Are you communicating with your employees enough? Are you supporting caregivers in your organization?
Listen in for the latest talent focus conversation from UNLEASHcast.
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Listen above or read an excerpt of the transcript beneath, which has been edited for clarity. We join the conversation as our two hosts discussion a session from – and reminisce about – their recent event…
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Jon Kennard: It was so good to get back together. The atmosphere was amazing. We’re looking forward to next year already. Lots of secret exciting plans hatching as we speak.
But today, we’re going to be talking about the world of talent and recruitment and people, and the interesting stories that we’ve covered. And it makes sense just to segue into the first story, which was a round-up from UNLEASH America and one of the panels about how to thrive in a Great Resignation. Do you want to tell us a bit more about that?
Allie Nawrat: Yeah, so it was a panel with Luciana who is ex-HP and now works for a company called True Culture. Bill Tompkins from Smile Direct Club and Carrie Thiessen from Fannie Mae who I interviewed pre-UNLEASH America. And it was it was the last one of the day, the last one of the whole event actually, for me.
So I was really impressed by everyone still seeming really engaged. I think sometimes at the end of the conference, sometimes people can get a bit, like, ‘too much information overload’, but everyone actually seemed really engaged. And it was compered by our own Kate Graham, Director of Content Labs. And I just thought the interesting things that they said, which is what I picked out in the round-up – obviously, they said so much more than what’s in this roundup – was about employee experience. And we talk about this a lot – yeah, people will move jobs for more pay, obviously, they’re gonna do that. But maybe a way to get them to stay is actually if you have a good culture, and people want to be there, they won’t necessarily just leave because they’re gonna get five grand more.
So I think people are starting to value some of that enjoying coming to work, you know, feeling valued, feeling part of something bigger than just themselves, and being able to grow as well, which we talk about a lot about. Luciana and Bill talked about that quite a lot during the session.
JK: Well, I think of it, for odd reasons, which I’m not going to go into here, I was scrolling back through some old Instagram posts of mine, and I found a still [image], I think it was 2017-2018, I was reading one of the books by the founders of Basecamp. And I took a snap of one of the pages. And it said, ‘culture is the process of good behavior repeated’, or something like that.
(Ed’s note: The actual quote is ‘culture is the by-product of consistent behavior’. Not bad Jon – 7/10)
I paraphrase slightly, but I thought was quite a nice way of describing something which is often quite intangible. And the talk, that session, seems to come back to a lot of things that other people have said, which doesn’t mean that the talk itself didn’t throw up some unique ideas.
But it is interesting to see that that is one of the big themes of what was being talked about at the event that a lot of the time, the work that you’re going to value and the companies that you’re going to value working for – it isn’t about the actual work. It’s not about the money, it’s about the culture. It’s about things like meeting-free days, and all these things that the people on the panel were talking about. That’s what I’ve drawn from it.
