Recorded Webinar

Transcript

[00:00:00] Laura Meverdan: Hello everyone and welcome. This is part of the Skill Builder series on how can HR equip managers, drive growth and development. We are so glad you are here.

[00:00:12] Laura Meverdan: My name is Laura Meverden and I work for PILOT, and we'll tell you a little bit more about PILOT later, but I'd like to introduce another Laura right now, who's going to give us a little bit of the behind the scenes information, Laura.

[00:00:27] Laura Mastrorocco: Thanks so much, Laura, and welcome everyone. So my role is to ensure that things run smoothly from a technical standpoint.

[00:00:36] Laura Meverdan: Thank you, Laura, very much. I would like to introduce our two speakers today. So our first speaker is the amazing Ben Brooks. He is the founder and CEO of PILOT, and he is one of HR's top 100 tech influences and the author of HR's Executives Coach's Corner, and if you don't follow that, he shares insights [00:01:00] and advice on the dynamic business landscape.

[00:01:03] Laura Meverdan: Also, please follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn. He has some amazing insights. Throughout his career as an HR executive and also a private CEO and executive coach, Ben has been a driving force to help other HR professionals avoid needless turnover. He's also an active advocate for diversity in equity and inclusion, and he served on the board of directors of many companies, including Outserve, SLDN which helped to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell

[00:01:32] Laura Meverdan: and he also co founded the LGBT employee resource group at his previous management consulting firm. So that's a little bit about the amazing Ben Brooks, but I also want to introduce Nick Ionita. He is the senior vice president of strategic products at Beamery. He's also served as the chief executive officer and co founder of Flux.

[00:01:54] Laura Meverdan: That is an internal mobility platform that aligns employees looking for more growth of [00:02:00] their career inside their company. The amazing thing about Nick is that he is so passionate about internal mobility. He is also a father and not getting enough sleep. He's also from Canada and he loves to travel to strange places. And he's an avid scuba diver.

[00:02:17] Laura Meverdan: So I'm so excited to introduce these two very vibrant speakers that hopefully are going to give us an amazing overview of this.

[00:02:26] Laura Meverdan: , Ben and Nick, what I'd like you to share is in the last, Two years, we've had the great resignation, quiet quitting, it feels like a mass layoff in the tech industry.

[00:02:35] Laura Meverdan: We've had a lot of inflationary pressures. So what does the organization of the future look like? Can you help us with a little bit of that? And we're going to start with Ben.

[00:02:46] Ben Brooks: Thanks, Laura. And really excited to be here with Nick. Nick and I've done webinars before. One of my favorite people to talk about these topics because I always feel like I get more out of it and learn more from him given his thought leadership in the space and industry on this topic.

[00:02:59] Ben Brooks: I [00:03:00] think, Laura, you mentioned just so much that has changed in the three years or four years or so period that we're talking about.

[00:03:07] Ben Brooks: Probably more change to the employee experience and workplaces than we've seen in our lifetimes. in a very short period of time, and it's accelerating a lot of things. It's breaking certain things, right now the current debate is the sort of return to office is a big thing keeping employees engaged, trying to figure out hybrid and remote and productivity, right?

[00:03:29] Ben Brooks: A big focus on performance rather than growth. And so I think that, organizations are really needing to lean into retaining and keeping, organizations that are in the, in a commercial business, they focus on customer retention, right? You have a subscription business or a service business, you want to keep customers because it's very expensive to get new ones, very hard to get new ones.

[00:03:48] Ben Brooks: They're really focused on keeping employees too, and we'll talk more about that today, but Nick, how do you see organizations?

[00:03:54] Nick Ionita: Yeah, actually playing to how this slide will build, I think the way we've seen everything, Ben, you've [00:04:00] mentioned, and I think, one of the things that needs to change and we're seeing evolve has been, I think if you look at the left I think we've conditioned people to believe that promotion is the only form of progress.

[00:04:10] Nick Ionita: And we've got these strict kind of job architectures and things we spend a lot of time building and. It's really what development has been geared around, right? I move up this ladder to progress. The reality is, outside of just the conditions themselves, job definitions are constantly changing.

[00:04:26] Nick Ionita: We see new roles and skill sets surfacing all the time. These architectures, I think that, traditionally were meant to guide people and give structure have actually become more restrictive and they're expensive to update. And really what this is starting to do now is we've got to move to a world and we're seeing this where that ladder is becoming more of a jungle gym here on, on the right.

[00:04:45] Nick Ionita: And I think management programs for a long time in fortune 500s have always known this, right? If you were at GE and you were in a, a management fast track after school, you would do a rotation in all these different business units, right? So if you're going to move and [00:05:00] ultimately run a sales team, hard to do that if you haven't been involved in sales.

[00:05:03] Nick Ionita: So these things I think we've known at the top now need to be organically happening down below. And I think we're seeing a lot of people and I've witnessed this in my career in companies I've built where, these people that have taken different routes to get places sometimes have very profound perspective and very different skill sets are highly applicable.

