84% said that those silos have a negative impact on security, and 84% said that had a negative impact on productivity. So you feel like this poll between IT and security, and in some organizations, that's the same person, or the same people, and they're struggling to find a way to ensure that we're giving employees the experience that they need while ensuring that they're working in a safe environment. Welcome back, everyone, to the Geeks, Geezers and Googlesation Show, the home of Googlesation Nation, where we talk with HR and business thought leaders about the crazy, never-normal shift going on all around us. Our goal is to bring you ways to reimagine tomorrow and explore the ever-changing convergence of people, business, and technology.
Here's your host, Ira Wolf. Welcome back, everyone, to the Geeks, Geezers, and Googlesation Show. Thank you for being part of Googlesation Nation. I'm Ira Wolf.
If you think this is just another podcast, think again. This is the voice of the most important conversations in the future of work confronting business leaders and people today. My goal is to bring you ways to reimagine tomorrow and explore the ever-changing convergence of business, people, and technology. For the past few months on each episode, you've been hearing me talk about everywhere work and the 2024 Everywhere Work Report.
Well, this week, I'm going to really dig into this evolution, or maybe we should call it revolution of everywhere work. It's impact, what's going well, and what must be done better. So I'm delighted that Melissa Pools, a Vonti's Chief Marketing Officer and SVP of Customer Success will be joining me. And one question I'm going to be exploring with Melissa is, what problem is a Vonti trying to solve that most companies haven't figured out yet when it comes to everywhere work?
By the way, before we get there, you can download the 2024 Everywhere Work Report for free by going to adaptabilitytoolkit.com forward slash 24 Everywhere Work, that's adaptabilitytoolkit.com 2024 Everywhere Work. I'd also encourage you to visit the website of avonti.com and watch the keynote addresses from a Vonti CEO, Jeff Abbott, and futurist Sam Rad about the future of work recorded at the recent Avonti Solutions Summit in April. You'll find the link in the show notes too. So what is everywhere work?
I can't remember to whom I should give credit for this, but this was shared at the Avonti Summit this past April. It pretty well thums up everywhere work, nine feet, nine floors, nine miles, nine time zones. But the biggest mistake I see companies, managers, and workers make is that they think it means just working remotely. Everywhere work means much more than that.
It means working anywhere, everywhere, and at any time. Which by the way doesn't mean working 24, 7, 365, but having the flexibility to work when it's most productive and effective for the company, team, and the individual worker. Threading that needle is essential, but difficult and complex. Few organizations have been successful in doing it.
It's a work in progress. Which is confirmed with something about these calling the flexibility disconnect. You'll learn a little bit more about that in a minute. So everywhere work also means that people must be safe and connected no matter where, when, and how they're working.
The truth is that enabling everywhere work is becoming more challenging every day. The best strategy is moving target. And we'll focus on a common goal very often, HR, IT, and security work in separate silos and are often just ships passing in the night. It's impossible to look at the future work without these essential business functions working together and collaborating and considering the impact each has on the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of everywhere work and the employee experience.
So now with that groundwork and background laid, let me introduce Melissa Poole's. As I mentioned earlier, Melissa is a Vonti's Chief Marketing Officer and SVP of Customer Success. She's responsible for all aspects of the Vonti customer journey from initial awareness to purchase adoption expansion and renewal, ensuring organizations maximize the value of a Vonti solutions for greater outcomes. Melissa's passionate, which you'll definitely hear in her presence shortly, about all the phases of the customer experience and brings decades of experience to Vonti with a strong track record of fuel and growth through a customer-centric approach and integrated marketing strategies.
She was most recently senior VP and CMO at Avid, and prior to that she was CMO and held marketing leadership positions with the Optanics, Progress, Iron Mountain, and Infor. Let's welcome Melissa Poole's to the Googleization Nation stage. Hey, Ira, that was quite an intro, thank you. Yeah, we had a, well, we spent a lot of time together about almost three months ago.
