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Thank you for choosing W4C Radio. Welcome back everyone to the Geek's Geezers and Googleization Show, the home of Googleization Nation, where we talk with HR and business thought leaders about the crazy shift going on in the world of business, technology and HR. Here's your host, Ira Wolf. Hey, Michael.
How are you? A little tired as I imagine you are. Yeah, absolutely. And welcome back everyone to the Geek's Geezers and Googleization Show, a big shout out to Googleization Nation.
We're helping people understand what it takes to live in the vuco world, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And we're certainly being tested on that. We were both, I think you were on the call, we were on the call about an hour ago for the first adaptability quotient, the AQ Masterclass series. We're learning about resilience, about backing, bouncing back as Ross Thornley, who was a guest just a few weeks ago.
Talking about AQ, we were focused on resilience this morning. I loved when he said we need to not talk about bouncing back, but bouncing forward. I think that's absolutely the case. We'll be talking a lot about that.
One of the things that he said, I was excited to just echo here on your show, is that the whole concept behind adaptability is teachable. And that's so different from so many of the things that you and I have worked with over the years. You know, abilities are pretty much hardwired. Yeah, you can maybe nudge them up a little bit over time, but they are same with motivators and personality.
But the adaptability piece is a learnable skill for those who choose to go down that path, which I think is incredibly powerful. Yeah, and again, I don't want to take away which we got a great speaker today or a great guest today. We got Josh Little and he's going to be talking about the Zoom fatigue. But before we get there, you know, and part of that is adaptability.
So a lot of people in March, you know, we've talked about that for seven months, but even before that. But that people were overnight and to adapt. What you do is you get into this spectrum of different stages of adaptability is sort of like a grief. And you know, you move from, I guess the earliest stages, some people just collapse.
They just fell apart. They stressed out, burnt out. And again, for doesn't mean that there weren't good reasons losing a job, getting sick, you know, multiple things, but you know, other people rebound it very well. So it went from collapsing to coping a lot and most people are just getting by and say, oh, we're flexing, but emotionally, they're just coping.
And then we get to growing and then we get to thriving. And ultimately we need to teach people, unfortunately, as you mentioned, things like resilience and grit and open mindedness or not open mindedness, but my growth mindset, mental flexibility on learning all these things. These are actually skills that we sort of took for granted before. And now we're able to, you know, they've been able to research science understand that we can actually teach people to become more adaptable.
It's a skill. Similar to what you and I start sort of met on over motivation, you know, the Q and Q quality, the motor is motive. You know, if you think of motivations intrinsic is it intrinsic or external? I have to, you know, dangle the carrot in front of somebody or is it just somebody's hardwired to do that?
And when you start looking at motivation as a skill, it changes everything. Now we can look at adaptability as a skill and just like EQ, emotional intelligence, people look at it. Some people are more emotional, some are less, no, there's a skill behind how we respond. So a lot of those things going on.
A couple of, as I said, we're going to bring on just really in a minute or so. I'm just looking at my notes here. We're going to bring on Josh Little, who's the CEO of Volley. We're also going to be entertaining at the end of after the break today.
We're going to have Joyce Joya again, our German group. We're going to be talking about being ahead of the curve, normal 2.0, and our focus today is going to be on leadership. So that should be fun. Went over really well last week.
We had a great conversation with her. Yeah, she was great. Yeah, and she was really excited about it. We got some great feedback.
So we're going to continue that on. And she has the Herman Trend Alert, which comes out weekly. I just got that early this morning. And in that one, I'm sure we'll adjust that in the future when it was about hotels in normal 2.0.
Yeah. I mean, I think they just I just thought that they wrote off 2020. And then somebody described it as a, you know, does everybody want to go back in a giant Petri dish? So they're going to have to figure that out.
Because somebody asked the last actually like a graduate class last night about an organization. Somebody who talked about Broadway, you know, when Zachary came back. And I had a lot of colleagues and performers. I know it would just, you know, from symphony performers to people who play in various theater productions.
It's just their toes. It's been a Broadway. I know a lot of theaters are like that. But Broadway seats were really built for people under 150 pounds and 5 foot 6.
Right. Yeah. They're like the anatomy. I mean, it's the opposite of the social distancing and safety.