[00:05:22] Nick Ionita: And I think that the big thing we're starting to see here is, how do we get visibility into what people have so we can start unlocking those things and better applying them so we can let people flourish like this within organizations.

[00:05:35] Ben Brooks: And Nick, I'll just add to what you said, like you said, it's been this belief and this understanding of like how people actually develop and grow and what makes satisfying career journeys.

[00:05:43] Ben Brooks: And, you hear someone do a guest speech and they talk, well, I did this and then I tried this and it's like very inspiring, or you'll see, oh, we brought in a head of HR. They used to be in finance and they did these things in operations. But yet, like you said the development programs aren't structured to support those kinds of journeys the [00:06:00] development programs. Like I mentioned, some military experience that I've had the military is like, there's really strict structures and grades and paths, which is functional maybe for that sort of environment, but often in a commercial enterprise in particular, things are changing so quickly, right?

[00:06:14] Ben Brooks: Lines of business get spun out, things get collapsed, things get combined, you merge, you acquire, you grow, you're global. So I think that's a big thing that I'm noticing too, is that there's this tension between how we know people grow and develop and have satisfying careers versus how we've structured.

[00:06:31] Ben Brooks: And it's almost a little bit like, college and university or even K through 12 school. It's like, we know there's better ways for people to grow and evolve, but we're stuck in old methods to teach or learn. So what you're saying resonates completely, a hundred percent.

[00:06:54] Laura Meverdan: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about retention and and let's start with [00:07:00] Nick.

[00:07:02] Nick Ionita: Yeah. I think obviously just the environment we're in now, is this recession, how long is it going? This kind of winter we've been in for a while. I think the reality is it's not improving.

[00:07:12] Nick Ionita: I think a lot about, even just on a personal level, like my dad spent 30 plus years at one, Company from college through retirement. I think there's a lot of reasons that have changed in terms of people staying, but the reality is it's not been improving.

[00:07:26] Nick Ionita: I think this environment right now may be artificially stretching some of this out because there's just, I think a perception that there's less out there, and that is true in I think many regards. But, I think going into this last 18 months, this was happening at a, happening at an alarming rate, I'm in Silicon Valley and, the 4.2 years here to me for tech companies actually feels very high. We walk into this may, I think when I dug into the numbers, some of this is impacted by more senior roles that typically stay longer, but I think even what we see in software companies, this was like 18 months in some places, right?

[00:07:58] Nick Ionita: Which is crazy. From a business [00:08:00] standpoint the cost to ramp some, to acquire somebody, to ramp them up for them to become effective, in these, especially in these knowledge worker jobs you're not getting a lot done. out of people. And, I think a big part of this is just, back to that jungle gym picture.

[00:08:13] Nick Ionita: Sometimes people don't land in the right role or the role has changed or, what's available is different. And it's just easier to leave in a lot of cases right now than it is to stay places, which I think is impacting this number quite a bit. What do you think, Ben?

[00:08:27] Ben Brooks: Yeah, I think that like you said that the 4.2 years seems long in depending on industry right or depending on type of role, and that part of it is that it's been easier to switch there's all this new technology where you can get, one click apply and, job you can do remote so that the barriers to switching jobs have lowered, right? So it puts a pressure on employers because it used to be, if you lived in a town, you'd have to relocate or do something else. Like now you don't necessarily have to do those things, right? But at the same time, Gustav did some research around peak productivity of employees [00:09:00] and they did, and it was from HR professionals that said that they didn't see peak productivity until the start of year three.

[00:09:08] Ben Brooks: So if you've got people churning at 18 months. you, they didn't even get to their maximum output for the organization, right? Imagine growing vegetables in your garden this summer, and before the vegetables are ripe or big, you just pull them out of the garden, right? You're squandering that sort of potential, and so that, and that cheats not just the organization, but also the employee, right?

[00:09:28] Ben Brooks: Because the employee, when they're at peak productivity, they learn more, they have more measurable accomplishments for their career, they get more exposure, etc. And for anyone that's ever worked in a mid or large size organization, there's a lot of unwritten rules to how things get done. And so much of it is like understanding the right people and the right relationships and those things are not going to be part of a corporate onboarding or training program.

[00:09:52] Ben Brooks: Those are going to be stubbing your toe in the dark and learning by doing, which also just requires more tenure to be effective in an [00:10:00] organization. So I hear you a lot, McLaren. Nick, do you see, that this, why people are leaving and that increased. Do you have any sense of like, why it's increased over the last decade plus?

[00:10:09] Nick Ionita: Yeah, two things. Obviously the most recent one is just what you mentioned, the remote nature of things, right? I think the reality is as we thought, just when I look back at things, even hiring for our own organization, I think HR and particularly talent acquisition teams face more competition for talent in terms of the companies you're competing against than the, your business does in terms of core competition for your product or service, because the reality is, now we've got, companies from anywhere that could hire people that maybe you wouldn't have been competing against for that. And I think, look, I built, my career has predominantly been in software. And, I think the other thing that's changed a lot is so many especially for that industry and those types of roles.

