Recorded Webinar

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben Brooks: Hello everyone and welcome to the Bamboo HR virtual summit. My name is Ben Brooks. I am thrilled to be speaking with you today. I believe this is the third or fourth year that PILOT and myself have been able to speak at this amazing summit. Thank you to all of our friends and pandas at Bamboo HR.

[00:00:17] Ben Brooks: They put on such a great, I think the world's largest virtual HR summit, and it's free. So this great thought leadership, really glad to be here. I'm the founder and CEO of PILOT. And today I'm going to be talking to you about engaging your employees by understanding their needs. This is a passion. This is a topic that I'm extremely passionate about.

[00:00:35] Ben Brooks: A little bit about me, just to give a sense of a context for who I am. I'm a former senior vice president of HR at a big global company. I've been a management consultant. I've worked in a lot of big organizations that are global and complex. I've also worked with a lot of nonprofits and other types of organizations.

[00:00:51] Ben Brooks: And , about 10 years ago, I created my own coaching practice and founded PILOT with my life savings, with the mission for everyone to feel [00:01:00] Powerful at work. Now, a little bit about PILOT is, we're trying to help employees solicit feedback, advocate for themselves, prioritize their development, create closer relationships with their colleagues and their managers, the fundamental sticky parts of a great employee experience.

[00:01:17] Ben Brooks: And we'll tell you a little bit more about PILOT later in our session today. Now, if you're in the chat today, we have a lot of members of our crew from PILOT in the chat. We're here to answer questions, to, provide additional resources and also hear from you and to get your ideas and your thoughts on all of this.

[00:01:34] Ben Brooks: So again, simply put PILOT is employee development that works. We have a solution that's actually award winning. We've won the HR product of the year award and it's proven affordable, scalable, and easy to implement the things that people in HR want, need, and deserve. So today we're going to talk about five primary things.

[00:01:55] Ben Brooks: How do you engage your employees in this new world of work? What is the employee [00:02:00] experience really about? And how does that work? What do future focused manager conversations look like and how can you enable your managers to have them to give HR some leverage? How do you take action out of a session like this?

[00:02:12] Ben Brooks: Not just to, have interesting information, but to leave this session empowered to do something. And what are we our next steps? We're gonna cover all of that. In less than a half an hour. And we'll have this recording for you as well, that we could provide as well. But again, recommend you give your full attention.

[00:02:27] Ben Brooks: We call it monotasking one thing at once. You deserve to listen to this content. We spent a lot of time to make sure they're sure this is valuable and to really, again, help you have the best experience for your employees. So what is HR dealing with, we talk to HR professionals around the United States and around the world every day to hear about their challenges and hybrid and remote.

[00:02:49] Ben Brooks: While it's often great for employees and we're a remote first company ourselves, it creates sometimes disconnection. It's harder to feel close to colleagues or build relationships. Imagine onboarding in a [00:03:00] purely virtual environments can be a very difficult thing. The tight labor market also makes employer switching costs low.

[00:03:07] Ben Brooks: I can close my laptop and open up a different one that gets mailed to my house. And I don't have to relocate and I don't have to do all these things. So it makes the switching costs lower in the less sticky employee experience. Now, quiet quitting has become loud quitting and people have, certainly decided in different environments.

[00:03:25] Ben Brooks: Over the last couple of years to vote with their feet and, double dipping, we've seen people even take two jobs at once, right? Some pretty crazy things. And again, all things for HR to sort through and then again work is a slice of pie in our lives is become a smaller slice.

[00:03:42] Ben Brooks: We think about a lot of other things, employees in particular. And look, we have to also remember that most of our employees hopefully are pretty talented professionals that are committed to your organization. And we owe it to them to keep them engaged, to keep them [00:04:00] retained, to keep them growing.

[00:04:01] Ben Brooks: So they feel that your employer is the best place for them to spend the next few years of their career. Now, Gartner, a great research organization, talked about HR leaders having to do so much at once, and we'll talk more about this in a second, but, needing to manage investments in people and technology.

