the senior executives? Because sometimes they're resistant to change. So any tips that you have?

Cathy: Yeah.

Tony: They're very resistant to change, especially if it's going to cost money, and it always costs money. It comes down to your sales pitch. It really does. This is what it's going to cost you now. Here's what it's going to do for you next week. Here's, yeah, this is your ROI.

Cathy: Yeah.

Tony: I'll get you your money back in 18 months, everything after that is gravy.

Cathy: Yeah.

Tony: And you go get it. They always want you to go beat up on a benefits broker. Give me a million bucks right now. Sometimes you can do it. Not usually. Most things are going to cost us money. So, a lot of people call HR a cost center. I'll push back on that. We're not a cost center. We're a cost avoidance center.

Cathy: Mmm.

Tony: Right?

Cathy: Yep.

Tony: So, the sales people are out there generating revenue. The people are in the factories and the warehouse building the product that generates revenue. We're in place to build, help you build a company to let you keep that money. We don't want to pay it out in lawsuits. We don't want to pay it out in fines. We don't want to be non-compliant. And so, once you've demonstrated that, the selling of, we really need this, becomes a lot easier.

Cathy: Yeah, I think too. Don't know if many of you saw Ryan Reynolds yesterday, but I think back to something he talked about about being a storyteller and he talked about as he was building all these businesses. He's got the folks that do all the data analytics and they kind of put that in front of someone right to say, "Here's the reasons why. Here's what the data shows we need." But then I think he comes in with the narrative, and that goes to the salesperson mindset around, sort of that, you got to engage the heart and the head, right, and acknowledge both pieces to making decisions. And behavioral scientists that, you know, look at like behavioral economics and the way people make decisions, they actually make decisions much more from their heart, than they do their head. They will tell you they make the decisions with their head, but all the studies show, that they actually make it so much more with their heart, more the emotional side. So if you come in with just like, "Oh, here's all the data and like all the Gantt charts or whatever," but you miss that piece, which is really connecting the why, you'll probably miss the influencing, convincing factor that you'll need with your executives.

Tony: To add to that, with people making decisions from the heart, when you get the okay, run. Yes.

Cathy: Do not sell past yes. You've heard this, right?

Tony: The head will catch up.

Cathy: That's right. Yeah. So go activate. Go activate. A hundred percent. I totally agree with that. All right. So we have time for one more, quick question. Okay. Go ahead. And then we're going to have to wrap because we want to get you to your next session.

Audience member #3: Thank you so much. This has been amazing. So when you're talking about productivity, retention and scaling and you bringing in all these new people. And of course everybody has different personalities. Support is incredibly important and safety is everything. People make their decisions and how all behavior is based on whether or not you feel safe.

Cathy: Yeah.

Audience member #3: So now you've got all these different people coming in and they're out in the environment, you know, for at least two thirds of the time that they're not with you and they can't change immediately, typically. So as you're scaling, with the speed of scaling we were talking about where you quadrupled it, how can you ensure or what are your strategies for creating a supportive, an environment for improving their comfort and therefore, their performance, and in a way that allows for retention?

Cathy: It's feedback loops, it's, right?

Tony: It is, it's listening. Yeah, listening.

Cathy: We have a whole listening tour strategy that we do.

Tony: Yeah, absolutely.

Cathy: Opening up those channels.

Tony: Being available.

Cathy: Yeah. Opening up those channels so that, and I think because you were saying even to course correct, right? So, you need that feedback. You need to know how it's going, right, wrong, or indifferent, through the change 100%.

So I see we're at time. I was told to remind you all to rate the session. I don't know how they rate it, but maybe it's on your card. It's on that. Okay. Beautiful. And I hope you rated a five because we think you're fabulous and we hope you thought you we were fabulous. But listen, we'll be around later to answer any additional questions we didn't get to, but thank you so much for being a great audience and participating with us today.