[00:10:50] Nick Ionita: Every company has become a software company at this point. Everyone needs an app, a website, right? If you're an engineer or product manager in design it's not like 30 years ago where like you just worked [00:11:00] at a tech company. So the, just the people you're competing against for the same type of job, even though it's in very different contexts has gotten so much higher that just the pressure and the competition to get people in again for that kind of yield is just it's crazy.

[00:11:14] Ben Brooks: And someone asked in our question panel, looks like does peak productivity extend to lateral moves as well, or just only for new hires? And, that absolutely, in my experience, I don't know about the gusto research specifically, but I can speak from my experience in advising a lot of other companies and heads of HR and being an HR person myself, that, that you often, overlook folks, the lateral move, we have a real bias towards these vertical promotions.

[00:11:36] Ben Brooks: And part of it is employees collapse and organizations do achievement with growth. And so then the only way that I grow is I get a bigger title or more money or more responsibility or I'm up a level in the hierarchy. When in reality, you can unlock a lot of growth and accomplishment and experience and learning in some of those lateral moves.

[00:11:57] Ben Brooks: So when you do those nine box talent reviews, it's really important [00:12:00] to not always have the bias of just. Who's going to be the next, VP of the organization, but also to think about, the opportunities for folks to, have that productivity in other areas, because they're going to bring in all the experience, network, perspective, passion, culture, they know about the organization and apply that elsewhere, where you often get a boost compared to a new hire is just going to have a much steeper learning curve and a longer payback time on productivity.

[00:12:22] Ben Brooks: Nick, do you see it similarly?

[00:12:24] Nick Ionita: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, no I think that's I think that's spot on and, I think what's gotten harder with this, and obviously we'll get into this later in the chat is in all that distribution, like I always look at this as there's kind of a line of sight problem, right.

[00:12:37] Nick Ionita: Where, for, in order to unlock a lot of these lateral moves, That again are creating the jungle gym. You've got to employees need to know what's there and management and hiring managers need to know who's there. And so that's, that was already hard when even we were in offices, but there were these just informal networks and things that existed. And now as we're remote, I've spoken to friends who run organizations that, have made [00:13:00] decisions where Look, we don't have to hire a sales team in Chicago. Now we can put them in another geography which is cheaper.

[00:13:05] Nick Ionita: But the moment those people want to progress, or that wasn't the right thing to bring them into, they are even more disconnected than the other teams, right? To unlock these things, we'll get into this, but we have to create the visibility and things there to achieve it. And I think remote on one hand has been this double edged sword.

[00:13:18] Nick Ionita: It's given us flexibility and access to more from the outside, but it's made things more fragmented and harder to see and enable within organizations.

[00:13:27] Laura Meverdan: So I'm going to jump in here really quickly and I know you've hit on this, but with that in mind, how should the HR teams be rethinking the way they support the zigzag career landscape?

[00:13:38] Laura Meverdan: I know you've already given some ideas, but I just want to focus that a little bit. So how do they support the zigzag career while ensuring the business goals are met? Because I know that that is two things that people are trying to manage at the same time. .

[00:13:50] Ben Brooks: I know that, big focus of this webinar is the managers, right?

[00:13:54] Ben Brooks: But I think we have to lean into the managers more because there's no way from a corporate headquarters in a [00:14:00] top down system that, to Laura, your point, you can balance both the, what the employee wants or is interested in And what the business needs, like the manager often has better data on both of those questions than someone at headquarters.

[00:14:12] Ben Brooks: And so I think that's why it's really important that employees realize, the career opportunities for an employee are a lot more structured and transparent everywhere but your company because you can get on Indeed and LinkedIn and all these other great, recruiting aggregators and sites, and you can see, oh, I could do this, or I could do that, or and so it's very visible and clear and transparent, right?

[00:14:33] Ben Brooks: And so then employees perceive because there is a structured menu, that there is more opportunity elsewhere. Right? And where organizations on the internal mobility front don't necessarily structure that menu internally. And I think when we've tried to do it in a top down manner that says, well, if you're a sales development rep, you're going to become a, an account executive.

[00:14:53] Ben Brooks: That's fine. It could be a path, but it may be that you want to go from sales development rep to, customer success or to operations or to [00:15:00] something else. And so part of that is I think we need to get a little bit more inventive and creative around what interests people. It may be that being a sales rep requires travel.

[00:15:08] Ben Brooks: That, gets in the way of someone's personal flexibility and dependent care needs. You're not going to know that in your just traditional career ladders. It's got to be personalized, and we'll talk more about the personalization. Nick, how do you see it?

[00:15:20] Nick Ionita: Yeah, look, you hit the nail on the head.

