Adam Horne, co-founder of Open Org is on a mission: to build a more trusted, transparent world of work.
So, we wanted to get him on the pod to talk about how in the hell do you do that? Turns out, it's not only doable (let's start with employees having ZERO surprises around biggies like compensation, benefits, etc), but, when done authentically - can improve (like majorly improve) hiring, retention and overall health of an organization.
Our conversation covers aligning internal and external transparency, the costs of cultural mismatches and the unintentional humor (or not) of hiring managers who promise more than they deliver. Most importantly, this episode is loaded with practical advice for creating genuine, transparent work environments. Specifically, you'll learn:
Listen as we pick Adam's brain on the whole tapestry of trust within companies and walk away with a blueprint for embedding transparency in your organizational DNA.
References:
Learn more about OpenOrg here. In this episode, Adam referenced several free, open resources for organizations, managers and job seekers - check them out here.
Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.
Thanks for listening!
Hey! We love new friends! Connect with us!
Adam Horne, co-founder of Open Org is on a mission: to build a more trusted, transparent world of work.
So, we wanted to get him on the pod to talk about how in the hell do you do that? Turns out, it's not only doable (let's start with employees having ZERO surprises around biggies like compensation, benefits, etc), but, when done authentically - can improve (like majorly improve) hiring, retention and overall health of an organization.
Our conversation covers aligning internal and external transparency, the costs of cultural mismatches and the unintentional humor (or not) of hiring managers who promise more than they deliver. Most importantly, this episode is loaded with practical advice for creating genuine, transparent work environments. Specifically, you'll learn:
Listen as we pick Adam's brain on the whole tapestry of trust within companies and walk away with a blueprint for embedding transparency in your organizational DNA.
References:
Learn more about OpenOrg here. In this episode, Adam referenced several free, open resources for organizations, managers and job seekers - check them out here.
Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.
Thanks for listening!
Hey! We love new friends! Connect with us!
So we're of the view that there needs to be some sort of level of openness and transparency to call yourself transparent to a degree, and we provide that level of structure, but we don't necessarily prescribe where that transparency should be and necessarily how deep that should go. So the way that I try and talk about it with companies is work on defining it for yourself first. What does that look like? And that for me, starts of understanding, like why is this word important? If you're putting on your career site or your job ads or just putting it out there, there's got to be a reason why you're saying it, and if there's not, it's just an empty word.
Speaker 2:Mel, good Monday to you. Good Monday to you, yes. Yes, I'm going to start saying that. It just feels like a thing, it feels like it could be a thing Feels like Shakespeare Good morrow is good morrow thing, I don't know.
Speaker 3:I'm making that up.
Speaker 2:Good morrow is a thing, that's a thing.
Speaker 3:Good morrow Good morrow to you.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm stoked to talk about Adam Horn. Adam Horn is the co-founder of OpenOrg, and what I love about the work OpenOrg is doing is they're on a pretty cool mission to rebuild trust by bringing clarity to the world of work, and they're doing that by making sure that people have zero surprises at work, like when you're interviewing for a job. They want you to have zero surprises around things like comp, culture, benefits and career development, and Mel and I were really taken with what they're doing and we had a chance to talk to him. And Mel, what did you think of that conversation?
Speaker 3:I thought it was refreshing. It was really eye-opening to hear the perspective from Adam and his experiences working with organizations and truly the benefits of transparency, which feels like a no-duh situation, but not a lot of orgs are doing it, so I'm just really excited by this work.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The other thing I really liked, too, was his twist on this. This is not open Oregon Adam dictating what transparency needs to look like they're really working with organizations to say, hey, what is authentic, what works for them, what works for you? Yeah, it's a really cool way of thinking about the zero surprise game for employees and whether they're coming into a company or whether they're in a company as well.
Speaker 3:And the bottom line for your business.
Speaker 2:A thousand percent Packed within this discussion are things that organizations can do, what individuals can do and what can you do if you're leading a team and you want to be more transparent, even if your organization might not be. So here's our conversation with Adam Horne. Adam Horne, welcome to the pod. Thank you for being here.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for having me on. It's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, adam, you've had a really interesting career, right. You've started multiple organizations. Now you're pulling into OpenOrg. You're a new father as well too, so you've got like a lot going on, probably trying to get some sleep here and there. Just super curious as to how did you even get into this work? How did you get to where you are today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I gave up on sleep a long time ago.
Speaker 1:It's like this way, my latest uh child is my third and I've got three under six now and I've navigated the, the three kids and businesses etc over the the period of having COVID and stuff going on as well. So yeah, it's been interesting the last sort of four or five years, to be honest. But yeah, my, my career as a whole over the last sort of 12, 13 years is is all centered around people and talent. So nine of those 12 years as a founder or co-founder myself as well. So I've navigated the complexities and challenges of being a founder and trying to build and run a business, always bootstrapped, always anywhere between sort of five employees up to 70, 80 employees so that size but challenging in its own way but also a lot of that time actively working with clients externally on their hiring and their people strategy. So over that time I've had a lot of exposure to working with startups or scale-ups all over the world hundreds of them over the years and have, from a hiring perspective in particular, I've seen a very clear difference in terms of how companies benefit from being transparent or not. I've worked with some really open, transparent companies and you just tell when you walk through the door and you settle in that this is a very open, transparent environment. I've got resources, information landing on my lap and your job becomes very easy, regardless of what you're doing, but particularly when you are in that role where you're dealing with bringing new people into the business, being able to offer clarity and depth to candidates and applicants before they join, you see the benefit of that when they walk through the door it's really clear and things like attrition, retention, all of those sort of key metrics that businesses look at to try and point them towards some level of organizational health, feel really clear, really nice.
Speaker 1:I've also had the benefit on the flip side, of working with companies that are incredibly secretive, some by design but some just through pure chaos and uncertainty and lack of communication. But as an example, I've been parachuted into businesses before where I've been told I'm not allowed to know what funding round we've just done because it's a bit secretive. So if candidates ask an interview, just tell them. You can't let them know. And I've been given about 10 different values from different employees who don't really know what values the business has.