It was a good thing for eternity ago. A lot of things happened since then, but it was great to see Avonti and catch up just the other day, but we got a lot to talk about. So let's just dig into everywhere work. Where we are, I know you're living and breathing that.
Every day. How did I do with the explanation of everywhere work? And I can't remember if that was Jeff or Sam or Shree, or who gave the nine steps, nine floors, nine miles, nine zones, but that's brilliant. And it pretty well sums it up.
Yeah, yeah. You mentioned Sam Rad. So those of you who want to go to Avonti.com and listen to Sam Rad's keynote. She is super rad and she talks a lot about these issues and connecting the technology with the human spirit and AI and all those fun things are happening.
So highly recommend that. But I think you did a great job of describing everywhere work. And look, I've been a person who has done everywhere work since the last 25 years. I lived in Boston.
I was working in Boston when I graduated college. And I was like, no, I really want to live by the ocean. And I had this vision of like, why not just hire the best person for the job regardless of where they're living? So I up and moved to beautiful Cape Cod, Massachusetts for some of you that may vacation here.
I get the pleasure of living here every day. And I've been doing everywhere work that entire time. And it's evolved through the years. And it was certainly a battle to try to help people understand the benefit of everywhere work back in the day.
We had to overcome some hurdles. But now it's evolved to be not only something that's a great thing, in my opinion, but something that's necessary for people to be able to do their best work. Let me get off mute there. That probably helped people can hear me.
Let's talk about a couple of things. There were a number of highlights in the report that came out. And I briefly mentioned this coming in that there was a huge disconnect. And again, we read about this all the time.
And normally it comes down to how many workers want to be remote, how many want to work, are willing to work hybrid. And then you have the CEO mandates and manager mandates that are coming down that you have to be present. And there's a lot of working parts in here. But that to me was one of the more significant findings in the report.
So I don't know if you can share some of what came out with the flexibility disconnect. Yeah, well, first of all, the report says 85% of business leaders we surveyed support flexible work environments. And 80% of workers say that flexible work is highly valuable to them. And 40% said they would quit their job to gain flexibility, which is amazing.
But the flexibility disconnect is even though 80% find flexible work highly valuable, only 25% said their work is actually highly flexible. So even though there's these expectations or these needs to have a highly flexible work environment, which we can talk about flexibility, I think your point was a really good one earlier. It's not about remote work. It's about doing work on the individual's time and what makes the needs for the individual company that they're working for.
But even though they're saying, hey, I'll put my job if there's inflexibility, I'll go try to find something else. I really want a really value flexibility, but I don't feel like 25% feel like their environment that they're in right now is considered flexible. So it's a disconnect we're still seeing in the workplace. One of the things that we really need to focus on too is it's not just about that flexibility.
It's like, oh, you can just check in. It's all about having the tools that are needed to be able to do that. And that came out in the reported well. And again, just another kind of disconnect.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so look, I think we're in an interesting moment in time where you have conflicting challenges when it comes to the needs of the systems and tools within a company between really security and IT. And they have very kind of conflicting, in some way, conflicting needs or interests, and they're both really, really important, where the IT folks want to and are required to in that flexible work environment.
You have their employees, the tools they need to be successful in their jobs and to be able to deliver the outcomes that they're expected and to have flexible and great tools to work with. And IT takes that seriously. They're very serious about making sure that their employees have the tools they need to have a great environment to work in. And then with the continuous and the threat actors, they're getting more and more aggressive on the security side and coming after infrastructures of business, which security professionals have got to take very seriously.
And in bigger organizations, you have that divide. In fact, our survey said, our survey results said 52% of IT and security professionals say security data and IT data are siloed inside their organization, that the data is siloed, that the way they operate is siloed. And 84% said that those silos have a negative impact on security and 84% said that had a negative impact on productivity. So you feel like this poll between IT and security and in some organizations, that's the same person or the same people.
