Transcript
Speaker: In a post COVID world, how do you keep your culture strong and your people engaged? That's what we'll talk about on the next episode of The Market That Moves America. Welcome to The Market That Moves America, a podcast from the National Center for the Middle Market, which will educate you about the challenges facing mid -sized companies and help you take advantage of new opportunities.
Speaker: Today's podcast is about what middle market companies can do to keep employees engaged as they work their way through the impact of COVID -19. I'm Tom Stewart. I'm the executive director of the National Center for the Middle Market at the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business.
Speaker: where the nation's leading research group studying mid -sized companies, which account for a third of private sector employment in GDP, and the lion's share of economic growth. It is indeed the market that moves America. The National Center for the Middle Market is a partnership between Ohio State and CHUB.
Speaker: I've got with me today a special guest and a friend, Larry Inks, Professor Inks. Larry is a clinical professor of management at HR at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State. He's the former VP of talent planning at Cardinal Health. Before that, he worked at Allied Signal in PepsiCo, so three companies known for their extraordinary management of talent. And he's worked with the NCMM before on a couple of studies of talent planning and development. Larry, it's great to have you.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks. Tom, glad to be here. I want to kick around two topics today, not small topics. I don't know if we can get through. We certainly can't resolve them both, but at least frame them up. First and foremost is about culture engagement and managing people in the pandemic. Not that we're going to solve it, but I'd like us also to think ahead a little bit to the fact that companies and people
Speaker: look like we're going to be very, you know, facing a really tough couple of three years. So managing talent in tough times in a recessionary environment. So easy, right? Pandemic, recession, people, we can boil that ocean in 20 minutes.
Speaker: Yeah, I think we need a little more time than that. I mean, those are topics that can be difficult even when you don't have a pandemic that you're facing. And I think the pandemic has really added a lot of questions and thrown a lot of things at this that we have to deal with, especially when you think about how do you manage culture and you think about how do you keep people engaged in all these times.
Speaker: know what we did a couple of pulse checks of went out with some surveys to mid -size company executives and when we went out in March right just after the pandemic was decreed by by WHO um uncertainty was like king of the hill in terms of like their concerns like just what the heck is going on uh we went back again in June and uncertainty was still high but not as not as high
Speaker: And what was creeping up as numbers two and three were keeping employees engaged and keeping customers engaged. And so this idea of sort of how do we, now that we know we're not dead or not dead yet, what do we need to get back to work seemed to be coming pretty high on senior leaders' attention meters. What are you hearing about that?
Speaker: Well, like a lot of folks, I mean, what a lot of people are talking about now is you've got a large number of people that have been working remotely or working from home. And you've got a lot of people that are saying, you know what, I really like this. I hadn't done this before. I did it out of necessity. But this is something that I'd like to continue doing.
Speaker: On the flip side of it, you've got some people now that are saying, you know what, the novelty is wearing off a little bit, and I'm ready to get back to work. And I think it's over simplistic, but I think you start talking about people that are more introverted versus more extroverted, and that may be one of the differences. But I think organizations are going to have to deal with, and they're going to have to think both tactically and strategically about what does the new organization look like.
Speaker: So I'm assuming, and maybe wrong about this, but I'm assuming that when we get back to work, whatever that is, that for a lot of people, time in the office is going to be less. I mean, two days a week, two weeks a month, working from home a lot more, working remotely. And that presents all kinds of issues like, where is everybody? How do I onboard people? Where's the
Speaker: Where's the coffee pot to have a conversation around? It raises all kinds of questions about culture and also organizing teams. We may have a team where, especially mid -sized companies, we may have, where they're not used to maybe teams widely dispersed geographically. We may have teams from home, teams from work and teams asynchronous and maybe much more complicated just to get stuff done.
Speaker: Yeah, team effectiveness was a challenge in the first place. So now you're talking about some people are in, some people are not in. It's going to be a major challenge. I know that I've also started seeing some work being done and you see articles in the Wall Street Journal and things that are saying this. We're starting to see some cracks in kind of the working from home thing because there's some unforeseen costs
Speaker: Things like, you know, losing the spontaneous discussion that you have in the hallway or the, you know, ad hoc brainstorming session that you can't really get quite as easily when everybody's working remotely and everything has to be programmed out. Yeah, and there's some other issues about that. I was talking to somebody who was saying, one of the other things is, you know, we can all get in the Zoom room together, but
Speaker: But there also are issues about the quiet people, the introverted people, the people who don't speak up anyway and who might be sort of just left of bus stop.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's there's it's really going to be it's going to be like this is like Disneyland, Disney World for organizational psychologists, because there's so much to be to be done here. You know, culture is one of those things I think that is particularly important because, you know, you think about people that are in a workplace, eight hours a day or whatever, they're surrounded by icons, they're surrounded by symbols, they're surrounded, they're immersed in in the culture.