Speaker 1:So that end of the spectrum effectively in terms of the way businesses operate and you can still hire, you can still get people through the door, but I've seen what happens after people join and then, generally speaking, you've got that sort of revolving door type situation in those types of business and you see the struggles and the cost and the time it's been trying to just maintain headcount, let alone grow. So over that time I've had a really clear view on what transparent culture looks like and what that benefit is from being more transparent, and I've been lucky enough, whilst running my own businesses alongside that, to be able to pull that experience into how I build my own companies as well, and I've always defaulted to my own level of transparent, my own level of open, and it's worked incredibly well for me. So that, as a bit bit of a backstory, is where I come to today as regards to launching OpenOrg.
Speaker 2:We want to talk about OpenOrg because we've seen this conversation about how transparent organizations are evolved, especially, I feel like, over the last and I could be wrong on the numbers, but it feels like especially over the last four years. Five years. Is you need to put this information out there or this is now the expectation? So I'm loving these conversations around now. Transparency is the expectation from a marketplace perspective. So, Adam, what does OpenOrg do?
Speaker 1:The way we come in to it really is. I co-founded OpenOrg with an old friend of mine and we've known each other for 12 years, so we've had this talk track for 12 years, even about the world of work and culture and how it's broken and one day we'll fix it. And we've talked I don't want to name names, but talked about the damage that toxic review sites do to employers and to applicants and so on and so forth and how one day we'll find a new way to rebuild trust in terms of that intersection between you know, applying to a role and starting in the right type of business for you. So that's where a lot of the conversation about open org has come up and that's exactly where we sit. We want to get to the point with open org where we can help companies not just become internally transparent with their employees.
Speaker 1:That's a really good, healthy place to be, but it only does so much for us. You've got to mirror as much of that as possible externally. There's some things you maybe aren't comfortable doing and that's fine as a limit, but there's no benefit just to being internally transparent For us. There's huge benefits to opening that door a little bit more and showing people under the bonnet, showing people exactly what they're going to be getting when they come in, because without that, people are coming into your business with the wrong expectations. Without that, people are coming into your business with the wrong expectations. So Open Org operates exactly that intersection of employer brand hiring and both internal and external transparency and trying to help employers get more aligned across that spectrum to build healthier alignment across that entire employee journey.
Speaker 2:It's interesting when you look at why you should really think about transparency as an organization. I'd like to take it from the employee side a little bit more and also from the organization side, because one of the things you talk about is really to have employees have zero, zero surprises. When you start a new job and I personally felt that I think we all have right where you thought you were getting into a gig, you thought it was one thing, and then into it you're like, oh hell, this is this is not this at all. You talked about this a little bit earlier, but I'm wondering if you can walk us through what the benefits are to have zero surprises as an employee so much across that entire life cycle.
Speaker 1:If you look at some of the sort of stats and the research out there around people leaving new hires leaving roles within the first 90 days or so, I think there's a stat out there and I take them with a pinch of salt because you hear different things and different things, but there's so much research on this ultimately around how many people leave roles. I think it's something like 30% of new hires leave roles within 90 days. Such a waste of time for everyone. Such a waste of time for everyone the money you spend interviewing, hiring, the time you spend in the salaries for paying all of that stuff to get into that. It's such a waste of time for everyone involved. And then you have to start again to rehire all because and most of those people leaving site misalignment on cultural role as one of the big reasons for them leaving. And then there's other studies out there that link to that.
Speaker 1:Four in ten hiring managers have admitted to lying to candidates about a role or a culture or how business operates. So lying yeah, they actually these are the hiring managers actually admit to lying about this and this is like a resume builder survey study that you can go out there and find online. That's just the people who admit to it. It there's probably more over and above that who haven't admitted to it, but again, just at that interview stage, in terms of attracting talent, attracting candidates, there's a whole lot of problems going on there. So there's a time factor that is being wasted here. There's cost, there's money. There's also well-being and mental health involved here, particularly for the candidates and the employees, but also for the hiring managers, and my co-founder, john, has had this himself as a hiring manager in a larger corporate business, hiring people knowing that he's selling the wrong version of what people are going to get. But he's in this corporate environment where he's just feeling like he has to hire and grow and his own well-being and mental health took real damage because of that, which led to him leaving because of that situation too.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of reasons why transparency really is important in building trust at that early stage. But then, when you look inside the business internally, day to day, there's so many things that point to the benefits of of being transparent and opening, communicative with individuals when it comes. But once they're in, the benefit of being transparent and communicative with your employees is really important as well when you're thinking about to use layman terms like getting everyone aligned and on the same page. That's a lot of what ceos talk about wanting to get and wanting to see. That's all about communication and getting people aligned and understanding where are we going, what are we doing, and that can boil down to so many different things internally in terms of what transparency does look like, and that will differ for different people, but the benefits are there when it comes to productivity, performance, profitability. The research is out there.
Speaker 2:What do you think really drives organizations to not be transparent, because we see this so much, especially as you get in these big behemoth organizations. There are some that do this, okay, but I would argue that most of for us, the fortune 500, I don't know if they do this really well. What is holding organizations back from being transparent?
Speaker 1:Lots of different factors that could be founder mentality. Obviously that's probably more prevalent in smaller businesses. But if you have a more traditional CEO founder who doesn't believe in seeing employees is that they're equal ultimately and understanding the power of employee could bring when you think about things like co-creation and just communication, they see them as workers rather than, again, equals. That creates silos immediately in how companies are structured and how hierarchies work and those silos immediately cause problems with communication and what's shared and what's not shared. So there's a founder ce leadership mentality, mindset thing that is really common and we see that so much with the people leaders we speak to.
Speaker 1:There are some instances where companies in fairness are operating in certain industries or environments where they can't share certain information and that's completely fair. But I think what I see happen there is, if they're operating in this sort of environment or industry where it's a little bit more secretive or confidential, that stops them being transparent in ways that they still could be. They suddenly put the shutters down and they use it almost as an excuse to say we can't share this, so it means we can't share anything else. We try and find ways of showing them actually there's still some really relevant information you can still share.