And they're struggling to find a way to ensure that we're giving employees the experience that they need while ensuring that they're working in a safe environment. And that's a challenge that all organizations face today, regardless of the size that you work in. So Avanti has a big part to play in that, where we're really bringing together IT and security professionals on a platform where they can work together to understand where, for example, discover all those devices and endpoints that people are working on, understanding where those devices are, that you're able to manage those devices effectively, right? And endpoints, and endpoints, regardless of where they are, that you're able to manage them, that you could service those in a streamlined way and provide them in a secure environment.
So Avanti's uniquely positioned there, but it certainly is a challenge that we're seeing become greater and greater. And then HR, I'm as we were talking about the other day, HR is really looking at the human side of all of that. And so they play a very important role in connecting, providing a secure environment while giving the resources that their employees need. And they're kind of in the middle trying to make sure that that that has happened effectively.
So it's an interesting time to be able to leverage technology to bring security and IT together. There's so much to unpack there that you just said. So my mind was racing back to the first time I had a conversation with Jeff. And just make this aware of the challenges that exist, where Jeff Abbott, the CEO, shared an example of there was a vulnerability with a client.
And they couldn't figure out where it was from to realize, I think it was on a ship, that there was hundreds of smart toasters located. And so with the internet of things and so many devices connected, so people walk down, I can imagine a company, walks down, you bring in your laptop, there's security, you bring in your iPad, you bring in a smartphone, everybody walks in with a watch, which I might not at the moment, but a watch. And it's connected, or they bring in an appliance or printers. I mean, there are so many things that are now wireless and connected, and they're all vulnerable points.
That's right. And the first thing you have to do is discover them, know where they are. And that's, I really think IT and security at the end of this whole game, we're in IT and security going to be the heroes in this whole story. Because they're the ones that are going to make sure we stay safe in this new environment, but also give us the tools we need to be successful.
But in that example, with the toasters, it started with understanding that those toasters existed and that there were smart toasters in on that ship out in the middle of nowhere that could potentially lead to vulnerabilities. So if you understand where all those are by discovering them, that's the first step. And then you have to make sure they're secure, right? That they're operating in a secure environment.
And then from there, you can manage and service those devices in an effective way. But it starts really with discovering them, knowing where they actually exist. I just want to roll our talk back just a minute or two because we keep talking about IT and security. And as we talked about the other day, in larger organizations, there may be designated departments or designated people that are responsible with that.
And as you highlighted in the Avanti solution summit, the importance of bringing the CIO and the CISO together, the information security, together, officer together, that they need to collaborate because there's a, maybe this was Shree, your chief product officer, who brought this up, is that there's something called anti-frigility. And I've been talking about that for about 20 years, I discovered it about 10 years ago. And we talked about being resilience. And oftentimes, when we talk about security, it's like we need to lock down this place.
And that was one of the reasons that many organizations said, remote work won't work for us. It will work. It's just challenging as we're talking about. And it has to work because you're just not going to have the people available to do that.
And I mean, because of the locale, or it may be because people don't want to move. I know your headquarters is in Utah. And as far as I know, there's no ocean. There's not a lot of big bodies of water in Utah.
So it's in order to have you available to Avanti, it needs to work. So having, I think the key points are, is one, is for most many people to understand that although it could be one person, that IT and security are really two separate functions. It would be like saying in HR that if you're an expert in payroll and administration and benefits, that you also have to be an expert in recruitment. As we've been talking about the everywhere work one, is you can download it at 2024 Everywhere Work Report.
You can get it at adaptabilitytoolkit.com forward slash 2024 Everywhere Work. And there's also a number of, again, you can also go to the Avanti.com website and explore the Keynote. And there was a Keynote from Jeff Abbott CEO that was up there. And you certainly can explore that.
And you also can go to the Watch Sam Rat, a futurist. And a fascinating report or a Keynote address up to about 30 to 40 minutes. And I've seen a lot of futurists speak. And she was phenomenal.
We're trying to get her schedule on the show. But she's so busy. It was tough getting her there. And welcome back, Melissa.
You froze up. Yes, apparently I did. And we just had a few of those moments we had this thunderstorm rolling in. It's just not that hit today.
So sorry. Yes, but no worries, speaking about IT insecurity. So I can't remember where I was delivering and you left us for a moment. But we were talking about the IT and security of working together.