So we're going to look like so. We don't want me to go. We need to address something because certainly what has saved us, why we're able to be as productive as we are in the stock market sky again today. But, you know, the economy for as bad as it is is good.
A lot of segments that are really thriving. And part of that is through technology. And using technology, one of the solutions was using Zoom. But people are getting fatigued.
You know, this is a, nobody has to be on screen except you, me and Josh. And eventually Joyce today. But, you know, I started at nine o'clock this morning and I've been on three calls. And, you know, fortunately one of them was just them, but I was just watching and observing.
But the other two, just back to back to back to back some days of being on screen. And it's a lot thing. So with that, we're going to bring in on Josh Little. He is the CEO of Volley.
This is the fourth startup he's had. Very successful startups in the past. And he's going to talk about how do we kind of get beyond the death by meeting? The death by meeting is to be you walk, you know, just kept looking at your calendar and you went from room to room.
Oh yes. You know, that would be easy. We just pop on the screen. And, but it's exhausting.
It's exhausting for a lot of people. I concur wholeheartedly. I'm really looking forward to what he's got to say to help navigate this because it's exhausting. You got to make sure your area is cleaned up.
You've got all these other parameters that go into a Zoom meeting versus picking up a phone call. So yeah, absolutely. That's it's exhausting even without worrying about all that stuff. So hopefully Josh is coming on board here.
There he is. Hey guys. Hey, good day. Josh.
Good morning for you, Josh. I think you're out in Utah, right? Yeah. Yeah.
So I think you got a couple hours sleep last night for our election. Right. I gave up. I knew it was going to be a long night.
Yeah. I guess. I think so. I'm shocked.
Actually everybody's worried about the protests and violence and you know, at least at this point, the markets have a couple hundred points. So that doesn't solve the economy. Obviously, what's it? 60% of the population doesn't even have it.
It's not even invested in the stock market. So we still have a lot of struggles. But, you know, as you heard the intro, I'm sure we're all struggling with this Zoom fatigue. And so talk a little bit about that because Zoom in one respect, not just Zoom, but Zoom, but Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, whatever, saved a lot of companies.
You know, especially people, consultants, speakers, trainers, businesses. How do we communicate? How do we sell? How do we reach people?
But going from, it's a whole different experience and going from one meeting to another. It's a whole different dynamic. So let's talk about that a little bit. And then I know your new venture has a solution or part of a solution for that.
For sure. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned the back to back to back that's been a badge of courage. A badge of courage in the corporate world for many years.
And we're hoping to change that. And I'm also glad you mentioned that Zoom is just the scapegoat here. Zoom happens to be kind of the market leader and got widely adopted because they built a great piece of technology. And, you know, better, but just marginally so, but that's all needed to be better than the others to get the adoption that it had.
So Zoom fatigue is your right. It's also Skype fatigue and go to meeting fatigue and all of the others out there. Because for some of the reasons you mentioned, it is not natural. And we're missing that really important bit of synchronicity that last one second of synchronicity that we're used to when we're sitting together in a room or when we're standing next to each other or even the telephone and cell phones have allowed us to have that synchronicity that duplex.
This little bit of timing that's off just makes a bit of a difference that makes the conversation seem awkward. And so. But I guess I'll challenge that a little bit because I can argue both sides of this. And somebody asked I think I asked this in the last time.
I have so many interviews and so many conversations besides my own. Somebody asked the question is what would what would the pandemic response been without technology? And we can actually frame that is what would be our response be without zoom or and again not specifically zoom. Thank you Google me.
Thank you Microsoft team. But what would the response have been without it? What would have been disastrous because the reality is we need to talk to move forward. Conversation is the heart of what moves work forward if you think about it.
We have all of these other tools email chat the text etc. Which are great for quick information updates and sharing you know files or links or whatnot. But to move forward we need to talk and the convention has been either you really only have two options. You can either jump on a call or you can set up a meeting and while both of those are interruptive that you know being able to do those virtually has sort of safe companies because that's really been the only way we can talk.
We've seen an increase in a large increase in virtual meetings on platforms like zoom. But we've also seen just a general uptick in the percentage of time spent in meetings which is increased 13% just since social distancing started. And that's on top of two decades of the time spent in meetings increasing by 8 to 10% a year. It's just kind of this runaway train which to which you had mentioned I read it's it becomes a back to back to back situation which gets in the way productivity.