Speaker 1:That's safe and okay, but the default to being closed and secretive because of that and I guess the other one probably is some companies that have just grown either very quickly or very slowly over time, with a certain mindset, with a certain culture, and it's almost too much for them to unravel now, particularly in a larger corporate sort of environment. You've got problems with pay equality and equity across the entire business. Where do you start? How do we unravel that? What do we do? It's almost easier just to keep pushing on in the direction we're going and hope that it never causes us too many problems or assume that if it does cause us problems, it's going to be cheaper for us than having to rework all of this and rebalance salaries and so that there's some companies that may be too far down the road to care about it.
Speaker 2:It's just like that big nod of Christmas lights or something that you're like we're just not even going to handle.
Speaker 3:Just walk away slowly. Oh gosh, adam. It's so shocking, as someone who worked in talent acquisition, to hear that hiring managers would lie in an interview. And I would say why? Just why, because people are going to find out as soon as they start the job. So it's just an interesting choice to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's pressure from above. Particularly when you work in a larger corporate type environment, I think you probably are more likely to just feel this pressure from above to hit targets when it comes to hiring for your team. You just do what you need to do to get people through the door and you probably have more resources around you as well, so you don't think about the cost. And when it comes to time that's invested in hiring, you've got a TA team that will. Yeah, they do. They just do their magic stuff in the background and you don't really appreciate how much work goes into that as a hiring manager sometimes. So there's lots of again reasons why people might do it. But yeah, I was shocked to see that as well.
Speaker 2:I think I've lied. I think I've lied. Have you? Yeah, I think I have not. Let me ask you all this Is this a lie? Like when you feel like you're probably out the door anyway, but you're hiring people and you're like, yeah, the culture is great.
Speaker 3:I actually won't say that. If someone asks me interesting, I will just what's the culture like and I've been honest.
Speaker 1:I'll give you the good, the bad and the ugly, because I think you deserve to know it so I had this conversation with someone recently who's a I won't again name names because it's a bit of a delicate one, but it was a people leader. I think there was an m&a event. Their business has been acquired, everything would change. They were basically checked out and said I'm committed to moving on. Now everything's changed. That's not what we've built anyway, because they're in a people lead a role. They were heavily involved in hiring and interviewing.
Speaker 1:So we that touched on that discussion of what should I be doing, and I guess my advice was similar to the. What Melza said there is that the most positive thing you can do now is try and make sure that anyone else that walks through that door and joins that business is aligned, because even though you don't think it's a great place to work anymore for you, it doesn't mean it's terrible for everyone, and there are still people out there who really will align with that culture. Even if you think it's crazy, it doesn't make any sense, there are people who might like it. So do what you can to present facts and, rather than being opinionated, try and talk explicitly about what culture looks like here, which I think actually is what so many companies don't actually understand at the starting point is like what is culture here? How do we describe it and understand it, rather than giving an opinion on how fun it is here?
Speaker 3:Either happy hours yeah, yeah understood, yeah we have a foosball table. No, I'm just kidding that pods. No, and it's interesting because the cost I thought I read this week that what they previously thought the cost of making the wrong hire was significantly low to compare, comparing to what the actual true cost of that is. And, adam, I'm sure you must have some number that you know about. What is the cost of that at times? What could it be up to?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I again chatted about this yesterday. I can't really give you a figure because I just keep seeing all these different figures out there, in different, yeah, but it's high. The one that seems to stick in my mind is up to two thirds of someone's salary to replace. So if someone's on $90,000 a year, it could cost you 60k to just replace them. And again circling back to the benefits of being open and transparent, the more you can share up front, it's not just about getting people aligned to the right culture. It's not just about getting people aligned and to the right culture. But there's so many benefits around onboarding and ramp up time and getting people to a point where they are more productive in the early days within your business. So companies are always looking at like how can we shorten that ramp up time so that people are effectively making us money sooner, which is completely fair? How do we do that? The more share, the more you provide up front, the quicker that happens.
Speaker 3:What does a good open culture look like from your perspective?
Speaker 1:that's a really interesting question. It's really hard to answer as well, because people ask us quite a lot like how do you define transparency? And this is the whole world that we're in. So we, we don't define it. We were very keen from the outset to make sure that we aren't the ones trying to define what transparent looks like.
Speaker 1:That's part of the problem for me, like some of these awards and accolades out there that you can win about we've got great culture or a great place to work. The problem is you're prescribing to someone else's view of what good looks like You're jumping through hoops and like ticking boxes view of what good looks like you're jumping through hoops and like ticking boxes. So we're of the view that there needs to be some sort of level of openness and transparency to call yourself transparent to a degree, and we provide that level of structure, which I won't dive too deeply into, but we've got an assessment and a framework companies can follow. So we do have some level of it, but we don't necessarily prescribe where that transparency should be and necessarily how deep that should go. So the way that I try and talk about it with companies is work on defining it for yourself first. What does that look like? And there's a very high level journey that, for me, starts with understanding like why is this word important? If you're putting on your career site or your job ads or just putting it out there, there's got to be a reason why you're saying it, and if there's not, it's just an empty word. So where I tend to see it, there's two paths.
Speaker 1:Typically, when it does work well is it's either heavily linked to your product, your value prop idea you're doing something that's bringing transparency to your customers or whatever that might be, via a platform or a product, and you can lean into transparency as a business yourself, which works really well or it ties heavily into your values and when you dig a little bit deeper and understand what those values are and why, that's when you can start to work with companies to help them understand what they should be leaning into and what they should be sharing more of.
Speaker 1:I'll give you an example. Company I worked with recently talked a lot about they believe their strength is in having a diverse team, but they offered nothing around diversity, no transparency externally around what diversity looked like for them. I talked to them about the fact that they talk about strength and diversity and this is a really core value for them. That's an opportunity to be transparent and double down in that particular area. So, long story short, transparency is going to mean different things to different people, but I ask companies to look at their culture, their values, intrinsically to that, and look at where they can double down. You don't have to share everything across the entire spectrum, but think about what it means to your business, find ways you can double down and over index in certain ways, and that starts building a little bit of meaning behind the word for you as well.
Speaker 3:So it's more personalized, depending on your business. I know at OpenOrg you're going in. You're taking a look at this with them, so it might not necessarily be like this is what good looks like. But in terms of leading practices, for example, what would something like open compensation what's a leading practice you might recommend, regardless of that company's personal mission? What advice would you offer?