Speaker: and in behaviors with other people. And then they're at home and they don't see this so much. So one big concern I have for organizations is that organizations have to be thinking about how do they retain the culture? How do they retain people's identity? How do they help people retain their identity as part of the organization? You know, one of the things, when I've talked to executives of mid -sized companies,
Speaker: they like to say, and I think they mean it, about that one of their advantages from a culture point of view is that they're more likely to know everybody. You know, there are 200 employees in this company, 300. I know them all by name, or I know most of them by name. I may know their families, I may know their dogs, you know, I may see their dogs on Zoom now, but that's another question. But there's that sort of, some of that physical closeness, high Bob, high Jane, that may just be
Speaker: difficult and put yourself in the position of a leader of one of those companies. What are a couple of things that they ought to be thinking about doing? I mean, people talk about the boss's touch, just that management by walking around, hiya, hiya, how are you? What's going on? What are the ways that executives and mid -sized companies where that's particularly valuable can try to recreate that?
Speaker: Well, first, I think, to your point, that's not only great for the executives, for the leaders to be able to know the people, but those kind of interactions are incredibly meaningful for the person on the other end of it. The fact that the president of the company knows my name and was asking about my spouse or how my son's baseball team played or whatever it is. So I think one thing the organization is going to have to do, though, is think
Speaker: I said before strategically and tactically, I think they're going to have to go back and start really thinking about for all these different positions. Is this a position that needs to be here or at work or can it be remote? Because I, you know, again, I not to sound like I don't care about people, but I think the primary decision about working remotely versus not starts with the nature of the job itself. If the job is one that requires you to be in the workplace, then
Speaker: if that person wants to be working from home, that might not be the right fit. So I think that's the first thing they could be doing.
Speaker: And then also, I think they need to think when they're making that decision, think about not only the immediate consequences, but some of the longer term things. For example, you could have some jobs that could they be done by somebody working from home? Yes. But think about all the secondary and tertiary things that go along with that. To what extent do team dynamics, team effectiveness, is that hurt? To what extent are we losing the creativity?
Speaker: So I think organizations need to think pretty carefully about what it can look like going forward, and then they're gonna have to try to make the best decisions they can in terms of who works remotely and who doesn't. There's another thing that I've been concerned about, and let me share it with you, and that is literally physical safety. You hear people say, oh, people are getting so much unemployment, they don't wanna come back to work. And then I talk to people and say, that's not it, I'm just not sure it's safe.
Speaker: And, you know, you and I know that one of the classic studies in the whole literature of human resources is the work that Frederick Hertzberg did about motivating people. One more time, how do you motivate employees? And he made a distinction by what he called motivators, which are often things about growth and promotion and development, and hygiene factors, which are things like just pay and benefits and a safe workplace, that sort of stuff. And he said, you don't motivate people with hygiene factors.
Speaker: But it seems to me that hygiene factors quite literally, you know, sanitizer and physical separation and HVAC, seems to me that executives ought to be thinking about those hygiene factors as well as the social factors in a very literal sense.
Speaker: Yeah, they're going to have to. And it is funny because, you know, you talk about some motivators. Hertzberg would say, motivators are the things when they are present, they cause satisfaction. Hygiene factors, when they're absent, they cause dissatisfaction. So on the one hand, I think one motivator could be the interaction.
Speaker: This motivates me, the dynamic interplay between me and other workplace and other people. But if I don't feel comfortable, if I don't feel safe here, then that's definitely a problem. You also think about Maslow's hierarchy, which probably everybody that's listened to this has heard before. You think about safety.
Speaker: physiological needs, but also safety and security needs. And here we are. And this is, this is one aspect of it. So they're going to definitely have to think about the implications for layouts, for shifts, as you said, a lot of things to do here. This is, this is a lot of work ahead of us. You know, there, there was a, I've done a lot of work on sort of service design and experience design. And, and one of the things that's really interesting about these things is that
Speaker: If you've got a product and you want to prove that the product is of high quality, you can sort of, there's often tangible evidence, you know, you can kick the tires or slam the door to the car, right? But when you're talking about something intangible, a service would be an example, a workplace safety, isn't it? It's often, it's often intangible and you need to create evidence of it. You know, so seeing somebody, like seeing somebody go around with hand sanitizer and wiping a table,
Speaker: is tangible evidence. And that's one of something that usually is hidden. And I guess part of that is that I think one of the things executives need to be thinking about is how do you make it not only be safe, but be seen to be safe, be visibly safe.