[00:04:18] Ben Brooks: Technology is becoming one of the big parts of an HR person's job, right? A great culture, right? There's DEI parts of that, employee experience, and then HR also has to become digital and efficient and automated and outsourced. And meet employee expectations, which the new Gen Z's and Millennials are expecting more of a consumer like experience.

[00:04:38] Ben Brooks: So all of this is to say, HR is up against a lot. So what we're going to talk about with the employee experience today is flipping the model on its head, thinking very differently about using resources that may not be tapped in your organization. Because I think we could all agree and put a plus one in the chat if you agree with this, HR doesn't have a lot more capacity.

[00:04:57] Ben Brooks: HR is pretty burnt out. There's, HR maxed [00:05:00] out. I know very few people that are like, Oh, I'm doubling my head count in HR next year. Or we have a lot of idle people said almost no one ever in HR. And so it's important that we think in an inventive manner. So what's the typical approach about the employee experience?

[00:05:15] Ben Brooks: We think, Oh, we've got low engagement or we've got people quitting or we're not able to attract enough candidates or people are leaving after two or three years, right? There'll be some precipitating event that has us think we've got to do something about this employee experience or engagement in general.

[00:05:31] Ben Brooks: There's a sort of suggestion box. Now, what does this look like? The annual engagement survey. Now, I used to run engagement surveys in my last HR role, and I believe in surveys. They can be very powerful tools, but we often use surveys for sort of things that would be better done in a conversation, and they often don't really give us the insights we want.

[00:05:50] Ben Brooks: I think they can be very useful. If we use them properly, but the idea is essentially employees put suggestions and vote and everyone has their thoughts and it all goes into this big thing. And we have this report and we put [00:06:00] some really vague statement out with very little commitment on our intranet and have work groups.

[00:06:05] Ben Brooks: And the reality is that employees don't give us any credit if we ask what they want different and then we don't do anything. In fact, Mercer's research shows that it actually reduces. if you ask and then don't just think about that. If at one of your favorite s and you had a complaint o you felt like it fell on be more likely to look ar

[00:06:34] Ben Brooks: It's no different in employees and how they view their experience at your organization. Now, what we'll do with that survey data, right? We aggregate it and say, okay, it's a little like the army here. We need to create a one size fits none experience. And I say that a little bit in jest, Look, the army and the military is great.

[00:06:48] Ben Brooks: Everyone gets their knapsack and their uniform and their bunk and all these things, and that's great in certain ways, but that's really typically not what the average employee in, a non militarized sort of environment wants [00:07:00] or needs. Oftentimes, if you've got a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand employees in your organization, you have that many different sets of expectations.

[00:07:10] Ben Brooks: So that suggestion box, that survey. It's going to lead you in a lot of different directions, and it's going to be very hard to please so many different people with so many different expectations if you're trying to standardize. And look, there should be basics. There should be fundamentals. Everyone can access the intranet, and the directory works, and there's a certain set of benefits.

[00:07:29] Ben Brooks: Those are good basics, but the experience when employees, at the end of the day, when their loved ones at the dinner table says, How was work today? Their roommate, their face timing, they live with someone, a spouse, kids. The answer to that question isn't the benefits package. It isn't the fact that everyone got, an iPhone or a laptop or that you have a really groovy intranet, which are all nice things.

[00:07:52] Ben Brooks: It's often things that really are tied to their direct work environment and role in team. And that's what we know is a great [00:08:00] experience in the first place, right? It's often that old saying, people join organizations and they leave managers. Well, what do we do about that? Everyone thinks we have to have better managers and trainer managers.

[00:08:12] Ben Brooks: Our view at PILOT is a little different. Our view is that we need to have employees and managers have better relationships. Managers may not get a whole lot better. We'd like them to, and we should invest in them and train in them. But, frankly, for 30 or 40 years, consulting firms have tried to make managers better.

[00:08:26] Ben Brooks: If you've got managers, you wish you could be better, put a comment in the chat, we'd love to hear from you about what your challenges are, or if you actually maybe agree with my point that maybe managers, you There's not that much capability to influence them because they're pretty busy. They have day jobs, not a lot of pure management jobs.