[00:15:21] Nick Ionita: It needs to be easier for someone to find their next job in the company they're at. And the reality is right now it's just easier to reply to an external recruiter. All that said, there's still this incredible burden on people to understand job descriptions, which are usually very poorly written or, not granular enough to really understand the context of the job.

[00:15:39] Nick Ionita: And that's internal external. But, I think really, and this has been a lot of our focus has just been, there's been a G like a career GPS system, I think that's been missing, right? Because if that progression isn't upwards in your current job family, where again, like those structures are understood, it's really unclear where to go.

[00:15:54] Nick Ionita: And it's not, For organizations, not investing in development programs, great things like [00:16:00] PILOT, like those tools exist, but I think a lot of this starts becoming, how do we create that visibility for them? I always point to, job boards are exhibit a.

[00:16:09] Nick Ionita: Like for a lot of employees within your organization, there could be lots of opportunities available, but you're giving them the same experience that the external candidates have, these people. And, if you don't know where you want to go, search isn't a good mode to find it. So I think, a lot of what we've been focusing on with customers is like, how do you highlight those career paths?

[00:16:26] Nick Ionita: We don't have to have them all worked out between things, because a lot of this is about career transferability and. Frankly, potential and motivation, right? Like we focus so much on skill fit, which is important. People need to be able to step in and do something, but I'd challenge, how many of those skills do they really need to know on day one?

[00:16:42] Nick Ionita: And if we focus on potential and some of those intangibles, if they're motivated, can they make the transition? And then how do we aim L& D programs in a more bespoke way so that they can close those gaps and make those moves. And I think employees will be very self directed if we just give them the tools and the visibility to do that.[00:17:00]

[00:17:01] Ben Brooks: And I'll just add, even at PILOT, we did an engagement survey of our own employees and we had a lower score on, I see myself working here in two years time than we expected. Yet a lot of our other scores around people's happiness and feeling proud of their work and being set up for success were high so it wasn't like it was a negative work environment and so what we realized is again the structure of the opportunities externally was greater than internally.

[00:17:27] Ben Brooks: So we've been having, I've been having a personal career conversation with, all of our employees, just about motivation, potential, those sorts of things what interests them inside and outside of work, and we've been doing this in real time I have one of these later today. And it's been this really wonderful opportunity to help people realize that there's this sort of we talked about in PILOT, there's like the menu and there's the secret menu, and the secret menu is whatever the heck you want it to be.

[00:17:51] Ben Brooks: And it's not a message that we typically get in university or an onboarding and things, that's the self directed part that I love that term Nick is that we talked about with PILOT as well as [00:18:00] that. We want employees to find their voice, but they need some encouragement and facilitation to do that.

[00:18:05] Ben Brooks: It's not a thing that they can just go sit on a rock and figure this out. And that's where the manager is the ideal person to help surface the, potential and motivation. They're going to know about the skills. That's fine, right? And to your point, that's important. But oftentimes, what really has an employee very satisfied is what interests them.

[00:18:24] Ben Brooks: What ties to their personal values and tapping into that, that gives organizations that retention advantage because the external recruiters and stuff, we're never going to have that data.

[00:18:34] Nick Ionita: That's right. I love the secret menu thing. It's like an animal style role.

[00:18:39] Ben Brooks: Yep, exactly.

[00:18:40] Nick Ionita: But I think Ben just one last comment too, because I I'm with you 100%.

[00:18:43] Nick Ionita: I think, some of this stuff, I think when we speak with organizations starting to go through these journeys and thinking about, how do we make this more self directed or how do we, how do we just impact retention in a meaningful way? Thanks. A lot of this can feel really daunting because I find people aim right at like, how do we get people making the [00:19:00] move?

[00:19:00] Nick Ionita: And it's the end thing that needs to happen. And with a lot of things, we need to move upstream. And I think what we've been finding with organizations we've worked with for a long time, even small things, because honestly, the bar is low in, in a lot of places, if we're being honest about it where we found just visibility alone, there's some things we'll, we pull employees on and we've correlated just having visibility and the belief that you can navigate.

[00:19:24] Nick Ionita: And again, this is where managers play a huge role in this and supporting people will stay longer. Obviously something has to happen down the line, but even just starting with what's available here and can I is huge for impacting that significantly. And I think that's the real starting place for people.

[00:19:41] Ben Brooks: Yeah, we talked about the possibility of possibility you don't have to have a committed to plan but it's just the idea that the employee know that I've got options here. I'm not stuck. McKinsey research said you know last summer that the number, one driver people have been knowledge workers leaving organizations they felt they were at a quote unquote dead end psychologically even if they were [00:20:00] high performing, right? It wasn't like they were struggling or not being compensated fairly or in a toxic work environment. It wasn't any of those things. They were just like, I have capped out here. And people don't want to often be in a potential where they feel like they've capped out or stuck.