So let me roll this back a little bit because you talk and again some people may not understand what when we talk about synchronicity is and obviously we're here together we're all in the same spot. And I have done the podcast for two years just audio and now that it's video I actually really like it because you get to see the people now at first it was like oh gosh I actually got to put more than a t-shirt on. You know I've got to make sure the background's right I don't have to do all this stuff. So to me it seems even more synchronous than a telephone.
Why do you say it's not as synchronous as a phone? Good question yeah when I say synchronous I mean time at the same time. So I'm a singer and one of the first things every school and choir wanted to do right after social distancing was a virtual choir. Let's get on zoom and sing.
But they quickly realized oh that doesn't work because when I'm speaking or singing I can't hear you and we might be just a second off a half a second off but that's enough to make it sound bad right. So that's that little little gap in synchronicity. What you're talking about the difference between phone and a video call like this is all about the getting the full spectrum of communication the full type of richness. It's been debated but somewhere between 70 to 93 percent of what is communicated is communicated through tone of voice and body language body language holding about 55 percent of that so the 55 percent the video ads is valuable because I could say I could say something and be looking off or have a sad look on my face or a trouble look on my face and then something totally different is if I'm emoting and smiling at you.
So video does add a lot but it's that synchronicity that wears on us. It's the lack of synchronicity. It's the I can't quite interrupt or you can't quite stop me and then if we stop then there's this gap and then we're kind of waiting who's going to talk next and we're actually amazing. I assume it being amazing at this dance called conversation.
So amazing that there is there exists this 200 millisecond gap between turns and a conversation. It's just and it exists across all languages, all cultures. So I know to wait about 200 milliseconds which is one fifth of a second and study show that if you wait just 600 milliseconds still less than a second. You you trigger what seems like an awkwardly long pause which causes you to think are they understanding what I'm saying.
Do they like what I'm saying. Do they not cause you to think all of these things. And so this less than a second difference adds up to a lot of friction which which leads to this zoom fatigue. So it's really interesting because in some of it was preparation some of it was just happenstance but I had done a podcast.
In 2010 I started it and it was blog talk radio for the if you remember that and you go on and I don't remember how we I think we I don't remember I guess we access it to the computer. I think you called in actually because the audio quality on that. You call in and the computer was like the interface to kind of pull everything together. I think for about 12 weeks 10 or 12 weeks and then I was like this is I'm busy this week and then it's built it out.
But well interesting when I went back I look I found my files and I found one of the files was I don't remember the exact title but it was virtual. Virtual virtual meetings was like visual communications in the future. And I had on it a startup. It was a CEO of a startup his name was and I actually reconnected I just connected with him again on the LinkedIn.
His name was JW. Now he's actually has a venture capital firm. That's what he does. And I said hey look at what I found and his technology book was called busy meeting visual meeting visual meeting.
And his response was if we had COVID 10 or COVID 10 instead of COVID 19 there might not be a zoom. That's right. So zoom went from 10 million to 300 million users I think between December and April, March or April. So timing is and you know there's better than I do in the startup world and especially technology sometimes timing is everything.
Absolutely. Yeah. And we're there. So let's talk about you got a solution.
I mean we can talk we can be zoom fatigue and I'm sure everybody agrees that they are. How do we get out of what do you work on? What are we doing? What are some ways that people can un-fatigue.
For sure. Well if you Google zoom fatigue you'll see a number of articles all well intentioned that say things like take breaks turn off your camera do all of these things that equal zooming less or talking less right and the answer isn't in talking less because I believe strongly and I think all would agree that conversation or communication is the way that we work for we have to talk in order to make them work for this is why executive spend 28 hours a week in meetings yet 17% of them feel that meetings are not a productive use of time. They need that time face to face to get by and to make decisions to do all of the leading that needs to happen in meetings. So the answer is not talking less.
In fact also another point SAP just launched an initiative to that all meetings need to be either 25 minutes or 50 minutes. There's no such thing as a 30 or 60 minute meeting. So that way we don't have back to back meetings right that's a good thing right. But I say if you if meetings are really flexible like that why not five minute meeting fine at two minute meetings if we can just suddenly compress the time right and that might be a solution.
