Are you interested in learning what areas you can focus on to improve your organization? Listening to your people will certainly will help. In this episode of The People Purpose Podcast, Chas and Julie discuss different tools and resources you can use to gain insights from your employees. Plus, find out how many people would be willing to exercise at work if their organization provided a gym.
Are you interested in learning what areas you can focus on to improve your organization? Listening to your people will certainly will help. In this episode of The People Purpose Podcast, Chas and Julie discuss different tools and resources you can use to gain insights from your employees. Plus, find out how many people would be willing to exercise at work if their organization provided a gym.
Hey y'all, welcome to the people. This podcast, the show that explores all of the ins and outs, challenges and opportunities, HR people, managers and all people. work every day. Y'all. We got a good one. Today I am with my dear friend, co host and Julie, we're together. Yeah, extraordinaire. I don't know there was a really bad adjective. Where are we? Hi,
Julie Develin:hi. Yeah, we are in UKG has two headquarters. And well, yeah, lots of different offices, but our main headquarters in western Florida, and one in Lowell, Massachusetts. Yep. So we are in the western area. But specifically, we are in Fort Lauderdale. We are at together at Hotel, which generally we you know, are together at hotels a lot. That sounds really bad. But let's continue. No, no, you can edit though, because that's funny. Yeah. Anyway,
Chas Fields:there are times that we travel and are in a place where we stay at the same hotel. How about that?
Julie Develin:That is that is. That is that is the way that is the way. I'm, you know, the one thing I like I love is laughing with you. Um, so, Chas, I want you to tell me something, besides the
Chas Fields:fact that I'm so hilarious. Okay, so this is gonna be a funny one, it's late in the day. For me anyways, we are together, which is always, which is always a blessing. But you know, we're doing we're planning. We're planning a lot. We're playing, we're in the season of planning. For us, the podcast, the market, all of this stuff that you do. And, you know, Jenny, who I think we mentioned on the last time we recorded or maybe it's an episode after this, you know, tasked us to do this best friend workplace best friends, which by the way, if I missed out on this the other day, I'm not going to share it. But the best friend in the workplace thing and the something good is I really enjoy working with you. Also, I wish they had a camera on us for one more planning these episodes. Because there is so much content there that it's just like, we laugh a lot. Yeah, it's like and then sometimes we get at each other. But I actually genuinely enjoy that because we come from different backgrounds, different experiences, and and I learned a lot and I hopefully it's the same for you. But hey, Jules, I love you. That's good. Yeah, it's always me something
Julie Develin:Well, that's great. And all but my something good is no, that's very kind. You know, it was this past weekend, I was watching the Little League World Series.
Chas Fields:I have you watched it? Oh, yeah, sure.
Julie Develin:You know, if for those of you who listen to the podcast for a while, or I don't know, ever, you know how much of a baseball fan I am. And this year, the Phillies played the Nationals at in Williams port at the Little League World Series. And it was just it, you know, with all the commercialization of sports and all that sometimes it's great just to get back to the roots, and the love of the game. And I was able to get a feel for that. And I was able to see the players be that way too, if that makes sense. Yeah,
Chas Fields:it's really cool. Because then what ESPN does is they show some of the players who may have played in the Little League World Series. Yeah, now our big leaguers
Julie Develin:are literally at all like a lot of those a lot of those players never made it that far. It's a big deal to make it to the Little League World Series. There's do you think of how many 1000s of Little League teams there are? There's only 20 teams that make it and only I think 10 Maybe us teams? Yeah, there's there's a there's a whole international division to Long story short, if you haven't seen the Little League World Series, it's every August it's a great it's a great time. These kids are super talented, and
Chas Fields:it's special for them in special. Yeah.