[00:08:41] Ben Brooks: We also know people having friends at work makes a tremendous difference. Gallup wrote a whole book after surveying 12 million people on friendship. People leave, they always say, what are they going to miss? The people, right? So encouraging relationships is a very sticky way to create retention.

[00:08:58] Ben Brooks: Of course, you got to pay people [00:09:00] well and have good benefits. Most organizations have got that sorted and have good benchmarks around that. Also people have to be able to advance. That's a key thing. If they feel like they're at a dead end, especially if they're top talent. They're going to leave because it may not be advanced means promotion.

[00:09:14] Ben Brooks: It may mean, additional challenge, exposure, feedback, feeling on the cutting edge of technology or methodologies. And that includes development, also clear feedback, people knowing where they stand and being praised for good work and knowing how they can improve is critical and being recognized for when they do that great work and celebrating and then set up for success.

[00:09:35] Ben Brooks: Think of how frustrating it is when you try to do something you're supposed to do. File an expense report, do compliance training, use the CRM, get a job rec posted. We want to make doing the right thing to do the easy thing to do again, good work life integration and balance. And of course, pride in your products and services and your brand, Marcus Buckingham, great author groovy accents, a suave guy.

[00:09:57] Ben Brooks: And he said, people leave managers, not companies. [00:10:00] That is true. What do we do to bring those people together? The Global Happiness Report said interpersonal relationships rank first, number one, of power to explain variation in job satisfaction. So you want to look at someone who's disengaged.

[00:10:14] Ben Brooks: You're probably going to see someone who has poor relationships with their co workers, their boss. And, Gallup studies that 80 percent of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged. Feedback sometimes we think in a negative way, but in reality, it's a very loving and compassionate thing.

[00:10:30] Ben Brooks: It's delivered in the right context. There's the book Radical Candor is one of my favorites. Or another one, Thanks for the Feedback, that are both great examples. If you're looking for those resources, maybe my PILOT crew can drop those links in the chat for everyone. The thing I bring is, we can, again, we talked about the survey, right?

[00:10:46] Ben Brooks: We're going to try to find the answer. We know the answer. Wouldn't you agree that these are the things that we need to work on? It's not some strange answer where we need to, I don't know, pump, pump on a white tea scent into the office or, [00:11:00] put on, Enya every time we start a meeting those might be nice things.

[00:11:02] Ben Brooks: It'd be very, groovy Westin lobby like, but what we need to do. is get the basics right that these are the things that move the needle. We like to focus on other things. We like to focus on giving everyone employee volunteer day, which is a nice thing to do. I believe in volunteering, but if you don't have a good relationship with your manager, getting one day out of 200 days in a work year to go volunteer and paint a fence or pick up trash ain't gonna move the needle.

[00:11:24] Ben Brooks: This is the things that we need to work on. Now, the other thing we have to realize is that each employee, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand employees have different unique needs. That's based upon where they're at in their career. Imagine someone who's recently at a university or a new hire their aspirations.

[00:11:42] Ben Brooks: Some people imagine someone that's a first generation person who's really here to make it in this country or in your organization versus someone who's in a different stage of life. Again, the generation, what Gen Z versus, Millennials, and Millennials is a pretty wide swath, and, people at my, I'm the tail end or on the top end of Millennials that calls [00:12:00] geriatric Millennials, quite a becoming sexy name their family situation.

[00:12:03] Ben Brooks: For those of you who had kids. You've got two phases of your career, before kids and after kids. It doesn't mean you have any less ambition, but it certainly changes the context for you, in terms of how you think about what your unmet needs are. Your health. Imagine having a chronic medical condition or surviving a medical condition.

[00:12:21] Ben Brooks: These things are really, shaping what we want from a workplace, as well as our values. And people leave organizations where their values are misaligned or not expressed. And even your faith which ties to flexibility and other things like that. So we have to think that if you were to think of even, a team of 10 people, 10 different people sitting around a table or 10 different Brady Box squares, Brady Bunch squares in the Zoom, each of those human beings want and need different things.