But as I've seen companies move remotely as I've over the last decade and half experimented with remote work with my companies and sort of COVID coming on the scene and the social distancing is sort of sharpened my focus to a solution of this problem. And over the last couple of years when you talk about timing I've fallen in love with asynchronous video communication on several different platforms with friends and family. It turns out that conversations are turn based we take turns just like we've done in this conversation you've taken turns I've taken turns back and forth. But only because of the constraints of the physical world and the traditional world have we needed to take those turns synchronously at the same time meaning I have to listen to you while you're talking you have to listen to me while I'm talking.
And with technology we don't have to do that we can actually break up those turns and allow those turns to be taken when we have time in between so that we can open up our schedule and reduce this back to back to back to back. So what I've been working on is a conversation hub for work called volley that allows you to move forward with asynchronous video conversations. So I can record my volley which is just like maybe my stand up for the day we do asynchronous stand ups every day as an engineering team and we give our updates or I can say to the hey team I was thinking about this and you know what do you think should we get the blue two shirts or the white t shirts, you know and then everybody can chime in when I don't have a need for that answer right now I don't we don't need to have a meeting for this we don't need to make this time and place bound. But there's a lot of conversation that fits in between slack and zoom so to speak with slack meaning written text communication and zoom synchronous video communication there's certainly a place for synchronous.
You don't want to fire someone over text message right you just wouldn't do that you'd want to talk about it you have to tell a few companies that I just did it the other day again. Really. Yeah. I came out one of the new.
In emotionally charged conversation you want to reserve synchronous for those sorts of things but there's all of this conversation all this communication that falls in between written communication is slow because I can speak seven eight times faster than I can compose business communication even it's not a matter of typing. And then because you can you tend to perfect that emails even text messages I know friends who like obsess over getting everything right in their slack messages. But when written communication fails to be adequate. What do we do we need to talk and if we really only have two options jump on call or set up a meeting.
Then we're going to have back to back synchronous meetings all day which are going to interrupt productivity 65% of his executive say that meetings stand in direct opposition of them completing their individual work. And now we just increased that by 13% and increase the fatigue as well. So again for out there and a lot of people that you know zoom was this new technology learning how to use it so in addition to just the fatigue being in the community they had to learn functionality. How do we do that how do we set it up how do we log on how do we resolve the future.
But there you know I mean I in fact I got the point and I think this is a little bit what you're talking about. You know client calls me and says they're having trouble and you know before we walk them through or we set up a call but I can just as easily click the button I use this loom and there's a dub and number of other programs and I'll just record a screenshot and walk them through exactly what it is. And it takes the same amount of time to do it probably less time and send it to them and I got a tremendous response from that. You know favorable response because it didn't as you said it doesn't require them to find a quiet place to get the lighting right to be on the screen maybe they're involved with something else.
They can just watch it and get the answer. Yeah absolutely and you also gain a number of superpowers when you move from synchronous to asynchronous you now get some pre cool advantages one that you didn't have to schedule something under calendar so now your calendar opens up. And so that speed is a huge advantage because I can watch your loom synchronous video or asynchronous video at 2x and I just took your 10 minute presentation and watched it in 5 I just 2x my productivity for that little segments of time right and you know as we're starting to use tools podcast platforms very few people that I talked to are actually listening to things on 1x were 1.25 1.5 and depending on who speaking you know there might need to be a different speed. So I'm going to have the ability to stop time and think which is another superpower asynchronous educational research shows anytime you can wait 3 seconds anytime a student who wait 3 seconds before responding the quality of their response dramatically improves because they have that time to think and so Savin structures build in this think time this wait time where student can process because in reality because that 200 millisecond gap in between our turns in a conversation.
I'm building my response while you're speaking and I was just doing this when you were speaking last I thought you were going to go somewhere like how does it work and I got my phone and that's where we're going after we got a couple minutes here. How does it work out and that was how does it how does it how does it how is it different than when I just described or from a slack or from somebody or discord or some of these other channels. Yeah, so I mean the big difference is asynchronous and what that looks like we have a mobile app right now on iPhone we're building desktop and Android as well and we're about to launch the iOS app but these are all of my conversations just like text messages and here I'll embarrassingly go into one with my wife and you can see the video is running there and these are our turns in this conversation in the in the timeline of the conversation. So this is our conversation over time never before has has conversation been able to be recorded and volley just does that naturally.