Julie Develin:So just like your heart was warmed, my heart was warmed my cold cold heart was warm. Um, so let's do a business out of it. What do you think? I think so. Yeah. All right. So I found a good one. And I wanted to share this with you, because I think you're gonna you're gonna like it because this kind of goes to, I think something that you like, which is 77% of individuals said they would exercise if the workplace had a gym and that was buy treadmill reviews now I bet treadmill reviews is a little biased. But but you know, when we're talking about corporate wellness, we're talking about exercise and how folks are really focusing on mental health. Yeah, I think that goes hand in hand. 77% If the workplace had a gym,
Chas Fields:yeah, first thought I would tell you, I think if I ever had to go to an office, like I know, our offices have them. So prereq was it are automatically a win for me? Yeah, you know what I mean? It's, it's the little things, you know, and I'm not here to brag on the corporate workplaces that I've been. But the cool part about it is like, there are some, you know, and we have an office in Manhattan has a yoga room, which is really cool. You know, both offices here have treadmill desks. I think Lauren Weston.
Julie Develin:Yeah, Lowell has a gym that we share with folks in the building. lol is actually the reason that I bought a subscription to an exercise bike. Good for you. Yes. That's cool. Because I was able to ride it there. Yeah. So
Chas Fields:it doesn't surprise me. But I think about when we when we talk holistically, well being in this actually transition back to you is we had someone at the conference, we were out last week. How do we how do you get our energy? Right? Like, literally she asked that? How do we get your energy from A to B? So when Julia and I present together, we fired up? I mean, let's call it what it is. We have a lot of energy. And one of our responses. My response was, hey, diet, sleep, and exercise.
Julie Develin:Right? And that's one way to look at it. Right? Yeah. But my response to that question is, where's your how do we get your energy? I said, when you love what you do, yeah, it makes it easy to have energy. That's true. And you know, a lot of the feedback that I get from speeches, folks say, Well, you know, I can tell that you love what you do. And that's that's like, fantastic feedback. But you're you're right, also, where it is, you know, that diet and exercise. And all of that does help. And we're certainly not here to preach. Yeah, when
Chas Fields:you hear when you say treadmill reviews, I reviews, I actually don't own a treadmill. So no, I'm a bike and row person. Well, just
Julie Develin:just just so you're aware, a little bit more from that study. 50% of employees who don't exercise are more likely to have poor productivity than those that do. Now, that shouldn't be surprising, either. Because we know there are studies that show that exercise gives you more energy.
Chas Fields:That's right, and natural endorphins. And there's all kinds of things that you can do to do that, you know, Julie, I don't drink a lot of coffee. I don't know if you know that. We drink a lot of coffee only in certain scenarios in certain circumstances. And, and I know you bring it to when when it's like you get fired up to go on stage or whatever it is. But I also know that you work out regularly and we do all the things that we I mean, when you travel as much as we do we have to sustain ourselves somehow, some way. Yeah. Right. Like, and just diet, sleep exercise keeps us from getting sick, like just very little things. So anyways, now why we're here, Julie, why are we here?
Julie Develin:Well, we're here to talk about something that you and I had the opportunity to partake in last week, when we're at an HR conference in Nebraska, HR, Nebraska to be to be specific. Yep. And let's just let's get give a shout out to the Nebraska HR folks, fantastic HR people. Not that all of the states aren't great. And the world HR people are great, but all of you Yeah, every every year we have the good fortune of going and speaking to the folks in this year, it was in love this stuff, which is a suburb of Omaha
Chas Fields:cultural series.
Julie Develin:Yes. Yes. And it's just a great crowd. They're really, really good to us. Yep. And we love speaking to them.
Chas Fields:Yeah, it was really special. So we actually got to host the first pre conference workshop. And what was cool about that is not only have we gotten to know these people over the last several years, right? So seeing some similar faces, things and new faces and really all outright support. The conference host came up to us and said, Hey, would you be willing to do a pre conference workshop? And we dove in or like, we wanted to do it? And we actually have this tool, so we'll just kind of dive in. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah. So what's interesting about this tool is that our team the ACM advisory group, a part of human insights here UKG, developed a proprietary tool that we call HCM 360. Now, it's in 360, human capital management for those of you don't know what that is, Google it, you're gonna get 40 different ways of doing it, but we focus it on the five pillars of the business that we do and the people that we serve, right. And what was so interesting about this in the live workshop we had about 200 and some odd People in the workshop.
Julie Develin:And thank you for coming, thank you.