And one of the things that I discovered at the Avanti Solutions Summit and then through the report prior to that was how there, although it could be the same person that, but there's completely different functions. And the analogy that I had used was that in the HR world, you have people that are payroll and benefits experts. They're not, even though one HR person may be responsible for hiring and recruiting and benefits in payroll, they need to be proficient in all of those. It's not bad.
Oh, I also recruit when I have time. In this day and age, IT and security need to always be on. They're two full fledged different functions. But essential.
So whether it's one person is doing it, one department's doing it, they need to really collaborate. But the missing link on that, and especially when we're talking about HR and recruitment and building teams, even AI automation is going to shrink workforces, which I don't think it will. Even if we're talking about that, HR technology, and I've been living this for pretty much 30 years, has been a series of integrations. It's not one system.
It's not like one piece of software. You get it and assume that we'll do everything for you. In our world, certainly it's Workday and Oracle SAP, these large enterprise systems. But then somebody says, but I don't like the way it does payroll, or I don't like the way we want to have a blog, or we want to have a chat.
And then all of a sudden, there's these other software pieces. And it sort of becomes like a jenga tower. And we're going to remove this piece, and then add it somewhere else and hope it stands. And the world I've lived with HR Tech has been exactly that.
And two things that it, frankly, I didn't hear any conversations here. None. I never heard a conversation here. The assumption is we're going to build this so it's functional and the best employee experience for the employee and the HR department.
And that's IT and security problem. I never heard security, by the way. It's IT's problem. It's IT's problem to make it work.
But I never really heard the security problem. But every one of those integrations, and then going back, even complicating it once that further, talking about all the ways people connect to those, adds so much complexity. And essentially, that's what you're doing. From my understanding, I've worked with you for four years, and I have a fair understanding of what you do.
But it's to help make that really complex process simple. Yeah, that's exactly right. So you have complete visibility into your various endpoints, whether it's a toaster, a laptop, a phone, whatever it's going to be, that you have visibility into all of those endpoints, that you can manage those endpoints in an effective way. So you know where they are, you're discovering them.
You're identifying, you're able to do service management on those devices in a way that gives the employee experience to be a good one, right? That they can go easily and say, I have this issue, with this device, can you help fix it? That you know those devices and endpoints are secure, that they're locked down, that you have an ability to understand your risk in your environment. So where do you have vulnerabilities?
And when do you have to hit on that patch Tuesday to make sure you patch up those vulnerabilities, right? And that's where your security people come into play. And then you have ongoing management of those, where you're just delivering them out to the right places, making sure they come back to you, so on and so forth. So the great thing about where Avanti says is it brings that CIO and the security, whether they're different functions in organization, organizationally, or just those functions that need to get done, that this is finally the platform for CIOs and CISOs to have a common language that they're speaking regarding all of their endpoints and devices.
So our goal really is to break down barriers between IT and security so everywhere work can thrive, right? And that sounds very marketing, coming from a marketing person, I guess I can say that. But that's ultimately what we're trying to do, is break down any of those barriers between those functions, give them a common view of all of their endpoints that they're working with and on, to give the employees an amazing experience, but also balance that with the IT requirements, that security requirements that IT professionals have today. Yeah, and speaking of kind of all the complexity, there's a, and he came in, he was a friend of mine and he came in and guest lectured, I teach innovation and entrepreneurship at the Mulemberg College, which most listeners would know at this point, because I talk about it all the time.
And he has a startup and his company works with in cyber-curity space, but he talks about even a small college, and this wasn't Mulemberg that he was working with, he was working with another one, maybe 1500 students, maybe even fewer than that, so a small liberal arts college nearby. And he was working on their vendors because they found that the vulnerability came through their vendors. So they use 300 different third party vendors, and they either have, I like to order supplies or everything. What happens, everybody wants to integrate it and make it simple, that you don't have 300 systems that you log into, but now when you integrate those and have one system that's 300 different points of entry and just creating, so anybody who buys products, anybody who purchases products on a volume and uses a third party system, that's another vulnerability.