Speaker: Yeah, I think there's definitely behaviors they need to be very clear about. I think communication is also gonna be critical. Communication about why, for those people we expect back and what's it gonna look like and what's the new normal gonna be and how we're gonna make sure that everybody stays safe and how do we make sure that we're gonna get back to functioning just as effectively as we used to be doing. So it's communications, obviously a huge piece here.
Speaker: And one of the things that you go back to that, actually, when you just were saying about functioning as effectively as we used to be, that sort of also gets me back to Hertzberg. And some other work that, and you know this work well, that a lot of what motivates people is the idea that we're making progress. We're getting somewhere. We are accomplishing what we're trying to accomplish. And another piece is that I'm growing. I'm making progress. I'm learning every day. I've got a future here. I can see a promotion.
Speaker: All of that, we've got the pandemic on the one hand, and then we've got a recession on the other hand. How do you keep those motivators going when business is tough? When people are going to be seeing budget cuts and layoffs, you need engagement more than ever. How do you get it? You've been through this with companies. How do you make that happen?
Speaker: Well, I mean, uncertainty is, nobody likes uncertainty, and there's a ton of uncertainty out there right now. You know, you've got legendary kinds of things that organizations do. I've done some work just recently with an organization that has never laid anybody off.
Speaker: And even in the middle of this pandemic, they have not laid anybody off. My dad retired from Eli Lilly. And I remember hearing stories about Eli, it's not the company I was talking about, but Eli Lilly in the depression, they didn't lay anybody off. And what they would do is they'd have at the plants, they'd have people paint all the buildings green.
Speaker: And when they got done painting them green, they'd go back and paint them blue. So they'd find something for them to do. And the thing is, these are the kind of legendary events that live on in the culture. And so when people are wondering, does this company care about me? Does this organization care about me? These things live on. You said before, you know,
Speaker: You know, it's a tough time for talent and everything. You know, when times are good, talent remembers. Talent, people remember how they were treated. So, you know, right now, people, you could say, well, people should just be gosh darn glad that they've got a job. There will come a time and hopefully sooner rather than not, where that's not necessarily going to have to be the case, people are going to remember how they were treated.
Speaker: So I think organizations, what they need to be doing is they need to think about the different positions they've got and what positions need to come back in, absolutely have to. Where could we be open -minded about it? How can we be as fair with people as possible? And in doing so, have an organization that's still going to be very, very effective. I'm hearing a couple of interesting themes. One theme is that one of the things that executives
Speaker: need to do right now is do some of the hard work sitting down with a pencil and paper and your executive team saying, all right, who are our key people? Who are our key positions? What are we doing? Who are the people we must not lose and what do we do about them? And also some hard work about where can these people work? What's the work circumstance for that? And the third piece of hard work is let's make sure the workplace is safe.
Speaker: Yeah, I'll tell you, it goes back to this idea of engagement and culture. Now I get asked all the time by folks, you know, our average merit increase budget is two or three percent. So how do we hold on to talented people? Well, the answer to that, what big answer there is culture.
Speaker: You have a work environment that people say, you know what, I could be getting a little bit more money someplace else, but here are the things I love about this. And so many of those things have to do with the quality of their coworkers and the nature that they're doing. And I've got a big concern that right now you've got people that are working from home and they're losing a sense of culture and they're basically a remote worker.
Speaker: and they're feeling less of a tie to the organization. I think organizations, in addition to identifying the talent, like you said, they have to be thinking about how do we get people re -engaged with our culture? How do we people, if people are going to be working remotely, what can we do so that those people feel just as much a part of our organization as the people that are coming in every day? You know, I started my career in the book publishing business and we had books that we had salesmen
Speaker: Almost all salesmen, there were a few saleswomen at that point, but they were all remote. And then they come in every year, twice a year for sales conference. And there's nothing more fun than getting drunk with salespeople. But the other thing that happens is after you get drunk with salespeople, the conversation is always the same. Is headquarters stupid or are they trying to screw us on purpose? And that's sort of what I think sometimes about remote work. They lose that, you know,
Speaker: you lose that question of engagement and links to headquarters. You got to worry about making sure that that happens. And by the way, I'm also thinking the other side, we got a bunch of people who are working from home and then we got a bunch of people who may be working in the factory or they're healthcare workers and they're working outside or in the store. They're not working from home. And that's another cultural split I can see. I think you're sitting there under your chandelier and you're
Speaker: in your dining room, and I'm out here in the factory, and you could imagine that being a pretty intense problem too. Yeah, you had mentioned, you asked the question before, what do leaders need to be doing to get ahead of this thing? And what they got to do is they