[00:12:47] Ben Brooks: There's no way that HR or management from the center can solve for all of that. We need to do something different. In fact, HR managers, are overwhelmed, right? We can't spoon feed. You [00:13:00] got, if you have 10 people, your spans and layers, you have 10 people with a span of control for a manager on average, you say, okay, let's.

[00:13:06] Ben Brooks: Figure out your unmet needs. Well, do you have time to make an unmet needs plan for every single person and then solve it for them? They'd be like having 10 children at the workplace. HR doesn't have the bandwidth, the HR business partners, nor do managers. So we have to have the employees.

[00:13:22] Ben Brooks: help HR and management. Now, I'm not saying we're letting managers off the hook or that HR doesn't have an active part to play. I'm saying HR's job is to be in the strategic seat, not the administrative and the operational, the strategic seat. This is a big part of SHRM's strategy over the long term that we fully endorse at PILOT as well.

[00:13:40] Ben Brooks: And they're a partner of ours when we do webinars like this. And what we're seeking to do is to, really think of a different method to get leverage for HR and managers. And what do you do with that? Well, it's often a conversation. Now at PILOT, we call it the ears model. You may have heard the grow model if you're a coach, but the ears model, it's all ears is all about [00:14:00] listening.

[00:14:00] Ben Brooks: When we manage, we often direct, we tell, we're the field marshal. We've got that clipboard. We're given orders and those sorts of things, which can be really important for getting things done. When we need to develop people and understand their unmet needs, we don't know what they are.

[00:14:14] Ben Brooks: We're not mind readers. Each employee, Ben Brooks is the world's leading expert on Ben Brooks, and you are the world's leading expert on you, and your colleague is the world's leading expert on them, and so let's tap into that. And so we've developed a model that we use in our award winning employee development program, and it talks about establish, assess, review, and shake.

[00:14:34] Ben Brooks: You establish, you set the purpose, you, people aren't, you, a manager sits down to talk with an employee, they're like, am I in trouble? Right? You get a little anxious or what's, what is this about? Or is this a performance review? And it's no, no, no. The purpose is I want to make sure you're engaged.

[00:14:46] Ben Brooks: I value hearing you in this organization. I want to make sure that I support you in getting your needs met. You assess, you often get down to one thing. You can't solve it all. So you can do this model again and again. So what's the thing if someone's. [00:15:00] Really struggling because they're on a project that they just can't really get traction on.

[00:15:04] Ben Brooks: Focus on that. If someone is super bored and they need stimulation, focus on that. If someone's got a work life integration issue, focus on that. That's the ASSESS. REVIEW. You think of many different ideas. How could you solve that? And if you got one, that is way too few. You need a bunch. What I always talk about is the manager should help add items to the menu.

[00:15:22] Ben Brooks: The employee and the manager pick the one together and then they have a handshake on it. So it's a really powerful model, but there's actually a discussion guide. And you know what? I'll tell you what, if you are willing to email Layton, what we'll do is Layton is a colleague of mine. [email protected].

[00:15:39] Ben Brooks: This is this handsome mug right there. We actually have a resource guide. This is not something we email out to people automatically. So if you want this, you have to request it. But this is a special thing we decided at the last minute to include just for me. We've actually never sent this out by the way, this is a part of our product, but it has the ears model and we talk about [00:16:00] what happens before, during, and after and give you a simple checklist that can be inspiration for you and your managers.

[00:16:05] Ben Brooks: You may want to modify something for your environment or get a sense of how we implement this with PILOT, but we're going to give you this to you completely for free. It's actually built into our product. Just email Layton, L A Y T O N at PILOT.coach and just put ears or ears model or just manager guide or the thing Ben talked about at the Bamboo Summit will make sure that you get hooked up.