Chas Fields:And we decided to do the lite version. So there's a lite version and a full version free, we'll put the link in the description notes for you. There's a lite version and a full version. But what it does is it takes your opinion, your sentiment, and spits out a score for you about where you stand within your organization and what your people say about your organization in
Julie Develin:terms of how you're doing in HR, how you're doing.
Chas Fields:How you're doing in workforce, right, how are you doing in a multitude of different areas of business now,
Julie Develin:based on though, based on how important is so how important it is to the company? Correct versus where you believe the company is right now.
Chas Fields:And that's a critical note to make. Because I myself might think something is super important. Right, right. My employees, you know, let's say me as a people, my employees, I'm like, Man, this is really important to Julian topic, one. And my employees are like, What's he talking about? Right? What's he talking about? So, from an HR Payroll, and the people who take this quiz, which by the way, anybody can take it, you get a full perspective on Oh, wow, there's a major disconnect here, or we're pretty good at Right, right. So what I wanted to talk about within this is within that tool, you kind of get a one to five, if you will, one to five score, it's addressed directly to you. And it talks about pressing needs, you know, do you have low to medium trust, where's your interaction engagement with your people process improvement, it's a free tool, you can check it out, helps you identify some gaps within your organization, and really, areas of control. Now, the cool part about it is it spits out your results instantly, which shout out to Teresa Smith, who has helped develop this thing on the back end with with our people. Yes, she's our manager, by the way. We mentioned that Yes. And what we wanted to do today is go through some of the overarching results, if you will, of the people that took it, we're not going to share any information or anything about their company, their business or who they collect that information. Yeah, we don't collect that information. And then I want to talk about Julie, if you remember some of the themes that we drew out from that. Yeah. So real quick within the tool. If you are a high performer, there are actually some key things that if you're a high performer, and you believe that what you say is important, and what your people say is important. You're what we like to call them model behavior, right? What's interesting about that, is I unless there was more than one HR professional in the room and had their team member in there, I don't know how they would know if there's model behavior. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah,
Julie Develin:I think that it's this is more effective when several people say, Yeah, and I think I could see this tool being used by HR teams to determine sentiment in terms of, again, the tool is very simple. It's where it's the the three pillars of HCM? And where are you in terms of importance to the organization versus actual state of the organization? And then if it spits out low, medium, or high, based upon your answers, yeah. And what it could do by taking this little quiz, I guess, it could help your HR team to determine what areas you should focus on. And you also might find that again, you know, you said it, what you think is great, may not be great to someone else.
Chas Fields:That's what's so interesting, because it is a free tool. And we're not here to tout the tool. But what we learned through this process is there are still companies that really struggle on the medium to low end.
Julie Develin:Yeah. And let's just say it doesn't matter how mature that's a big gas, or how mature a company is, yeah, all companies struggle.
Chas Fields:Yeah. And from this conference, what we learned is with those individuals that were taking this quiz is that there still is a disconnect kind of referencing back to our state of HR changing the conversation, looking back at what our very first episode, it was kind of the same sentiment from the results from this where people came up to us and we're like, hey, we still want to know more about this, or the conversations, which we're going to talk about here in just a second. That, you know, we still think that all of these things are important. We just don't know how to address them. So I think we dive in number one, go use the tool if you want to. I'll put it in the description. But what was the first theme that we pulled? Yeah,
Julie Develin:so we looked at the results, and we have what we call themes. And the first theme that that I saw that I thought was important was workplace motivation. But more specifically, more specifically A structured versus unstructured work. So just what does that mean? Structured versus unstructured work can mean a lot of different things. But my understanding is structured work is work, that's nine to five and, or whatever, 8247, whatever, within a structured amount of hours, but you know what you're going to be doing within those hours. So you know that you're going to be working within those hours. And then when you're not, in those hours, you're not going to be working,
Chas Fields:here's the task that you're assigned, here's the tasks you need to complete. If it doesn't get done, it moves on to the next day, or the next person, exactly whatever it is, you know, what this kind of reminds me of is, this is also a different take on structured versus unstructured, you know, kind of the hybrid thing, right? We felt we can master hybrid by now. Have you met a company? That's No, no, no, we actually asked
Julie Develin:that in the audience. We did. And there's so yeah, yeah, there's, there's so many nuances with hybrid with hybrid work, and so much of the hybrid, you know, return to Office debate is individual, you know, based on individual circumstances. So, we're not going to we're not going to go there. But, you know, the, when it comes to structured versus unstructured work, this was a theme that came out in terms of motivation. So if I have some employees who are structured, and I have some employees who are unstructured, how do I ensure that both of them have a good experience?