Right, right, yeah, I mean, that's why there's a big trend in vendor consolidation too, and not that you're ever going to eliminate the various technologies you have within your company, but we are seeing that the vendor consolidation is major, and that's one of the reasons for that, but let's say, we're always gonna have different systems that are locked in together and integrated, and you're trying to figure out if you have any kind of vulnerability in your system, where is that and how you solve for that? And that's gotta be a part of the whole system infrastructure and architecture, is to be able to understand where your risk is, and then prioritizing that risk, and say, okay, all things aren't, there's a lot of vulnerabilities coming out from every company, CVEs are being posted all the time, which ones are the most critical, and which ones do we need to prioritize, patching, getting a fix, so that you can, I like to say, no offense to Walmart, but you got your grandma's China that you need to take care of, you gotta treat it like a piece of gold, right, you don't want any of those plates to crash, sometimes the Walmart stuff can go crashing on the ground and you don't worry about it so much, that's kind of the same thing as this, like you gotta make sure you can find where your grandma's China is and that you take care of it and make sure that that's being fixed and solved for, and again, that's not just IT's responsibility, it's not just securities responsibility, it's them working together to identifying risk, prioritizing that risk and then solving for it and working with your vendors to ensure you're patching as you need to, so it's, you know, it starts with having visibility. Yeah, and this, again, you become hyper aware when you're working on a subject or working with somebody like you, so also I'm hyper aware of all these things, I was also hyper aware because I invested in a couple, not a lot of, I think maybe 10 shares of stock in this company, but just, I think it was yesterday, or the day before it popped up, it's like, why did my stock crash, why did my shares drop like 30%, and there was a breach, well, there was, there were a, of this company, I won't give it a company name, you can look it up, there was 165 customers who had their username and password credentials stolen. Now the first thing is, is why wasn't the software working?
Why wasn't, but that wasn't the problem. I'm just gonna read this because I just found it this morning. It wasn't an indictment of this company's software or environment, the affected customers appeared to have failed to impose a two factor authentication on the users seeking access, so bad actors were therefore able to simply log in without having to also confirm their identity with a third party device, such as a smartphone. Basically, it was their employees, found their work around, that they can log in to the system from their smartphone, not from their laptop, their iPad, or their PC, to be able to get in.
So, there's no perfect solution, but it's a matter of having a practices and mindset that this all can work together. Right, right, yeah, look, I think it's a little, like if you're the old brick and mortar environment, where you needed to make sure that your work environment was safe, right? You need to make sure that in some way to identify who you were, and we weren't just letting anyone in buildings, and you have your badges, and so on, obviously those still exist in the workplace where people go in the actual place frequently. But if you had, if you made that overly difficult for your employees to come in, like the security levels were so high that they couldn't, it was really in convenience, even walk in the building, yeah, you would be really safe, but you'd have people complaining a lot that they weren't able to get in the building easily.
And I think security, we should look at it that same way. You absolutely, if you're working in a regular place, you have got to have your badge on you, you can't let anyone just let you in the door, all those protocols we take very seriously, those rules that you put in place in your organization in everywhere work environments are to do the same thing. And employees really need to respect and honor that because just like you would in an individual location that you go into, but on the flip side, security can't make it so difficult, right? This is, again, the challenge of the disconnect, and security can't make it so difficult that employees like, forget it, I'm gonna find a workaround every time.
So it's an important balance to strike, but it's one I think we're still dealing with today. But employees, they have to take this seriously because they could potentially be at risk too. I think Melissa froze up again, but this is a perfect segue because we were at the bottom of the hour and we're gonna take a quick break. And you've been listening to Geeks News and Googleization.
We've been talking with Melissa Pools, the Chief Marketing Officer and SVP at Customer Success at Avantee. We've been talking about the Everywhere Work report and Everywhere Work. And you can download the Everywhere Work report, the 2024 Everywhere Work report at adaptability. toolkit.com forward slash 2024 Everywhere Work.