[00:16:25] Ben Brooks: Now, look, you have to help those employees. When you have that ears conversation, you have to help listen for the deeper issue, right? It may be that there's things outside of work affecting work. Imagine someone gets three hours of sleep every night. And then they're not getting their work done. Well, we say, Oh gosh, dang it.

[00:16:42] Ben Brooks: They need to get their work done performance management. Maybe they just need to get six or seven hours of sleep and they could get their job done. So part of it is we have to look at these variety of unmet needs. And again, we build assessments into PILOT when we do this. You can think of your own at your organization.

[00:16:56] Ben Brooks: What are common things? We'll give you some examples, some specific. Civics [00:17:00] right here that you can use. If you've got maybe an employee assistance program, someone's worried about money, connect them with that. They're, they've got anxiety or depression, perhaps postpartum. Get 'em connected with your therapy and mental health benefits.

[00:17:13] Ben Brooks: Sometimes just the encouragement to have them ask for help. Maybe things are chaotic and you need to encourage them to, have a better work environment at home or to come into the office more with fewer distractions. Those are the kind of things, even autonomy, where they get permission, even from you, if you're their boss, to say, hey, you don't have to respond to my Microsoft Teams messages instantly.

[00:17:33] Ben Brooks: If it's urgent, I'll write urgent. Otherwise, assume you can respond within a few hours. Those are the kinds of things that you can do right now. Simply, and at no cost, they can massively affect how people answer at the dinner table, how was work today, honey. Now, one of the biggest risks that McKinsey found in a recent study is that employers face the high performers or niche talent.

[00:17:55] Ben Brooks: Think of niche talent is, really hard to retain, really hard to recruit for [00:18:00] maybe specialized skills or licensure, those sorts of things. They often feel undervalued. My mom sold Mary Kay makeup. I don't know if you have any Mary Kay makeup people, but put that in the chat.

[00:18:11] Ben Brooks: She actually created more female millionaires than any other company in the world, I believe. And I read a Mary Kay, a book that was at Harvard Business School in the eighties called Mary Kay and People Management. And she said, I always imagine talking to someone with a gold chain around their neck and a sign across their chest that says, make me feel important.

[00:18:28] Ben Brooks: Your high performers and your niche talent, they're not necessarily feeling important. According to McKinsey. How do you make someone feel important? Do you give them a volunteer day? Do you have a new intranet? Do you, I don't know, throw out another benefit that everyone in the company gets? That doesn't make you feel important, right?

[00:18:47] Ben Brooks: Individualized attention. Showing that you care. Slowing down. These are the things that make people feel important. Now, you have to teach employees to advocate too, because [00:19:00] understanding their unmet need is part one, right? Super clear. It's often called the unhappy hour, not happy hour.

[00:19:05] Ben Brooks: People go after work to get a drink and they complain and they moan and they say, I'm just a happy or I'm looking for opportunities. I'm going to flip that switch on LinkedIn to be open to recruiters, but then they don't really know why, right? And they think the grass is greener, but part of it is you want to help them water their own grass right where they are, but you need to help them get voice.

[00:19:24] Ben Brooks: to their needs, right? You don't want them suffering in silence. That's terrible, right? You need to have them advocate. And in fact, once one of my colleagues who was the head of HR at the National Basketball Association, I visited him in his office and he was distraught. And I thought, how can you be distraught here?

[00:19:38] Ben Brooks: This is such a groovy office and organization. He said, I had five high performers in my organization quit this week. All of them were underrepresented minorities as well, and they all quit for solvable reasons. They quit for reasons we could have done something about, and they never said anything. Now, they may have put it in the suggestion box in the survey, but with [00:20:00] 5 people, no one's going to get back to you individually.

[00:20:02] Ben Brooks: It's often anonymous anyways. So we have to teach people to advocate, right? That they're their own agent. If something's not working for them, They need to speak up sometimes even to themselves. That's the person they need to advocate to. Now, and we have to equip them for what that looks like, right?