Speaker 1:We've still got some like minimum standards that we would say people should try and attain and get to, and then the optional. This is how you elevate it if you want to go crazy and go for it basically buffer style but for us, the minimum expectation, ideally, is to get to the point where you can comfortably put a salary or a salary band on a job advert when you're hiring. Now that, for us, is really important because you're then providing some external transparency, building trust with talent, reverse engineering that. How do we get to that stage? There's a lot of work that goes into that before you can get to that stage. So you've got to work on your compensation philosophy, your bands and your levels.
Speaker 1:How do we benchmark our salaries? Where do we get that data from? We encourage companies to share that internally as well, as much as you possibly can, and if you can't, that's okay, but as an absolute minimum, what people really want to see is how is this decision being made? Whatever I I'm being paid, that's fine.
Speaker 1:How have you come up with that decision? What data have you used and where have you got it from and how has that been assessed? So it's the why and the how behind the decision is actually really key for me as a minimum requirement. People don't care about what their colleagues being paid, necessarily, as long as they can see what they're being paid is fair and they feel that that lines up with what they should be getting paid. That's really key. So again, minimum expectation provide the how and the why behind the decisions with the things like pay and hopefully get to the point where you can comfortably put a salary on an advert and not have chaos ensue internally where people are reapplying for their own jobs because they see that you're paying someone else 30k more.
Speaker 3:I never really understood why that isn't public information, because people are going to find out anyway, because they talk about it. So it's interesting to me that they don't share the process, because it is an in-depth process to go through salary band review each year and it's good for folks when they're talking about their year end and bonus and seeing where they're at and if they have room to grow. It's a good discussion to have with your people.
Speaker 1:It's hard work and it takes a long time and that puts a lot of companies off and it won't suddenly mean that everything goes perfectly. You're still going to have some really tough, awkward, tricky conversations with employees who are unhappy about what they're paid, why they're paid it. It's not going to make everything go away, but it builds so much trust as a starting point so that when you have that conversation, people feel like they trust you. They can see it, it's open and it's a starting point for a conversation effectively. And you've got that backup. Most businesses have done their working out. They've got some data source behind them. That should build some confidence in you to have that conversation and say, look, we haven't just plucked this from thin air, this is what we've used, so share it.
Speaker 3:It's honest and it helps others really understand the process, because I think if you're not in comp, it does feel like a mystery. Did you just throw a dart at the dartboard and pick this number? So it's good to include that. What about some leading practices in terms of company culture?
Speaker 1:yeah, so we culture is one of the pillars under our framework and it's probably like one of the broader ones. What we try and get companies to do is really think about what does culture mean here? What does it look like? Because I think the default for a lot of companies when you look at career pages is like we've got great culture and then there's like a picture of a team playing like crazy golf or whatever they're doing on a team social and that like sums up culture on the face of it. And we're trying to get companies to start moving away from that.
Speaker 1:Don't start sharing like all the positive employee stories of it's fun to work here, it's great. Start sharing some facts and reality around, like how do we succeed as a team? What is the sort of unique DNA or blend of how we work, our ways of work that enable us to work well together and succeed? And how do we learn? How do we fail? How do we thrive? How do we like communicate?
Speaker 1:There's so much you can gain from understanding how a team communicates day to day. Is it synchronous? Asynchronous Boundaries have reset to communicate. Communicates day to day. Is it synchronous? Asynchronous boundaries have reset to communicate. It might seem like a lot of information, but you can get that across to people really nicely on on wiki or careers page or a job advert.
Speaker 1:The companies that do this well do really well and they hire people who succeed really well in their business. So for us, that's culture. It's thinking more about operational excellence rather than that word culture. And when you start breaking it down like that and thinking in that way, you can actually look at some of those areas around communication and documentation and meetings. That's one of the areas under our culture pillar is encouraging companies to talk more about their approach to meetings. Engineers in particular, and others as well. Now, to be honest with you, really benefit and enjoy having blocks of time for like, deep work and focus. They don't want to be sucked into six hours of meetings a day. So start talking to people more about your approach to meetings as a business and people have the opportunity to opt in or out. That's like what we refer to as culture, rather than the coffee, the beanbags, all the other stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's how we work around here. Right, that's all good stuff to highlight. What about benefits? How do you feel about leading practices there?
Speaker 1:Yeah, another bugbear, and this is hard right. Like you can only get so much information on some careers page, for example, or a job advert, but they have defaulted over time to just being a little bit vague and shiny and like you can't really see much. So you see, like competitive salary mentioned, like just go a little bit deeper, even if it's an extra line to say we benchmark and pay on the 75th percentile. You can't just say it's competitive and that's going to suddenly mean it's competitive to everyone. Someone could be working for the you know business that pays 90th. Someone could be working for somewhere that's 30th.
Speaker 1:You can't just say that and have it apply to everyone. So just add some meaning. So, generally speaking, best practice on benefits when we work with companies and look at this is just really I don't want to say tearing apart, that sounds a bit aggressive but like line by line, going through each benefit that they've listed and actually looking at how can you elevate that and add a little bit more clarity to what that is. And I think maternity leave, paternity leave, is a big one. So many companies write enhanced parental leave.
Speaker 3:What does that even mean?
Speaker 1:A week and if so, how much? Buy or would you offer 12 months full pay? Just tell people what it is. Actually, it's not a deal breaker for most people. It just helps them understand and plan ahead and think what does that mean for me financially if I do join here and I do decide to have a child? And it's not a deal breaker, but it helps set expectations and it's one of those things, famously, that's always been really hard to find out before you join a business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's so interesting to me because my experience in organizations one that I was interviewing with or to have worked with although there's information provided, it's so high level and so vague and usually it's not until you get to the offer stage where someone will finally meet with you to get into the details. And I always think that's a disservice, Because if you're just exploring an organization, you want to be able to say what does this exactly look like, so everyone's happy in the end, You're not waiting all the way through.
Speaker 1:Six interviews have happened, You've wasted five hours of everyone's time, You're at the offer stage and you lose that candidate because they didn't like the benefit package that they're getting Another example and one company that does this really well and you some might argue it's a bit overkill, but health insurance might work differently in the uk to the us. I don't know whether it's a little bit more comprehensive and everything's covered regardless, but absolutely not over here, like even if you have insurance.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely like it's garbage. It's garbage.