We will be right back. We're gonna take a quick break. Hopefully Melissa will be able to join us again. And we wanna thank our adaptability toolkit for being our sponsor.
We'll be right back. Are your employees feeling stuck in just showing up or a paycheck? Is your workforce working harder to get back to normal than adapting to the future? It's time to help them break their addiction to certainty and develop a growth mindset.
Developed by one of the world's top rated future of work thought leaders. AQ plus Mindset is a powerful tool to help your employees embrace change, adapt faster and grow on the job. Conveniently deliver to any smart phone or laptop and easy to digest five to 10 minute lessons. Managers can sit back and watch employee attitudes shift towards growth and innovation in just 30 days.
Are you ready to help your employees thrive in this ever changing, never normal world? Encourage them to show more grit, resilience, adaptability and unlock their potential. The journey to a growth future starts with a growth mindset. Visit AQ plus Mindset.com or call 484-373-4300.
Welcome back to the Geeks Geeks and Googolization Show. We've been talking with Melissa Pools from a Vonti. We've been talking about the everywhere workplace and hopefully Melissa will be able to join us. I think there was a number of storms that were rolling through her place up on Cape Cod.
But hopefully we'll be able to get her to come back on. In the meantime, talking about the things that happen, life happens, shift happens. I just released a new ebook, an audio series, which actually is introduction to a second series, called, the first one's called Thrive, and the second one's called Upheaval. And basically life happens and shift happens as we talk about each week.
But how do we continue to grow and thrive and function despite all these obstacles? And you can go to adaptabilitytoolkit.com, click on courses and underneath courses, click on Thrive. That is free and you're gonna free ebook, the audio is only about nine minutes and it talks about some of the basics of being in situations like we are with Melissa. When life happens and shift happens on a spontaneous basis.
It's always at the most fun moments, isn't it? Ira, I've shared this before. One of my favorite interviews was with, he's become a friend, John Sonny. He's a futurist as well from South Africa.
And he's taught me so much. I've learned so much from him. But the first time that he was on, I was so looking forward to it. And we had a series of storms moving in and I just ran out, I wanted to run out of my door real quick and just go to the restroom.
And as I did, I looked and it was water coming into my office. I've been here 20 years and my wife's been in the house for 22 years at that point or maybe 20 years at that point. And it was, we just had so much rain that it just started to leak through the foundation and it wasn't a lot, but my office is in the basement and I'm looking and so I ran and grabbed towels and then during the conversation similar to this, I would put myself on mute and block out the screen and run out to see if it's holding and replacing it. And fortunately through editing and things nobody ever knew it.
But the stuff happened. The cool stuff happened. We're trying to be prepared. Anyway, and I apologize, apparently I've been pronouncing your name wrong because I was going by Melissa, but it's Puls.
Well, you know, my daughter's name is Malia. And she is, I was, she's now retired, we call it, but she was a high level gymnast. And she would get awards, they would call her at the end of a gymnastics competition and they would call her Malia Pools and her all of her teammates would go, it's Malia Puls, like, you know, so it's fine. I'm used to it, I respond to anything.
Yeah, it's like the IRA in the era because apparently to everybody in Asia and Africa and also parts of Europe, you pronounce it era. Era? Well, you can call me anything, Ira. We'll call you Melissa.
Okay. Anyway, we had a great segue. We were just leading into that. We were going to take a break anyway so you're timing with our fix.
We talked about, we were just leading into the importance of the employee experience. And that's what I love about it. That was the strangest thing when I was first introduced to Avanti, I think it was right after your first report. You everywhere work with this is the fourth annual of course, report, yeah.
And it's like, what's a cybersecurity company talking about software company talking about the employee experience? Why was this so important? We got to talk, I mean, you engineered this. I mean, this is your bailiwick stuff.
Yeah, yeah. This is our comfortable place that we like to live. Listen, I think it's all about the people, the human beings that are doing the work and making sure that they're put in the best position to do the work. And that's not only the places we've been talking about it, like the flexibility of where you're able to work.