[00:20:17] Ben Brooks: Sometimes they're going to be a little bit scared or intimidated. They're going to want to role play it or even be really specific with their ask rather than just to say, I'm bored to say, Hey, I want to work on a different client. You have to manage their expectations. A good batting average in baseball is about, a third of the time you're going to, have a good average.

[00:20:32] Ben Brooks: And so you want to think about. That your hit rate for an employee. Some people only advocate if they know they're going to get it. One of the things we say in PILOT to your employees that go through our program is when's the last time you were told no, because if it wasn't recently, you're not advocating enough.

[00:20:47] Ben Brooks: You have to also be equitable and think about how people can advocate for others. Sometimes people need support. You need to Metaphorically, put your arm around someone and help them or speak up for them or do it together. And there's big [00:21:00] DEI implications in this. So not only are we creating advocates for ourselves, but we want to advocate and look out for when other people who may be from backgrounds or in positions where they're less able to advocate, they're scared, their safety, their economic security is at risk.

[00:21:14] Ben Brooks: Maybe you've got someone who's in the country on a visa. They're really scared to lose their job. They'd have to lose the country, help them advocate. And of course, build a resiliency. Sometimes you're going to be told no or not now, or here's what I can do instead. So you have to have people be psychologically strong.

[00:21:29] Ben Brooks: We talk about psychological safety. Yes, absolutely. We also need to build psychological strength in our employees to not get crushed. If they don't always get what they ask for. And of course we want to have them ask in a way that can be heard. It's not a demand or a threat. Right? This is something we want people to thoughtfully and respectfully ask for, and often if they wait too long to advocate for themselves, that's when it comes out in a a real rash moment, rather than a thoughtful, deliberate, and professional way.

[00:21:59] Ben Brooks: Now, we've got [00:22:00] some research from Indeed that I think is important, and we're big on DEI at PILOT. We're one of the few certified LGBT owned software companies in the United States of America. It's a big passion for me personally, and 41 percent of women in this Indeed study around self advocacy say that they don't advocate enough or at all.

[00:22:18] Ben Brooks: So almost half of women, and this is just one demographic of underrepresented folks, but we're talking the largest sort of minority demographic in the workforce. Women said it. Flexibility is the number one thing that they need to be more satisfied. So we talked about relationships, but flexibility is super key.

[00:22:35] Ben Brooks: You have a super rigid schedule or a super rigid, this you're going to drive out people or they're going to stay cause they have to, but they're going to be disengaged, stressed, pissed off, et cetera. And then about half of women say that they're. Self advocacy is supported by higher ups in the organization.

[00:22:49] Ben Brooks: So less than half believe that your executives and your HR team are going to support them. So if they don't believe that you're going to be supportive, they're not going to ask in the first place and then they're going to suffer and [00:23:00] then they're going to leave and you're not going to know why. And it was something preventable.

[00:23:03] Ben Brooks: So this is what we're trying to get in front of. Now, the other thing you have to do is ready the organization. So if you have employees that are not advocating in the past, all of a sudden they start advocating, you might have managers and executives go, Whoa, we need to really slow down here. You want them to know that this is going to happen and that assertive employees are good employees, right?

[00:23:22] Ben Brooks: Now, there's some research that the best basketball coaches often were highly equated with just having the best players, better players made for better coaches, right? So we want that updraft of expectations and the push on that. We want to embed it into one on one discussions. So when managers are sitting down with employees for one on ones weekly or bi weekly or monthly to say like, how are you feeling?

[00:23:42] Ben Brooks: What can we do to increase your unmet needs? Just the prompt helps them feel important and has the employee do some of that work. You want to experiment, right? Experimentation allows imperfection. You might try something, a new schedule, a new this, it's not going to work, that's okay. Your employees are going to give you [00:24:00] credit just for trying to take action or supporting them in doing so.

[00:24:03] Ben Brooks: And giving employees time to prioritize themselves. If they're an employee development program, like PILOT or something else in the market, don't schedule a meeting over it or support them in doing it or ask them how it's going. Don't make it a thing that they have to be shy about or hide from you.