Speaker 1:I don't want to say I made the assumption. But it's the same here as well. There are some companies that say we offer health cover. Great, on the face of it, brilliant, I'm excited. But then you join and you realize, okay, it's just for me, it's not for my family. I didn't realize that. Or you realize, okay, I've got a very specific, rare condition that's not covered by this particular policy, so that's not a benefit to me. Now, and there's a company called Juro and others do this as well, but I know about Juro. You can, on their notion, you can dig deep on their benefits, click into their health cover and actually look at the exact policy document that they've got for their business. And it's long, it's in depth, but you can actually go and find out.
Speaker 1:Is my specific condition covered, which is great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's fantastic because that's the stuff people need to know when they're moving, especially when it impacts your family, as you mentioned, if you find out after the fact. Oh wait, that actually happened to a friend of mine where she found out with her new job, it only extends to her, it doesn't extend to her family.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think a lot of organizations are doing really cool things too. I worked for an organization where, after I had my son, they flew my breast milk like overnight yeah Back to my house, which was like $800 a pop, and they did that for every single mother. And that, to me, is I don't know why you guys aren't screaming this from the effing rooftops. Yeah, there's also stuff that the organization could be screaming from the rooftops and they're not. Yeah, there's also stuff that the organization could be screaming from the rooftops and they're not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is again it's personal choice in terms of how much effort you want to put into it, but there are companies that will have. You know that we call them handbooks in the UK and try not to refer to it too heavily as handbook in the US, because it's a slightly different, slightly more legal document in the US, but like a wiki or a resource hub for employees effectively to be able to go and dig deep and look at this stuff. And you can keep it high level and say we offer enhanced parental leave. Or you can really provide a heap of depth on parental leave and not just like what do we give parents, but what does returning from maternity leave look like? How do we help you and support you and all that entire journey? There are some companies that do incredibly well, so it's not like to disparage everyone, but the majority don't scratch the surface.
Speaker 3:What about with professional development is typically it's not something people think of as falling under benefits, but it's also something that you hope, as an employee, you continue to get, because then you feel that organization is invested in you, they're invested your growth. They want you to succeed. What does a good leading practice look like in terms of transparency around how much an organization is investing in your career development?
Speaker 1:yeah, this is again. This you've just said those words as well. I think is like there's such a standard phrase on career sites of like we invest in people and we've got world-class career. If you're going to say that you've got world-class like career investment, whatever that might look like, show it like don't just dangle a carrot and then don't offer anything over and above that.
Speaker 1:Really show what you offer people and give some clarity as to what that looked like on a a couple of levels. There's a few things on that. If you're going to list it as a benefit, again, something that we see a lot of companies do is dangle a carrot to say L&D budget, but again just a few more words to say what that budget is. It takes no effort and really helps people understand what they're going to be getting here. So there's tiny little tangible changes companies can go and make that really make a big difference to people. I think the deeper work and the work behind the scenes to really elevate that is looking in depth at how you progress and promote and keep people growing within your business. So career development frameworks is something that seems to be missing in the loss of companies, I think, probably for a reason. It's often it's hard to build. Sometimes if you're a bigger company and get everything in place and something that works and it ties heavily into performance, calibration and compensation and again you've got that big ball of christmas lights whatever we're talking about earlier that you can't unpick.
Speaker 1:So career, when we look at the data of all the companies that take our assessment to understand, almost like a heat map of what companies do and don't share.
Speaker 1:Career development uh, frameworks are always in the red, but for the large majority of companies they don't even share anything internally.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of companies out there saying we invest in people, but then you walk through the door and you don't have visibility of what's my next step look like or how can I move internally. So, again on our framework, one of our 35 areas that we zone in on and talk with companies about is sharing more information around internal mobility. So can you even share some basic data with people to say that this x percent of people moved internally last year, whether it's latently or vertically for promotion? That gives you a real indication as to like how people move within your business and how people can grow. So anyway, there's a lot of deeper work in depth you can go into there, but I think getting that internal clarity is helpful to people. And then, once you've got it, why wouldn't you share it? There's a few reasons here and there, but you should. And again, there's a couple of companies out there that do really well at just flipping their their internal documentation external.
Speaker 1:And then, and it's amazing, who's doing this really well there's a company called cleo in the uk who I don't know. If you've come across a platform called progression fyi really cool, check out progressionfyi. They have their whole platform is about helping companies to build career development frameworks and using their platform. But progression fyi is also like a collective open source career development frameworks that companies share publicly. So clio have got theirs on there. They've shared it publicly and you can go on and look at all their engineering pathways, the salary bands attached to every single role, criteria for progressing.
Speaker 1:They've got such a great name, particularly in the UK, for this stuff. And another one is Learnably, who again might not be well known outside of the UK because they're relatively small tech startup scale up, but Learnably are like an LMSms platform, so they major on development and growth for employees and they really drink their own champagne because of that. Going back to what we were talking about earlier with defining what transparency means to you, that a huge part of their value prop is about lnd and growth. So they've decided to major on being transparent about career development at learnably. If you're going to join us, we're going to make sure you know what you're going to get and how you're going to grow, and everything they've done has been crafted around that whole idea of lnd, because that's fed into their, their entire value prop as well where do you see this going in the next five years?
Speaker 1:yeah, I am in a bubble. I have to admit that we operate a lot more at the startup scale up end of the spectrum. So companies anywhere from 20, 30 employees up to a couple of thousand starting to get larger. But we don't work with many 30, 40, 50,000 employee businesses and I get they're probably not going to be making the drastic changes anytime soon to how they operate and how they communicate. That's a lot harder. But certainly there's so many earlier stage businesses coming through. It precede stage.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of founding teams who support what we're doing. They're a bit early stage to fully embrace and have a lot of this work verified because they haven't started hiring yet. But you see the mindset and the passion and the belief there and I'm not saying every founder coming through is like Gen Z. A lot of them are. A lot of them are coming into this world of work setting up their own companies now and then we will talk about the fact that Gen Z have. Everyone cares about transparency and trust, but Gen Z are more demanding. They care more deeply about it. It's a really important part of how they work, deeply about it. It's a really important part of how they work and they're building their own businesses now with this as a core value. So five years time I'd expect to see, particularly in the startup scale up world, businesses that do default more to transparency, whatever that means to them. They're at least able to say we're transparent and we've defined what that means, and if that's okay, because if it doesn't align with you, then fine, but it will align with certain people and and we're healthy and etc. Etc.