[00:20:13] Ben Brooks: And that could just be from learning, could be comp, could be other things like that. So that's, I think a great point.

[00:20:19] Nick Ionita: And actually just to call out, Kim made a mention here, cause we, we hear this a lot, right? Cause I think when we have these It's easier to have them with large organizations that have structure and an infinite, number of jobs on the job board.

[00:20:32] Nick Ionita: But, Kim said we're a startup and having issues with turnover, how would this work? So again, my background is predominantly in startups, but I've worked at large, fortune fifties. I think part of this is also just rethinking what the unit of work is. right? Like we're talking here about a job move.

[00:20:48] Nick Ionita: I've found is as a founder and someone who's done a lot of like early stage through scale up, one of the beauties of startup is, one, I'll hear the objection of we know everybody here and there are only so many roles like that's true, but do we know what everybody wants [00:21:00] to do? And there's always too much to do.

[00:21:02] Nick Ionita: Everybody's wearing different hats, again, Ben, I'm sure this is. true for PILOT. You're in a project oriented environment. So I think again, if opening up to, can people freely express what they're interested in and importantly, again, this is the manager piece.

[00:21:17] Nick Ionita: Can we have managers rethink? Cause I think humans are pattern recognition machines, particularly with hiring, right? Like I've hired hundreds of PMs and I've got a mode, but there's times I've discovered, look, someone over here is not. typically who I've evaluated from a skills and maybe where they came from standpoint.

[00:21:32] Nick Ionita: But if I really break down what the role is, they can do most of this. And so I found in startup places, even where a formal role may not exist for someone to move, having people engage and help with something. Maybe somebody needs customer facing experience. Can we put them on a go to market project where they're helping, not even quarterbacks, but just ride shotgun on something.

[00:21:51] Nick Ionita: So I think if you rethink where you could apply people in increments, That goes a long way and may actually unlock paths and [00:22:00] progression as your, as your business evolves. So startups, a lot of stuff is just in time where we could move people into things we didn't think were possible. So that's, that would be Kim, that would be my ask back if you're not thinking about something like that yet.

[00:22:13] Laura Meverdan: So this is amazing discussion, and I just want to put out there, if you're not following along on the chat, you're really missing out. There's a great give and take on the chat also, so please participate there. And we're going to go to a poll right now, just to give a little bit more insight from from our viewers.

[00:22:30] Laura Meverdan: From our participants. How do you react to this statement? Providing career opportunity for our employees is a high priority right now.

[00:22:37] Laura Meverdan: We're at about 67%. We'll hold off for 10 more seconds. If you haven't responded yet, please do so. All right, so we have some strongly agrees and somewhat agrees, and then we also have some disagrees down there. So Ben and Nick, I would love to see, to hear what your reaction is to this.

[00:22:59] Ben Brooks: You're in the right [00:23:00] place. You have this webinar. We're all aligned on this, right? Which is great. And again, I think that there's this, pretty super majority agreement that this is an important thing to do, right?

[00:23:10] Ben Brooks: Because retention is a part of it. Do people stay or do they go? But are they engaged? Are they productive? Are they providing good customer service to your end users or clients or customers? Are they being creative and innovative around your products? Are they following workplace?

[00:23:24] Ben Brooks: safety guidelines and processes and things like that. That, the engagement and productivity is also really important because just having someone stay that's, grumbling or dissatisfied or bored isn't enough. So I think that this is, the fact that we're talking about, this career opportunity is a very important thing.

[00:23:42] Ben Brooks: And we also know that despite some of the tech layoffs, there's largely been labor shortages in most industries in the last couple of years to the point, like, I'm in New York City, you can't even get a flight out that's on time or canceled because, we have 54 percent of the FAA staffing in the New York City airspace.

[00:23:58] Ben Brooks: It's 54 percent [00:24:00] staffed, right, for really good, stable government, jobs with pensions and all that are very important, but it's a labor thing, so I think people having these, career, opportunities is very important. Nick?

[00:24:11] Nick Ionita: Yeah, same. Look, I think we're definitely in an environment where a lot of people are being forced to ask themselves, how can we do more with what we have or less, unfortunately, in some cases.

[00:24:21] Nick Ionita: And I think it's created a perception that there is less opportunity. And there may be in the sense that there might not be as many full time jobs open right now based on hiring restrictions. That doesn't mean the amount of work to do has gone down. So I think again, back even to the startup comment, I think we're just seeing a lot of people pushing for how do we use what needs to get done as the development opportunity and rethink again, what that.

[00:24:47] Nick Ionita: structure is that we provide it to them in because we can do some of these things in increments, not just in full time moves that then obviously will add up to something greater over time.

[00:24:57] Ben Brooks: And one thing that I put in the chat is just [00:25:00] around outside of work questions. In our career chats we're having at PILOT, one of the questions we ask is, what do you want to accomplish outside of work, beyond work, in the next two years?