[00:24:17] Ben Brooks: And of course being flexible, it's a two way street. Employees are flexible for you. They have work off hours and take calls at different times and, support emergencies, you want to be flexible for them in critical life moments. And then sometimes there's break barriers. You need to break down the organization, a policy that needs an exception, an override on something, an escalation, be there for them, have their back, they'll remember.

[00:24:39] Ben Brooks: Now, PILOT, is just a little bit more about PILOT. We really reach your employees through four distinct modes of learning to surface these unmet needs, to have people be more engaged in it at work. So group coaching is enabled through technology. It's totally virtual. We've got three coaches, post and producers on each session.

[00:24:55] Ben Brooks: It's like a group fitness class for your career. Executive Fireside Chats. We bring in your senior [00:25:00] executives. We ask them about the unwritten rules of work, how things really get done, who gets ahead, etc. And because we're outsiders, we can often ask a little harder questions, but it also makes employees feel important to have access to senior people.

[00:25:11] Ben Brooks: They otherwise wouldn't. We ask individual reflection questions, the questions that stop people in their tracks really make people think critically about who they are and what they want and to focus on themselves. And then of course, we bring employees and managers together with that ears conversation model and have the managers give employees not about the performance of the past, but about their potential in the future.

[00:25:31] Ben Brooks: When you talk about the future, it generates excitement. This is what we do affordably and easily in partnership with HR across the world. Now, what we're doing for BambooHR, we've never done this ever, for BambooHR, I've spoken the last three years, we've never done this before. We're giving half off for any new customers, our implementation fee.

[00:25:48] Ben Brooks: This is one of the fees to get started with us. There's a bunch of things that are included in that. What we really do is lay out the change management, the comms, the technology, everything you need. It is a program in a box, and then we tailor [00:26:00] it to your unique environment and culture. We're giving half off of that, but you need to reach out and get an appointment with your friend, Layton, who gave you the ears guide.

[00:26:07] Ben Brooks: Or, click this link here or the we'll put it in the chat around booking a demo. So today, look, we talked about engaging employees and what does that look like in today's environment? What's the real employee experience that we actually know about, which is a lot of it's in the fundamentals.

[00:26:21] Ben Brooks: We talked about future focus manager conversations and how to solicit those unmet needs and how to use the EARS model. And then the action that you can take to ready your organization and to break down those barriers. Let's talk about our next steps. Of course, it's the coach and me. So you want to declare that proactive employee engagement, proactive is the key word, is a big priority for 2024.

[00:26:43] Ben Brooks: You want to also enroll your manager, maybe the CEO, maybe the head of HR, maybe the CFO or someone else COO, that they or other Sponsors in your organization and say, yes, dang it. This is the year we have to make this a priority, right? Get budget, hire the people or invest in third party programs and [00:27:00] initiatives that make this happen quickly, right?

[00:27:03] Ben Brooks: Don't take a year designing or building something. Get it rolled out quickly. Follow me on LinkedIn. We put a bunch of resources. We put a bunch of research, a bunch of free events, a lot of great content out there. And of course, PILOT, we do a bunch of webinars. You get SHRM credits and HRCR credits.

[00:27:18] Ben Brooks: They're truly thought leadership webinars, and you can manage your certifications. So join us on those future webinars. We've got great guests from across the industry as well. Now look for your inbox for the recording. We've got a great ebook. We're actually going to give you an ebook about managers.

[00:27:32] Ben Brooks: So I know I said, don't overburden the managers, but some of you may say I really want to give them a little bit more. I'm going to meet you halfway. We've got a great ebook on how you can do that. The ears model again, email Layton. He'll give you that, but we're not sending that out unless you request it and we'll have the recording.

[00:27:46] Ben Brooks: Again, we're really excited to be at the Bamboo HR virtual summit. PILOT is employee development that works. You can scan this QR code. Our team is available. And the most important thing, PILOT aside, is that you and HR really own that [00:28:00] strategic seat and make a tremendous difference for your employees and their employee experience.

[00:28:05] Ben Brooks: Have a great rest of your summit, everyone. Thanks for joining.