But really ensuring that you have, employee engagement is so, so important to a company's success. Like we believe diversity is huge obviously, and having a diverse community, but also having employees that are highly engaged. And the way to get employees engaged is to ensure that you're breaking down any barriers that are in their work environment to get the kind of outcomes that you need. So that's where technology should step in and give you a real what we call our digital experience for, like our deck score that says, how you take all these inputs from your infrastructure, the different ways that your employees are engaging with your infrastructure and say, how satisfied are they with those tools that they're leveraging?
So you could figure out where the challenges are in your infrastructure and prioritize where to solve for them. So because Avanti is uniquely positioned to understand all the devices, right? We talked about discovering the endpoints, servicing those endpoints, making sure they're secure. There's a lot of data that's coming in through all of those infrastructures, and through our neurons platform, we're able to get use that data to feed into a system that provides insights to companies so that they can perform better with their employee experience.
So the HR angle is so important there. Again, you go back to IT, they care a lot about their employees experience. I mean, the IT people, the ones that I speak to, they live and breathe and die by ensuring that the people that are doing the work and do it effectively. And HR is all about culture and engagement and making sure their employees are satisfied.
So that's where it kind of comes together, is having the insights to be able to know that where your gaps are and how to improve upon them. Yeah, and I don't remember the exact percentage, but it was significant. Hopefully you have that on hand, but this goes beyond just employee engagement. This talks about retention.
And I forget the exact percentage because I look at so many different reports, but it's a significant number of people that will leave if your digital employee experience, they may love working for the company, but if it's just a pain in the butt, the log in and work remotely, I mean, it's one thing being able to have that, be able to work remotely, but if every time they want to access something, they have to find a workaround, which obviously creates those small abilities. But it was significantly high. I don't know if you have that number on it. Yeah, I think it was somewhere around 45% age.
It was right in that. Yes, exactly. Yeah. It was a high number.
And again, so I know people focus on culture so often and teamwork and support, but sometimes it's just that I love working it, but I want to travel or you have kids and they just can't get there. Yeah. These times always go so incredibly fast and I can, you know, I'm not talking with you guys. It's not over yet, is it?
It is not, but we're approaching that, but we want to kind of bring it home. Yeah. So there were five kind of like five general ways to, especially for small medium size business, which is your focus. I mean, obviously when you're talking to the SAPs and the Oracle's, we're talking about large enterprises and I know you work with some, but when we're talking about small medium size businesses and that's where most of our listeners are, is there are kind of five general themes.
And I'm going to kick it off with the first one, because we talk about that every week here, whether it's with you or not. And it's about the future works here. It's right here. It's now.
I know people are thinking, well, we have that on our strategic plan or two or three years from now. That's too late. Yeah. The way things move.
Again, it's only been two months since we attended the conference and there was, it seems like an eternity. There's so many things that have happened in our life and business and everywhere else. But so the first one is to, the awareness that future work is now. Yep.
Yep. Everywhere work is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. You know, we've seen the evolution, even our brand promises, been about the everywhere workplace, right?
And now we just call it everywhere work because it's about flexibility. And that future work is here now, not going away. And I cited a couple of data points on this call. You can read the report.
It's the screams all over there that it's not, you know, flexibility is key. I would like to mention though, in that notion, which is perfectly fine. There are some work environments where people need to go into work every day because that's where the work is done. And that's okay.
If that's the requirement of that company. The point is that it's got to meet the needs of the employees and of the company together, their common objectives. But the future work is here. It's now, it's not going anywhere.
Yeah. So you had, we had talked about like five key points. What were so many other ones? What were so many other key points?
Well, I can I kind of just alluded to that. But flexibility is key for employee experience and engagement. As I said, everywhere work is about flexibility. It's not about a place.
It's people putting people in an environment where they can do their best work. So flexibility is absolutely critical and for companies to be looking through the lens of what's needed to provide that level of flexibility. We talk about, you know, another key one is security is critical to make and as your employees and customers are safe. It's about education obviously and making this at the center, but also having the right tools and technologies to bring IT and security and HR together to ensure that we have the right level of security, but also of the employee experience as a whole.