So I can view this is my wife making fish lips. Oh, she's going to be embarrassed. You're going to think you're going to think about it. But I can I can record a volley by hitting record and saying hi sweetie love you.
I'm giving a non-business example I got to think of a better conversation to jump in but then that drops in the timeline. Sorry on the side and the conversation expands. So this format of communicating is great for brainstorming because creativity doesn't happen on a schedule. It doesn't happen Friday at five o'clock or Tuesday at two thirty.
It happens when you're in the shower or in these random places so you can quickly record. Oh, 12 going to shower with it. Oh, yeah, true waterproof right. So it allows you all of these other things not to mention inclusivity because group conversations are bad for inclusivity.
We've all been in meetings where someone can't stop talking and other people can't get a word in ed wise and they go silent and they feel like they're not heard. And the beauty of asynchronous is everyone can hit the record button. Everyone has an equal opportunity to hit record and to chime in and to give their two cents because we're not constrained by this time box in this physical space. So is your is your platform then just one to one or could you do three, five, ten people asynchronous at the same time as part of a conversation?
Oh, yeah, for sure. You can you can have just like text messages. You can have text messages. I'm a group multiple people.
Yeah. So here's our engineering updates conversation with all of my co-founders and, you know, all of us chiming in on engineering updates or our stand up conversation or just a general sort of random put anything there because Slack is kind of pioneered that you just need to catch all the general sort of conversation to put everything in. So we're coming up on a break in the end of the segment, Josh. How can people get volley?
How can they download it or where can they download it and how can they get a hold of you if they want to have any questions? Yeah, thanks. Volleyapp.com. We're not quite lost.
We're still in private beta. We have hundreds of companies that are kind of on the wait list. So we're slowly bringing them in and letting them adopt the tool while we're learning and just polishing. So it's not publicly available yet, but we'll be in the coming weeks.
So if you go to Volleyapp.com, you can join the wait list or you can find me on LinkedIn, LinkedIn slash little Josh. Yeah, I saw that. I was looking at that in for Josh. Little Josh.
I have to bring it back to get that story out of it. How you became little Josh, but I appreciate it very much. Josh, I appreciate you being here. I know a lot of people are suffering for it.
I like that idea. And then even without that, I mean, just the idea of shooting video. A lot of people may not have thought about that, but I'm excited to do that. I can see some immediate needs for it.
So I'm going to try to get on the wait list and hopefully get notification was available. Well, I know a guy. So I can. Thank you very much.
Stay safe. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks so much.
Great stuff. So we are going to take a short break here. We're going to hear from our sponsors, Success Performance Solutions. And when we come back, we're going to have our celebrity futurist Joyce Joya from the Herman group.
We're going to be talking this week, how to be headed the curve. We're going to talk about leadership in normal 2.0. Stay tuned. We'll stay in two minutes.
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Hey, welcome back everyone. This is a Googleization Show and our new segment, ahead of the curve. Hopefully Joyce will be joining us very shortly. There she is.
Hey, Joyce. How are you? Dan, here you are. You're on mute.
Joyce, you're on mute. There we go. I'm great. As great as I can be on about one and a half hours of sleep.
Join the club. I didn't have my, I actually don't wear my Fitbit anymore, but I think if I would have worn it, that's about what I had, sleep sleep. Even when I was attempting to get out of that. I looked at Andrea Mitchell this morning on television and I said, oh my God, that's how I feel.
Now you got me curious. Oh, well, she has circles under her eyes. Understandably. I think I woke up last night.
I think I woke up at the TV and I woke up and it was like 3 o'clock in Chris Cuomo was just coming on, just starting with it. When do you ever see any of them on the middle of the night? That group. Welcome back.
We had a great response. It's great to be back with you and Michael. Yeah. We saw we had the Herman Trend Alert got it this morning and I think with hotels, right?
Yeah. Hotel hacks. Hotel hacks. So I can't wait in one of the future weeks.
We'll get into that. But I know we got a lot to talk about. I wanted to appropriate timing with leadership in the new normal or normal 2.0, whatever that's going to be. And this was from a couple of weeks ago in the Trend Alert Herman Trend Alert.
I covered 22nd actually. Okay. So people can get up to the website, which is scrolling across the bottom and get it from the archives. But you talked about a couple different things.