Chas Fields:It's a difficult battle. And the reason is, it kind of goes back to the expectation thing, but what we're learning in fact, I actually talked to a gal afterwards, she she brought this up, and she was like, hey, look, they see what that person has. Yep. And it goes back to the expectation thing. If I signed up for a structured environment, right, like, I'm in my box, or whatever it is, and I signed up for this structured environment, I do really well at that. But life happens, things happen, or manager changes, whatever. And now, all of the sudden, I haven't had a good conversation with my manager, for whatever reason. And I see, Julie kind of gets to do what she wants. Right?
Julie Develin:Yeah, but but that opens up a whole other conversation about well, you know, when you have workers who are structured and workers who are unstructured, the structure workers see what's going on, but they only see what's on the surface, they don't see everything else, in terms of the amount of work that the unstructured worker may be putting in, they don't see the amount of time maybe they're away from their family, on hours that they're working. You know, it looks glamorous from the outside, but it's not.
Chas Fields:Right. It's like, Wait, how much did she work last week? 60 hours? Like, No, I only saw in the office for however many or whatever it is? No, but what you don't see is that, no, I'm
Julie Develin:gonna I'm gonna take this another way. Okay, and say, the unstructured worker may look at the structured worker and say, no, they may look at the structure worker and say, you know, you're not even working that hard.
Chas Fields:Right, right. So easy for you, because you just show up here, it's handed to you. And it's you do what you have to?
Julie Develin:It's like, Yeah, I know. I know. It is good. Thank you. Yes.
Chas Fields:That's an interesting thing. Because it's almost as though and again, we're speculating here. But the structure piece is almost it's too easy for you, because it's everything, for lack of a better term is handed to you. And you know, the journey you have to
Julie Develin:write also, also, with the structured work, I think there's more of a delineation between when you're working and when you're not in terms of being able to turn off. Yeah, especially if that employee is not an exempt employee. It's good point, I would, I would say that a lot of unstructured workers probably are exempt. Because they, you know, don't want, they don't want the overtime, and a company wouldn't want them to have overtime, et cetera. So
Chas Fields:you brought up a really good point there, I think, where where we look at structured versus unstructured. And not just from a non exempt or exempt perspective, this is what HR has to figure out like this is, you know, and what it means is, we have to be really, really intentional with keeping in touch with our employees. And understanding that again, going back to the manager conversation that if our manager see change, right, like if you see a problem, we need to address it, but even just in common behavior, and I don't know that we're training managers well enough to
Julie Develin:Well, again, we talked about this so often with the manager training and and how manage it how it just because you're an employee doesn't mean you're a good manager and you can't just throw people into management and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's a whole conversation. I'd love to do an episode on it sometime. But I want to go to another point, you know, the unstructured versus structured work, I think is, is definitely something to consider and something that was on top. That's something that was top of mind for some folks that we found. So something else that we had a conversation about, is it someone said, well, help me help me determine how do I know what to anticipate? in HR?
Chas Fields:I, this is all you this one's all? Yeah. What's your anticipate?