Speaker 1:I'd like to see, hopefully, some good progression around pay transparency in particular. There's obviously a lot of movement in the US legally, so that's going to make some sort of change, I'm sure, and then there's some incoming changes across the EU as well. So what's sad is that either side of the UK right now we've got some legal waves happening, which is really enforcing some change, which is great, but nothing in the UK at the moment. So we'll see if we follow suit. But certainly on the pay front, that will change and I think as a knock-on effect to that, going back to what we talked about earlier, I'd heavily to. Pay is performance in career development. You can't suddenly become transparent about pay without giving people some context around how that ties into career development and levels and and how, then, they're going to be assessed to get to that next level, so that, as a trio is going to have to advance together? For me, um, as best as possible anyway yeah, that makes total sense.
Speaker 3:I know you're as you say, you're in this the bubble, but with the, the gen z, really coming in and leading the wave of this bubble, those startups could become either clients or partners to these larger organizations. Do you think their approach to transparency may have an influence on some of these large organizations in the future?
Speaker 1:I hope so. I hope so. As much as I don't operate so heavily in the large corporate world. As much as I don't operate so heavily in the large corporate world, I have to say some of the larger organizations out there are the ones actually doing better when it comes to things like pay transparency and visibility on career development, probably because they've got the resources there as well to do it from like a people team perspective. But particularly in the UK, the public organizations you like the NHS and you can apply to jobs and you know exactly what grade you're going to be at, what salary you're going to be at. Everyone's on the same, salary gets paid the same. There is visibility in a lot of the public organizations here which I imagine is maybe similar in the US.
Speaker 3:It's similar. Yeah, the US government actually does transparency well.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah, and there are things that you can give a little bit of a hat tip, so you just actually you know what, that there is the structure in place and similarly big consulting firms in the uk and imagine it maybe again similar in the us, like your pwc's, your ey's, etc. They've been around so long, they've got their structure so firmly set that, whilst they may not have the perfect culture for everyone, that's okay. People know what they're getting when they join. They know what they're not going to get and also the grading and the pace is like how you progress in those types of businesses is fairly clear to people and well known because they've been around for so long. So I'm I'm always wary of disparaging like large companies too much, because actually there's some things that they do really well that actually startups and scale-ups could learn from as well. Where they tend to get things wrong maybe is things like communication and day-to-day internal culture starts to get go wrong there because they become this sort of size where things start falling apart.
Speaker 2:From that point of view, so funny with this conversation around transparency and even just like your relationship with work. I can't help but think about it like a really any relationship you have with a person, Meaning and I know we've talked about this. But when I think about dating or getting into a relationship with someone, if you're not honest or if you misrepresent yourself from the jump, you're going to have a problem. And when we think about any kind of dating scenario, if you would be like, yeah, they said that they really wanted to have X, Y and Z, but then they didn't, and we talked about how how can people start to get more transparent up above right, Especially at the org level? But I'm thinking here about where this really comes down to is individuals, how individuals are feeling as they're moving through these organizations. I'm thinking here about where this really comes down to is individuals, how individuals are feeling as they're moving through these organizations.
Speaker 2:And I'm wondering if we can really double down on if you're a manager or if you're an employee and you're sitting in an organization that may have some opportunity. Everybody has some opportunity Individually. I have some opportunity, have some opportunity for transparency, but you really want to be this person that shows up well for your team or shows up in a way that you feel you need to as a manager. What can a manager do, agnostic of the organization, to drive transparency and drive that kind of honesty on their team?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very tough. I think in some respects in smaller organizations it's more down to mindset of founder CEO. They're probably still close enough to the individual employees day to day for them to be the driving factor here. I think maybe when you get into larger organizations and most people have never ever met the ceo or know really what they look like or who they are, there is more of an opportunity possibly for managers, middle level managers, more senior managers, to try and direct and formulate some level of team level transparency. Everyone knows that as companies get larger, culture and values becomes lost on a broader level because you end up with your microcultures and across the entire business. You do have this opportunity to form your own microculture, microverse within your team. So if managers do care deeply enough about it and not to say that they're going to suddenly change the entire business and how the business operates, but there are steps that they can take to start understanding how they can build more trust with their team.
Speaker 1:And again, this is a whole nother podcast episode, I'm sure, but managers are highly underdeveloped, under supported, under trained.
Speaker 1:I think the latest stat that's flowing around now is like 82 percent of managers are accidental managers, like it's completely broken in terms of how management even works itself, and so most managers don't know where to start when it comes to how to manage a team and how to communicate with them, and et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1:So, in terms of like steps you can take, we're building an open manager handbook with our community now building it together like a building public community exercise, which is really cool, but that's going to be filled with a heap of like resources, guidance on like how to build trust with the team, how to communicate with the team, how to run effective one on ones, but all with a lens of how to build trust with the team, how to communicate with the team, how to run effective one-on-ones, but all with a lens of how to do it in an open, transparent way.
Speaker 1:It's tricky because some of it will go against the grain a little bit, potentially with what you're being told you are allowed to share and aren't allowed to share. But if you're not able to be transparent ie share the reality you can at least be clear with what you are and aren't allowed to share. So there's a bit of a difference between clarity and transparency. So even if you don't have the information to share with them, you can tell them what you can share and what you do and don't know, and that in itself is at least building some trust with your team.