You talked about purposeful leadership, empathy, creativity, innovation. Let's put that in perspective. Where would you like to start, Ira? Well, I guess the question is, I mean, people have been studying leadership forever.
We've been around for a while. Michael, a little bit long enough. There's a million different theories of leadership. So I guess one is, I think we all agree that going forward, it's going to be different.
But what's different about the different skills? I mean, why aren't some of the good old standard off the shelf leadership things? I've got to fly. Why isn't it going to work anymore?
And they are, except that some are more important than others. And I'm going to start with something that you happen to be very enthusiastic about, which is agility. And a cue, as you call it, or agility quotient is even more important than it's ever been before. Because we need to be able, oh, it's actually adaptability, right?
Yeah, I'm going to interrupt you. That's what I meant. So it's more important because things are changing so fast that we need to be able to adapt quickly. And that is a key leadership trait, I think, for this new normal.
And it's not like we're going to be there. It's like we're there. And as far as I'm concerned, this is normal 2.0. And what happens, post pandemic is normal 3.0.
And in fact, I'm going to be doing a presentation for the Asia Pacific Futures Network on our post pandemic future in normal 3.0. Because it, too, is going to be different. We talked about why I call it normal 2.0, the fact that it's an evolution of normal, the fact that it's not like we're going back to something, like back to a normal, or to a new normal, but we're going forward into a new version of normal, at least in my view. And there are many aspects of leadership, which, yes, admittedly were important before, but are even more important now because we're in a time where our environment is not a new version of normal.
And now, because we're in a time where our employees, our followers, need us to be more for them than we ever had to be before. So I'm looking at this. Actually, I'm reading a book. It's called the Adaptation Advantage, new book, great book.
And there was a graph and it just happened to be sitting here. And underneath that, the description of it is human adaptation is linear. Technology change is exponential. And I think that's important because even in graduate classes, I started to teach last night, is that there's still people perceive their changes of their own life.
And if their changes are, if we make a gradual change, it's enough. And it used to be. The problem is, is when the world is changing at an incredibly faster rate than it ever did before, which comes up with the VUCA, the Volatile and Complex and the Biggivos. Even if you are changing, you've gotten so much better than used to be a change.
It's still not enough, which then the responsibility, and this is what I was trying to teach the students, and again, it's a graduate class, but most of them are 25 to 31 years old, so they don't have 20 or 30 years of life experiences, not an executive leadership program. But they had some, like a career. Yeah, they had some, but they were still kind of microed, and it's like, you guys were counting on you to be, is it the leaders of the future? Really?
The leader of the future, you have to do two things. One is, you have to understand how to adapt at the rate of change, and secondly, how do you get other people to do it? If you're a manager of it, don't worry about it. If you're a leader, you have to get people to acknowledge that we're not going back.
And to embrace your vision for the future so that they can support you in helping it to become a reality. So again, let's go back to a couple of things you talked about. Sure. One of the things that definitely changed, and again, I think this is definitely if you went back to what leadership was in the 50s and 60s and 70s, or authoritarian empathy was a thing, not, the empathy was a weakness.
How was a vulnerability? Yeah, empathy is so important. I read that I did a whole weeks trend alert on different aspects of empathy, and what is empathy, and we can address that sometime in the future. But empathy is vital.
It's critical for leaders right now, because people are suffering financially. People are suffering emotionally. Some of our employees have actually lost loved ones. People are suffering socially because they can't connect with others.
I mean, there's so many ways that people are suffering, and so leaders need to be even more empathetic than they ever were before. So that they can see things from their employees perspective and help to support that employee through whatever he or she is going through. So what are some of the other things? I mean, again, we've got to be five more minutes and there's a lot.
I think there's a lot that we could talk about. There's all ideas isn't there? Yeah, I think we could talk about creativity innovation. I think people get that part.
We need to be doing that. But the purpose of leadership, I think, is also very, very important. And again, that tends to resonate with people. It's what people need right now rather than just attending a solution or fixing a problem that we've got.
I mean, talk about purpose. Having a purpose makes us feel like we're contributing to something greater than ourselves. And when our purpose is aligned with the purpose of the organization, that's when the magic happens. Can you give an example of that?