[00:25:07] Ben Brooks: What are you up to? What are you interested in? And I've been fascinated because oftentimes we think about we have to do everything at work to keep the employee satisfied and growing, but think about the other things that keep people retained and engaged. I had an executive assistant years ago who was in New York City, was an actor, right?

[00:25:24] Ben Brooks: And for him, it was really critical that he got done at 4. 30 based upon performances, practices, auditions, etc. So his schedule reliability was super important that made him really loyal engaged because it was this balance of things. So he didn't necessarily want a new role or promotion at our company, But what kept him engaged and retained is knowing he could succeed in something else.

[00:25:47] Ben Brooks: And that could be people that have dependents they take care of or anything else. So also don't think that it always has to be just the company. You encouraging someone or helping them be accountable to a thing or supporting them to go do something else in the rest of their life.

[00:25:59] Ben Brooks: They [00:26:00] don't often have that from anywhere else. And people know that's special.

[00:26:05] Laura Meverdan: And Ben, I think that really brings up that this next slide about the retention and the recruitment where does that some, symbiotic relationship come from. So a great way to start that conversation off.

[00:26:16] Ben Brooks: Yeah, I think that, sometimes there's this sort of either or are we going to focus on recruiting or we're going to focus on retention and, I think Nick and I are very much on the same page and being where he's got a lot of sophistication in this and their product and offering and research that, that these, the answer is really both.

[00:26:30] Ben Brooks: Right. That, obviously you don't want to burn through, expensive recruiting costs and everything else needlessly by people just churning all of the time. But also that, that retention and talent mobility can really unlock all sorts of different sort of, career paths and things like that.

[00:26:48] Ben Brooks: We've had customers with PILOT that, people get hired in one function and then internally they get moved into another which reduces external recruiting pressure on hard to fill roles. And so they can hire, [00:27:00] through one path. And this is, you often find this in certain operational environments, people rise through the ranks, and they'll come in at sort of entry level and they get built.

[00:27:07] Ben Brooks: And then they turn to these other roles that may have been really hard for external recruiting, but are much easier for internal recruiting. But you have to look at the whole system, like the bench of talent, rather than just recruiting for a single role. Because if you don't look at it as a system level, you just think, Oh, I have an open rec or an open seat and I've got to get this filled rather than looking at the flows of talent that people could come in here, do this for a period of time and link to this, et cetera.

[00:27:33] Ben Brooks: So Nick, how do you see it and what has been re figured out in this regard?

[00:27:36] Nick Ionita: Yeah. Yeah. So I think I, and I agree with you a hundred percent. The little diagram in here, the tree, one of the things I like to talk about is that I like to think about organizations like trees, right?

[00:27:45] Nick Ionita: So if we can bring. More people in, down at the roots and grow them up, into the organization and develop them into the, the branches and the leaves, that's a healthier organization, right? Than one that we're having to [00:28:00] graft on, everything up top.

[00:28:01] Nick Ionita: So I think when we think about this, obviously there's always going to be, some role we needed six months ago in some specific domain that doesn't exist here. But, I, again I've spent a lot of my time, in this business focused on the employee development and the business progression side of this.

[00:28:17] Nick Ionita: And I think if you really get to how do we solve root problems, one of the things you highlighted, Ben is, again, in, in maybe times where we're hiring more, one of the things that gets really chaotic is when there's all this reactive hiring, because we're having to do all the things outside of the plan.

[00:28:30] Nick Ionita: And the reality is if we can nail retention, right, if we can keep people happy and growing into things and staying. We're one, we're growing the stuff that's harder to hire generally, cause we're growing people up into specialties and things that are more senior, right. That's letting us aim recruiting down at the roles, they're lower that we know we can get in more volume.

[00:28:48] Nick Ionita: And then, you think about the ripple effect of that, if you do that, well, we've reduced a bunch of reactive work hitting TA we're letting TA aim at things that are easier and maybe they're getting in more frequency because again, there [00:29:00] are those types of roles, but, you think about the employee experience, right?

[00:29:03] Nick Ionita: Those people are growing. So what does that lead to? We get some amazing stories that literally should be on the career site, right? People that are making these transitions, those people are happy, they're doing referrals, right? There's tons of data that shows just quality referrals and things coming in network.

[00:29:17] Nick Ionita: We've got some customers where this is working and, 30 to 40 percent of hires they're making are coming from referrals, right? And those are from happy employees. So. Both these things I think to Ben's point have to work in tandem and it's really hard right now because they're usually in silos, they're different teams, they're different systems, and we've got to get to a view where we can do one well what's the ripple effect to the other and how does that impact and I'll give kind of one example we've got a, we've been a customer that I wanted to move a lot of people out of customer support, and I think in a lot of organizations this is, an organization sometimes that's very decoupled sometimes, sometimes it's hourly it's not a salary based role, and again this idea of like you can't become what you can't see, well if you're not even in the corporate bucket with everybody.