And I think another one is connection and culture, that in this everywhere work environment, it can be more challenging to bring people together and connect groups of people. So, you know, we have things like a women's connection group here at Avanti, which is awesome. Like we do a lot of coffee talks where people can come and just talk about either their days or talk about, you know, acknowledge each other's work or those are free sessions for people just to come in and say what's on their mind. We do things like Avanti's got talent.
We have a lot of talented people here at Avanti and we like to showcase that so we can make that kind of a cultural aspect. So connection and culture is critical. And then I think the last thing really is employee experience, translate to customer experience. And that's really what I'm all about.
You know, here we have, we're looking at the entire life cycle of the employee experience and the customer experience, because that's the way you're gonna get the best outcomes for your business. So I think those are really just some free, a few, you know, key takeaways that we can all walk away with today. And we'll list those in the show notes as well. But unfortunately, it's got the warning here.
We've got about four minutes left. I was gonna go in the show before we got tossed off the year. I wanna, one is what's the best way for people to kind of get in touch with you. Yeah, so LinkedIn, Melissa Pauls, you can hook up on LinkedIn.
I'd love that. Also my email is Melissa.pulse at avantee.com. You obviously can go out on avantee.com and get more information that way, but don't hesitate to reach out. Love to hear from you.
And we always wrap up with what we call the lightning round. And we'll do this pretty quickly. So does we get to know you a little bit more, who Melissa is other than the chief marketing officer at Avanti? What's your go-to music?
Or it could be a song, it could be a band, it could be a genre. Yeah, well first of all, and I'm not just saying this, I love all genres of music. I really do. And my husband, who's a math teacher by day, high school math teacher by day, is a musician by night.
And he plays in his band. And I like to go, I'm an absolute groupie. I like to go to his gigs and sit there with a skinny margarita and watch him sing. But classic rock really is what he likes to play.
So I want to know. Is there one particular group out of it? He's really good at Bob Seager. Very good about that.
That's interesting. I think that's the first thing that we've had here. Second question, and I have a whole long list, but we don't have time for all of them. But the next question is, it's always interesting.
If there was one person you can meet past, present, or I guess future, who would it be? Well, it's going to be a little bit of a shallow answer. But Joe Missoula, who just won the Celtics won the NBA championship. And Joe is the coach.
So right now, today, there's a big parade on Friday in Boston. So right now, I'd love to have dinner with our lunch with Joe. That would be cool. What would be one question you'd want to ask?
What is his secret to his leadership style? I think he's a young coach. He's learned a lot fast. What is the secret to his leadership?
I can imagine there will be lots of blogs and articles written in the next couple weeks about that as well. Absolutely. So you may indirectly get your wish. There you go.
Well, it's been a pleasure. It's always good to talk to you and everybody, Ubuntu. One is I highly recommend people just go explore the website about the dot com. There's a lot of resources.
Make sure you watch the keynotes from Jeff Abbott and Sam Rad that are available. And I think Shree's is up there, too. So there's a number of keynotes that you can do. You can also download the 2024 Everywhere Work Report from there, or you can go to adaptability.
Soilkit.com forward slash 2024 Everywhere Work. And download the report there. It's free. I highly encourage you to do it.
Thank you for being part of Googleization Nation. Thank you for listening. And we're watching, wherever you're doing it, to Geeks Keesis and Googleization. We'll be back every week.
As you know, we'll be talking more about the future work. We have some great guests lined up. We will be taking a couple of weeks off over the summer for the holiday. Everybody's on vacation.
So it's sometimes tough to get schedules. But we will be back soon. Meanwhile, we've got 400 shows. You can listen to past episodes.
And a few were about a bantise. So you can just do a search for Everywhere Work. And Geeks Keesis and Googleization. And there's a number of shows up there about that.
Until next time, don't let the shift. Hit your plans. Thanks for watching Geeks, Geeks, Geeks, and Googleization. Be sure to listen to the podcast and follow us on YouTube.
This show was produced and edited by Hilton Productions.