Speaker 2:I've been in. I think most of us have situations where you're leading a team and you're going through something really tumultuous layoffs, budget cuts, the business isn't doing well, et cetera and I've worked with people, colleagues and peers that have been like all you need to say is that you absolutely trust the direction of the company. You're behind this 100% and we're going to move on, and I have found that when I've tried that tactic earlier on in my career, it goes over like a fart in church because people, what they want to know to your very good point is I don't need you to tell me everything, but I need to trust that you're going to tell me what you can and you're going to keep me updated and we're going to go through this together. Yeah, people don't expect you to tell them everything. They don't even expect you necessarily to tell how you're feeling about it, but they need to be able to trust that you've got their best interests and that you're going to keep them updated as they go along.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you've got two examples of companies that do a relatively good job on this. Again, in terms of again, this probably has to be something that is ideally fed from higher up, but maybe it could be implemented in a larger organization by a middle manager. There's a company I mentioned earlier called euro. They're really intentional as a leadership team as how they will approach crisis types scenarios, whatever that might be. Layoffs interestingly, an interesting one, because you can see a layoff coming so you can plan for it. You could think about our comms plan how we're going to approach it. Weirdly, there's no argument real argument for companies doing a really bad job on this because they they always see it coming, they always have time to plan for it and they have the opportunity to communicate it if they want to. But there are things that happen that you can't control and euro was one example. They were backed by, if you remember, the silicon valley bank issue that happened a while ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everyone sort of just forgot about that a little bit. So sorry if I've given anyone ptsd, but that happened and that affected juro and within minutes of that news being announced, juro's ceo was on slack. The entire business couldn't give them an answer as to what's coming, but there was at least communication there immediately to say this has happened. We could be affected. We will keep you posted and I can't remember exactly how many updates they were given, but there was continual updates very regularly throughout the entire weekend. No expectation for employees to read this, but it all happened over a weekend, didn't it? I think from memory and yeah, that's do committed to slacking the entire business all weekend about what was going on that that sort of level of intentional communication calms nerves, makes people feel involved, looked after as safe as they possibly can be and informed, and they're an incredible business. You have to work hard at that, but that's really great.
Speaker 1:Another example, slightly different, is someone like gitlab, who a lot of people know and accept as the most transparent company in the world. If you go on their handbook, when they talk about transparency as one of their values, they're very clear about why it's a value. They're very clear about what they do share and they give you examples of the things they share. But interestingly, there's a line in there that says there are some things we don't share and when we don't share them, we publicly document what that is and why. So you can click a link and they'll tell you exactly what they don't share with people and the reasons for not sharing that information as well. And that is like perfect scenario, like defining transparency but building expectations with employees to understand and get some context for why certain things aren't being shared.
Speaker 2:I think that education is equally important. Right, there are some things that it is in everybody's best interest not to share at a certain point in time. Right, there just is in business. But I think the ability to say this is it and to be very upfront about it again, it's so. People know what to expect, they know what they're getting into. Yeah, it's really that. Know what to expect, they know what they're getting into. Yeah, it's really that clear yeah.
Speaker 3:It's also just acknowledging going back to the example about the Silicon Valley Bay, it's acknowledging something is happening. We know what's happening. We don't have all the facts, but we're going to communicate to you. So people aren't like trying to fill in the blank. That's what always happens, right? They fill in their own blanks. Conspiracy theories spread throughout an organization, and then it just now you're fighting that and the real information, and then no one believes the real information when you finally give it. So I love these examples.
Speaker 1:The comfort it must build of thinking okay, my CEO is on it, like you don't communicate anything. If an employee sees it, that news, and they haven't heard from their CEO on the weekend, they might sit there and think should I tell them about this? Do you think they've seen the news yet? Or, knowing that your CEO is slacking you on the weekends about something like this, I think yeah, the trust in that leader must just be through the roof.
Speaker 2:Yeah absolutely, absolutely. One of the things that I think is really important is being able to control what you can control. Is being able to control what you can control and, as an employee, you're either interviewing for a job. Maybe you're sitting internally at an organization and you're wondering what could I be looking at in terms of this organization? And I'm wondering what would you tell people You're best friends interviewing for a job? What would you tell them in terms of figuring out what that company really is?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I haven't ever had to answer that. To be honest, we do a few things to try and help folks a little bit as much, as our advice usually is trained more on helping the companies rather than because we think if we can help the companies do better, that will automatically help employees and candidates. But I spend a lot of time personally looking at career sites and job adverts and I think I've gotten very good at just cutting through the rubbish. Basically, that's there, the buzzwords, the vagueness that actually a lot of people maybe read and take for granted and take as accepted. So encouraging people to not just see the words transparent on a career page but actually, if you see that, take that as a signal that you should be looking for some level of openness or something further that gives you an idea. Or, if someone's got a core value of diversity, start understanding whether they share anything about diversity or the commitments, failings, whatever that might be. So just try and think a bit deeper and go a bit deeper on that. That's like the high level stuff. There's basic things on the job adverts that people should be looking for some clarity on and most people do, frankly, is like thinking about like compensation and flexible working, like when will I be working? Where will I be working and can you think deeper around like policy on?
Speaker 1:Someone just says hybrid three days a week. What does that actually mean? Their questions you won't have answered pre-application, but taking that into an interview to actually like really dig deeper on that and understand is it just three days a week or is it a monday, tuesday, friday, like whatever that might be? We built and shared what we call like our interview question index and which is like an open resource on our website and it's I think it's 60 or 70 questions. We just we did it for fun, to be honest, but like opportunity for people to understand that the tougher questions they could ask employers and interview to dig deeper on things like culture, like understanding, like, and what one of the questions on there is like why did the last three people leave this team?
Speaker 1:Or what was the last mistake your ceo admitted to which I got some flack for and people said you should be a bit softer with that like and maybe like. So maybe someone could ask what was the last thing your ceo shared you that they learned, which for me became a bit fluffy. It could be like I've read a book and learned this, so I want to understand how open are CEOs and leaders about their own mistakes, their own vulnerabilities? It gives you a real indication of psychological safety and how people communicate and share information, and if an interviewer can't give you certain information, it's not necessarily that you should run for the hills, but it might give you a bit of an indication as to how communication and information is shared in that business. If they haven't even genuinely been given the information themselves. As a recruiter of 12, 13 years, that would signal some alarm bells in my head alarm bells in my head.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I always tell people to ask the question what brought you here and what keeps you here? Because it's the what keeps you here, where the honesty starts to come out for folks, or if you see them. Oh, I don't know yeah, yeah, that pause tell is telling yeah, there's.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I have to, like really work hard to find out why I'm still, why I'm still in this business is, but then and even the danger with that is there's almost very opinionated. So what, what's keeping someone else in the business might not be the thing that keeps you there as well, but understanding it's hard, because so many of these things could be linked to opinion. But again, understanding, like, who is the last person that failed to thrive here and why? Like what are the factors that leads to failure in this company, rather than always saying, like, why am I going to love it here? What do do you do for fun? Like always trying to find all the fun stuff. Understand who doesn't thrive and help you understand whether that might, you know, connect the dots for you as well.