Julie Develin:Well anticipate that you can't anticipate anything, I mean, that maybe that sounds cliche, but if you think about our profession, think about HR, you know, recruiting payroll, whatever, no matter what we're doing, it involves people and people are always going to shift people's expectations are going to shift people's behavior is going to change based on circumstances. I think the best way too antsy to, you know, learn how to anticipate things in HR, or, you know, figure out what it is that's coming up in HR is just by being proactive by utilizing data and utilizing technology to give you that forecast into the future, or as best as best you can. But, you know, when we talk about learning to anticipate, we have to become comfortable with not knowing, and I haven't always been good at that. I wasn't good at that at the beginning of my HR career. Not at all. I wasn't you get out? No, no, I'm not good at it now. I, I'm good. I can podcast that's very good. Um, no, I, I like, you know, as people we want to have control. But you know, give me an example. Open enrollment, okay. Yep. Open Enrollment. Actually, I want people I give them that this is back in the day before Tech, I give them the form, I want them to fill out the form, then give it back to me when it's due. Because that makes because then it's I can control that. Right. I want to control I want to control them. But but people are not a perfect science. And low and behold, every single open enrollment, I would get the forms back way, way late, even if I prompted folks. Yeah.
Chas Fields:Your stress level went up because someone else did.
Julie Develin:Exactly. So. So here's about the learning to anticipate. So what I did, back before we use tech to do this, this is I'm talking a long time ago. What I did was I would tell them, I needed the form back a full week prior to needing the form back. Yeah. And then it gives me some
Chas Fields:some of you get more back than what you anticipated. And there's always going to be the lag, right? There's just Oh, I forgot or
Julie Develin:right. And you would think that something as important as you know, health insurance was. But actually, you know, it's funny, we say that to some people. It's not right. It's important, like, um, so yeah, so anyway, so learning what to anticipate, is it we have to make sure that we're recognizing that we can only control so many things. And what we can control is having a system that shows us the data.
Chas Fields:I think I think in addition to that is learning the perpetuated behavior your employees exhibit, right like that they exemplify and the reason I say that is, you know, what your employees were going to turn.
Julie Develin:I could actually think of them now. So
Chas Fields:that's a data point,
Julie Develin:like 1516 years later, but
Chas Fields:that's a data point, right? Like, that's a data point. So I agree with you on the data point. But it's also leaning into the fact that, number one, I love that you said that you're not going to know everything. You just can't, you just can't and there's going to be a sense of comfort now, can you find a sense of comfort in the fact that you can't control it? Or can you find a sense of discomfort and trying to control it? Does that make sense? No. No, because
Julie Develin:what makes sense to me that can you find a sense of comfort? What
Chas Fields:can you find a sense of comfort, knowing you can't control it? Oh, I see. See what I'm saying? Yes. Like that's, that's I think so what you're saying so, like, you can't anticipate you can't anticipate, like, what are
Julie Develin:people being uncomfortable? Yes, I agree with and it's becoming comfortable not having control over everything. Sure. And having some of the consequences fall on you?
Chas Fields:We actually that's a good one. We actually talked about this at the workshop, and I know we're gonna go over 30 minutes today. You actually talked about this at every conference workshop where society has set us up in some way to fail with this because of our overconsumption getting things delivered on time having our groceries delivered, you know, all of the things that make our lives speedier, yeah, like, keep us going. But in the same token, if I if I've got to take a step back and realize not all of life, not all of the People, not all of the world operate under that function, then I have to be willing to
Julie Develin:know I learned that when I went to Portugal, right? Oh, that's, I learned that when I went to Portugal slow pace, one of the key Well, I read dinner time there. You were at the restaurant for two and a half hours. And it was
Chas Fields:the last time you sat for two hours at any place.
Julie Develin:Yeah, I mean, I don't know. We we have been conditioned to Yeah, your right to want things immediately.
Chas Fields:Go and get it done. Move on. Yeah, get it going. You know what I mean? So. So bottom line is, I think, you know, obviously, getting comfortable being uncomfortable, right. There's a lot of change in psychological theory around that. And the last one that I wanted to touch on from a theme perspective, is we had several comments on how do we care for employee peace?
Julie Develin:How do we care for Yeah, and store have some iteration of this?