[00:29:59] Nick Ionita: [00:30:00] How does that happen? And so if you don't become manager of the team, a lot of these people turn out. And what we figured out was some of these people can do great things. They understand the product, the service much better than other teams. So how do we unlock and help some of these people move into other parts of the organization and let's say an operational function.

[00:30:16] Nick Ionita: And what this customer had unlocked was All of a sudden, this glass ceiling was cracked open. They had these amazing stories of people moving from hourly to salary. It was letting them actually a more recruiting effort down in these roles. And it became the farm system for a broader part of the organization.

[00:30:32] Nick Ionita: So I think that the challenge here is to go back and rethink this, and this is retraining manager thinking, but I think it's also a level up in the HR department of thinking if we can move this one. piece. What does that do for us across everything else rather than everybody trying to independently solve what are very connected problems?

[00:30:51] Ben Brooks: Yeah, I'll mention Nick, a colleague of mine runs recruiting for Marriott International globally, and that these interconnected problems they look at like, what is a [00:31:00] front desk agent at a hotel, right, on a night shift but then that could be a catering manager, that could be a salesperson, that could be a facility supervisor, right, that could be revenue management.

[00:31:12] Ben Brooks: And so, they were in when you size, especially a large organization. The flows of these things are like trying to hire all these revenue managers, but it turns out good revenue managers often have worked the front desk, right? And so that became this sort of big unlock and they were able to, literally have a, eight, figure savings on recruiting costs by creating mobility paths.

[00:31:32] Ben Brooks: So this is like real, not only is it good for the employee, I think that we have to also balance what's good for the organization because we need to talk about what drives, organizations right now are very, financial and performance focused. And so I think, balancing the HR message I think everyone in HR is really passionate, obviously cares about the organization succeeding but like we have a role to help.

[00:31:52] Ben Brooks: Represent the employee concern and need. That's a big part of the function, but I think we always need to balance that with, how do we justify for folks that maybe aren't as aligned to [00:32:00] that or motivated by that to say. And I think that there's a real financial and performance benefit to this in addition to supporting employees.

[00:32:09] Laura Meverdan: Excellent. I'm going to jump in here, Nick, do you want to talk a little bit about your your internal mobility product a little bit grow?

[00:32:16] Nick Ionita: Yeah. I think maybe what to cover here, if we want to get into, to how at Beamer, we've got a suite of solutions, one of which is focused on just how do we empower employees to make moves, to understand how to upskill and transition, and then off on the flip of all that engagement of that data is giving the business the tools to understand also how to best apply people, right?

[00:32:35] Nick Ionita: Because the sweet spot here is we've got people progressing and building fulfilling careers, but we've also got them where we can moving into places where the business has needs, right? So what we've really found, again, at the end of the day, the software is just one ingredient in helping unlock this.

[00:32:52] Nick Ionita: And so when we talk about, how do we do, a lot of what we're talking about here. We found there's really three ingredients that, that all need to [00:33:00] exist, right? The three legs of the stool here. And this starts with, a, what we've covered a little bit here around self direction, right?

[00:33:06] Nick Ionita: Employees need to be able to have the visibility, have the access and have the confidence to be able to make these transitions or at least at minimum explore them. We obviously need the tools to help. Initiate that and make that happen, right? This can't be happening in Google Sheets and just in, shadow networks throughout the company.

[00:33:24] Nick Ionita: But then importantly, we'll hit on this the culture has to be there, right? We have to, we can't have, these two things and then not promote it and not support it. So we'll dig into each of these, but we found these are the real components to do this well. So maybe we want to talk about the first one here on, on self direction, but then I'd be curious, is there anything else, you all have seen, or does this kind of resonate with

[00:33:43] Ben Brooks: This is like this.

[00:33:44] Ben Brooks: This could be the PILOT model. We're totally aligned that, you need the self direction. I think the biggest untapped opportunity in employee development and retention is the employee themselves. That is the part sponge we put that water on and it just rose and so but employees need to [00:34:00] be told like that they're expected to figure that employees are waiting for the organization.

[00:34:03] Ben Brooks: Here's your next move to be tapped on the shoulder and based on people's maybe cultural backgrounds or other socioeconomic backgrounds, they may not know that it's part of their role to. ask, and to advocate. But to your point, it also can't just be, sending people out in the woods to go survive, right?

[00:34:18] Ben Brooks: We have to equip them with tools and resources to navigate that, language to talk about that, etc. You know, development programs, the tools like Beamery's, mobility tools, PILOT's development programs. But also, you said to the culture, you can't have a manager then go, What the heck?

[00:34:33] Ben Brooks: You don't like working for me? Or you don't want to be a part of that? You have to celebrate employees wanting to stay in the organization and not having managers take it personally, or hoarding talent, or there's all sorts of perverse behaviors that can come along. And Amy had brought up a question of like how often is too often for internal switches and we were in a chat discussion about that, Amy Brown, thank you.