Speaker 2:I think it's really important to dive way deeper than most people do in their interviews and to not be afraid to ask those questions. I've had many conversations with people that they really want to know X, y and Z, but they're afraid to ask or they feel like if they ask then they're going to get penalized somehow in the interview process. And I feel like these are questions that you should be asking to really get a sense of what is the organization like, but also if you're getting any kind of pushback about those questions or even asking those questions, that's also information as well.
Speaker 3:That's when a rejection is protection. Yes, ultimately.
Speaker 1:The hard thing right now, at this moment in time, is it's such a hard thing to advise on because they're ultimately braver questions for people to ask, slightly scarier ones, and the mindset that so many people are in right now is I've just got to find a job.
Speaker 1:So, like at the moment, people are just trying to find, prioritize finding jobs, even if they're not perfect, and it was a similar back in 2020 with, with covid, people were joining companies as a stepping stone, knowing I just need security for now and when the market improves then I'll move. So right now, this stuff isn't always a priority for people, but I've known a good few people in the last number of months who have jumped to jobs just for a job's sake and they've left them in weeks. There's no point in joining a business and going through onboarding and ramp up and hope if your gut is telling you that this is not the right place, because nine times out of ten it won't happen and you're better off still investing your energy and your time into trying to find the right place. But it is hard.
Speaker 2:It's a really tricky time to be doing that and I hate to put it on an employee to say you've got to go through this journey, but I think it's really great, though, that people have these tools and these questions to ask to see what situation are they getting into, what's?
Speaker 1:really sad is it's often the TA teams and the recruiters who get the flack for this. They're useless at giving me the information I need. They're really vague and the poor recruiter that's nine times out of 10, they just haven't been given the information. I've had this myself, like not being told what funding round we just done. How am I going to do my job properly if the leadership team won't give me the basic information I need to interview? So it's not usually the TA team's fault. Honestly. They don't sit there openly trying to hide things. It's just we're working with what we've got. But again, it's a huge indication really of like how does communication happen in this business?
Speaker 2:A thousand percent, yeah, and quite honestly, most TA teams are armed with the sexy ass information and all the information they can have so they can get those folks through the door. So if they don't have it, again I think that's a really great call out that it might not be as clear in the organization. The other thing is, if the hiring manager we talk about this sometimes there's a difference between talent acquisition, like your recruiter, and then the person that's actually going to be quote, unquote, your boss, and if either of those people don't have that information, or I think it'd be very interesting if they give you different information as well, again, I think it's just, it's a big archaeological dig.
Speaker 3:Put on your curiosity and critical thinking hat during the interview process the rapid round, here we go adam, no pressure, by the way, try to make this as fun as possible and not terrifying. So terrible, at least yeah, all right, I going to dive right in. Some of these could be yes or no, or true or false, and some might have broader explanation, and that's totally okay. I wanted to ask of the open org companies that you are working with, are there similar characteristics that you see in their leadership teams?
Speaker 1:yes, I can divulge a little bit more if you want yeah of course. Relatively progressive, a younger generation less precious about titles and flatter hierarchies and structures in their business.
Speaker 3:Okay, what is the next lever being added to the list above? We talked about comp benefits, career development, culture. What else might get added?
Speaker 1:Flexibility is another thing that I think is just such a big topic at the moment the lack of clarity on are we working from home? Is it return to office? How does that look? Is it different things to different employees? There's a lot of problems around that at the moment. So, like clarity on that should be really simple, but it's terrible at the moment, so that should be a big one.
Speaker 3:Okay, okay. We see a lot of large organizations today talking about social impact, environmental impact. Do you think, given the age of climate change, that companies should be transparent about their environmental impact, even if it's not flattering?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do so. The gen z, gen z, sorry big topic for them around, like esg and environment and climate. So it's a big thing that a lot of them are looking for, apparently, from employers when they join companies. So it will signal to me that the longer that it goes on and the worst things get out there, the more important this is for companies to talk about. The downsides is the pressure of greenwashing, etc. And everyone's talking about just doing something or trying to make it look as good as possible, and that's happened with diversity over the last few years. Definitely is like huge calls to do more on diversity, but it's become very performative. So yes, definitely, but but be careful okay, okay.
Speaker 3:Do you think social media is going to make companies be more transparent or just more cautious?
Speaker 1:hopefully both, hopefully both. So a trait I see from the really transparent companies that I follow and watch is very vocal ceos. On linkedin, for example, they post regularly. They post about whatever they want and they're not afraid to to either be vulnerable and share failings but also like really celebrate stuff. And it's interesting the the slightly larger or secretive companies. You never hear from a ceo and the fact that they don't post about anything starts making you think are they waiting for someone to comment on a post and call them out? And this happened with bupa very recently. The ce CEO posted about an award they won for women in their leadership team and there was a comment made that went viral and it all blew up. So more cautious if you're not able to be fully transparent, but hopefully that transparency will remove the need to be cautious.
Speaker 3:Okay, true or false? Every company should have a public fact sheet about how they operate, true, okay? And is there such a thing as too much transparency?
Speaker 1:There could be. Arguably no, but in certain instances there could be. And again it's a bit like the greenwashing example just now. Don't make it become like a performative exercise just for pr. Make it like embeddable. Don't overreach.
Speaker 3:As soon as you can't model certain behaviors, it will start to fall apart what's one organization either one that you're working with or one publicly that you've seen do this really well, like you think they're a pillar example of good transparency.
Speaker 1:A company called PostHog. Posthog is a small-ish tech business in the UK. I won't drone on because I'll talk about it for hours, but check out PostHog. They've got a public handbook. They share their roadmap. Their CEO is posting on LinkedIn all the time. That's so open, so transparent. They're amazing.
Speaker 2:Adam. I love the work you all are doing. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe. Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriendscom. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Fran.