Chas Fields:This is its own episode. Yeah. But here's how I know. Right? We've been writing them down. We've been better about that. Here's what I want to take from that. And my challenge to anyone who's listening is look, we believe in the 8020. Right, there's 80% of your employees who have some sort of common interests into what they expect out of the company. What I would suggest is, let's focus on caring for one, right? We have this idea that, well, if we have this big blanket of whatever it is benefits over time awful, are picked some sort of attribute that company gives to the employee benefit, if you will, and that's going to fix it. And I think that's the wrong mentality. Because if I can focus on creating a memorable, memorable experience for one, and then two, and then three, like we know, medical, dental vision, like those things matter, ya know, that we know that PTO matters. But what probably matters more to the workforce, especially in the conversations we had at HR, Nebraska, is we have a lot of people who aren't being intentional with their people who are just trying to Yeah, not that they weren't. But it's just like, well, we need to have our managers, we got to get better about training our managers to have, Hey, Julie, how's your day going? Right? And then listening and understanding versus, hey, go to your job.
Julie Develin:Some of the some of the frustration that I have about that is how simple it sounds. But in theory, having been in those shoes, sure how complex it actually is. Because, again, I go back to the time thing, we just don't have time in HR. But the question is, do we need to be more intentional about making time to do things like that, because if we become more intentional about making time to do things like training managers on how to have better one on ones, the ultimate goal, or the ultimate outcome of that is that our lives will be easier
Chas Fields:in such a short life. But I think about Yes, every good business sacrifice is something to get better. Right? Doesn't matter what it is, every good business sacrifices something to get better for more profit for more market share for more whatever. It's the same thing with human capital. I have to sacrifice a little bit more of my time. And it's not just I'm not talking just to HR people. I'm talking Yeah,
Julie Develin:yeah. So many of these things are universal, no matter if you're an HR. Like whatever. Right, right. Yeah. So
Chas Fields:that's where I would say, we have this idea that we're going to just cover all employees. And I think we have to change the mindset and say, just start with one or two or three, look, you're going to hit the mark, if you do something as simple as a survey and find out what do you really want out of your benefits. What do you really want out of your policies or procedures, right? That's gonna give you a good baseline. But if I can go beyond that, and we talked about this a little bit in the mentorship episode, golly, a year and a half, two years, that, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be this. You know, Hey, Julie, you're my mentor, and vice versa. It has to be the, hey, last week you emailed me that something was going on? You weren't in office? Let me follow up a week later, put a reminder on my calendar. Say Hey, Julie, I noticed you were at office. You told me that something was going on? Is there anything I can do for you? Right, memorable experience? Wow, that person really cares for me. Maybe that inspires you to go do the same thing.
Julie Develin:People aren't gonna remember what you say. Remember how you made them feel? It's pretty simple. That's my purpose. Well
Chas Fields:okay. Get that tattoo. Let's get that tattooed. I would say my purpose is it's always good to be in person with people. Right not just you. Also the the crowd and the experience like we still learn so much week over week and I had You have to find a job that someone else has that they get to talk to as many people as we do on a regular cadence. And then of course, bringing this back and sitting down and think about, you know, what, how can we help them in a way? Yeah. makes it different.
Julie Develin:Yeah, I like that we are able to, to work to help.
Chas Fields:Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Work. Yeah, you're fired? I know.
Julie Develin:I know. And truthfully, Chas, I'll tell I'll finish with this. You know, when I was in nonprofit at HR, one of the things that I loved about nonprofit HR was working and hiring the people that were helping people. Right. So I love that there's part of that in our role as well. Yeah, I would say not that we have all the answers No.
Chas Fields:Close, I would say just remember from the themes that you heard about, and if you want to learn more about me, maybe what your workplace themes are, number one, there's no magic pill. There's no magic pill. It's constantly moving. And remember that at least from these themes, hopefully you took it away and said, Yeah, that's that's kind of what I'm doing. You're not alone, right? You're not alone.
Julie Develin:You're not alone. So hey, a few reminders for relief. Don't forget to LIKE subscribe, use the hashtag people purpose pod on social media. Be sure to check out the latest blogs and research from the UK G workforce Institute at workforce institute.org More research is coming to more research is coming and that's also is that where they can no we'll put a link to the HCM three six on workforce since it is okay.
Chas Fields:Yeah, versions. There's a light in the fall, right. Reach out to us if you want to do a full I think is what we need to do.
Julie Develin:Yeah, yeah, yep. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for listening y'all. Cheers. Bye bye.