I know you have stories in that of an organization that did that because again, people are struggling right now. And one of our companies that has been an employer of choice for more years than any other company is called Sedgwick. And it used to be called Sedgwick CMS, which stands for claims management services. And those folks, they have like, what, 80,000 now employees worldwide speaking 14 or 17 or 24 or 42 different languages.
I mean, it just boggles the mind. And what they've done is something that I talk about in my book, Experience Rules, because what they've done is to align their employer brand with their external brand. And it all works together so that the employees feel invested in living that brand and their brand is carrying counts. And it's a light motif that goes through every aspect, whether it's their relationships with their suppliers or their relationships with their employees or their relationships with their clients or their relationships with their clients clients who are the claimants, they live caring.
And from the CEO down to the frontline person, they live the purpose of caring for others. I think it's just, I think it's amazing. How do we, so again, I can hear this, you know, I've been around the wild and people go back and go, you know, we're reading the book. We're reading the book on purpose leadership and we're going through our strategic plan.
And we just came up with a new, you know, we came up with our slogan. And here's our mission, you know, then. Well, the thing is that most companies these days are not even looking at missions. They're exchanging purpose for mission.
But how do we move beyond, how does the company move beyond the tagline that marketing came up with? That's right. And everybody says, hey, we just did a survey and everybody said we need to have more caring. So that's our new buzzword.
How do you? No, it's about, here's what it, here's the way you do it is you have to make sure that everyone in the organization from the top executive all the way down to the front line, all the way down to the front line person is on board with that. You can't just show up and say, this is what we're going to do. From now on, we're going to live caring counts and expect it to happen.
It has to be conversations, CEO to leadership team to middle managers to frontline supervisors to frontline people. Everyone has to have that conversation. How do we make that our brand live? And in that conversation, we need to make sure that people actually believe that that's what they want to do.
And if you do it that way, it's going to work. If you do it any other way, it's not. And so in last week, we talked about culture add and culture fit. So I mean, it really is a great segue with that of understanding of people hired people to what the world used to be, but you need to hire people not only do they value what you value, but what do they add to that equation.
If they're just fitting, it's passive. If they add to it, it means they feel important as part of that as per lab that they want to contribute to that. Exactly. And it's about skating to where the puck is going to be.
And that has to do with strategic workforce planning. So we don't want to only hire people for today. We want to hire people who can grow into the positions that we're going to need in the future. We're coming up toward the end.
We can always we can talk forever. I know we'll do a big back in. How can people get a hold of you? What are we talking about next week?
My email address is joice at hermangroup.com. And my website to reach me is is hermangroup.com or you can reach me by going to Hermantrendalert.com and they can sign up for the weekly Hermantrend alert next week. We're going to do it in order. We would talk about empathy and the critical importance of empathy in normal 2.0.
That sounds like a good segue. We're definitely going to need that because I think however the election turns out, we're all going to have to stand and somebody else's shoes. So that may be and it's just way beyond that. I know.
But that's a good start. So that'll be our therapy for next week. Joice, thank you. It's a very good start.
And thank you for this opportunity. As usual, Ira, Michael, it was great being with you all. And I look forward to our conversation next week. Excited to have you back next week.
So Michael, we've had a busy day already. We've had our AQ. Lots of Zoom meetings, lots of calls, lots of news. We learned how to resolve our fatigue.
I really like, I didn't think of it in that perspective, but I like that asynchronously. You know what it reminded me of? We just didn't have a chance to get in there. We might have a Snapchat, but basically more in a corporate setting.
We're just sending out a message and then having people on a conversation chain. So it's very cool technology. And I don't know if you use Slack or not, but I know there's a couple other tools like that. But somebody who I was on a call the other day and they said, oh, yeah, we just need our Slack audio on for like two hours a day.
So you're like in the same room. Interesting. Very interesting. So anyway, I want to thank everybody.
I don't want to fatigue them too much here. We're going to click on it close here. I want to thank everybody again for listening to and watching now. The Google de-exseases and Googleization show.
I got my guest co-host, Michael Spermouli along with me. And we now have our new segment with Joia at the end of each show about keeping ahead of the curve. I really appreciate that. If you missed the show, you want to have a replay or you'd rather prefer to get it on your podcast.
We're on almost every podcast, Apple, Google Spotify, iHeart, you name it. We are there. So until next week, 1 p.m. Eastern time, don't lift the shift.
And you'll get your plans.