[00:34:55] Ben Brooks: So I think that that's also, that trinity of that self direction, the tools and the culture is [00:35:00] really important. I think oftentimes in HR and organizations we're like, the culture, the culture, the culture. In some ways the culture is the hardest to change, takes the longest, and it's the hardest to touch, right?

[00:35:11] Ben Brooks: Like, where is the culture? The culture is the air. The culture is all of it. So, I do think, part of my bias is focusing on the self direction and tools impacts the culture. It doesn't mean you don't do anything for the culture, but sometimes you try to focus on the culture first, rather than have more tangible, wins in these other two areas.

[00:35:29] Nick Ionita: Yeah, absolutely. And look, I think, the culture to me becomes this kind of self reinforcing thing. Again, obviously managers have to play a big role in this. But what we've also found is, you've got to celebrate those moves, right? Particularly when we're talking about people who haven't made certain traditions traditionally, part of this is visibility.

[00:35:47] Nick Ionita: Part of it is safety. Part of it is seeing other people like them make that transition. When those transitions happen and those moves happen, we need to celebrate those and talk about them in all hands and things. So we start creating that kind [00:36:00] of feeling that this is possible.

[00:36:01] Nick Ionita: Cause I think some people until they see it they may not believe it, but you know, I think at the manager point, Ben what's I'm sure you've seen this. One of the things I'll get when we talk about this is aren't managers going to have an issue with this?

[00:36:13] Nick Ionita: It's going to be poaching. And, look, I, this isn't a popular answer, but I think the hard truth is like, as a shareholder and someone at your company, it's a lot better if that person transitions into another role in the organization that goes, and then going and joining a competitor.

[00:36:28] Nick Ionita: And I think if we can do these things well. One of the big operational shifts that happens is these moves become proactive and planned and not reactive. Because, again, if we identify, Hey, you know, Ben would be awesome at this. This is really his best next step. And it's what he wants to do.

[00:36:46] Nick Ionita: We're going to move him over to this team. We can plan for that. That could happen a couple of months from now. We could do that after a perf cycle. That is. far easier to do than someone giving two weeks notice. And then all of a sudden we're on our heels again, right? And this is, I think the mode, a lot of managers end up [00:37:00] in when transitions happen, where if we can get into this culture, I think we can be more proactive.

[00:37:05] Nick Ionita: And the reality is the tool and the system that helped make, Ben in this case, make that move at the same time can help you as the hiring manager, find the next person to step in. Right. So I think this is the real shift that I think has to happen underneath. All of this. But again, Ben, curious what you think.

[00:37:20] Ben Brooks: Yeah, and I think that celebrating internally is so key because you think about that itch when people get a job externally and then they post on LinkedIn or Facebook and then they get 200 comments and people reach out. That's a wonderful feeling. Like we don't have a lot of that in life. But we have to create that internally, too, right?

[00:37:37] Ben Brooks: Like, good job it doesn't have to just be a promotional, it's like, put that in the internal comms, have that in the town halls, have that in the newsletters, have that in the Ask Me Anythings. And again, I think some of these stats around the transparency, It's less often that there's some like secret, game and only certain people, have access to this secret society or the deep state and organization.

[00:37:56] Ben Brooks: It's less of that, right? It's more that it's in a Google sheet and the [00:38:00] shadow networks and all the things you mentioned, Nick. And so part of this is just to put it out there. When I was at Marshall MacLennan in HR, we started to put out roles and we just let everybody know on our internal social network that we had roles.

[00:38:11] Ben Brooks: And we had people that were from the insurance business wanting to come into corporate learning roles. that we would have never expected. People with law degrees, insurance, broker certificates, client, they turned out to be fantastic. And they were so much more credible to the business because they knew how we made money compared if we had hired people externally.

[00:38:30] Ben Brooks: But I didn't know that in advance that that would be so useful. And so I think that, again, it started to be a thing like people would say, literally, even in the application process, I didn't know I could do this. I didn't know that you would be open. I didn't know and so that I didn't know, the transparency is not just that it's like, transparent as in you can see it, but like you're inspired by it and that it can be celebrated because employees imaginations are often not that great around careers because they're, you know, we think of, these very [00:39:00] hierarchical and systematic things. And so I think we really need to inspire people around this. And like you said, from a shareholder perspective, have people think about what's good for the organization as a whole.

[00:39:10] Ben Brooks: Great organizations typically measure managers as like talent exporters. That's going to be a thing in a talent review is do they export talent? Do the people get promoted out of their group or take other assignments? Because if they hoard talent, they're viewed as someone who doesn't have people that actually have more ambition or are more capable, and that's a negative.

[00:39:29] Ben Brooks: And so that's also part of what you can do in your talent reviews for managers to say, are these people measuring? Are these people giving people opportunity outside their teams or organizations can be one of the ways you can also make sure that those managers that do that get ahead and those that don't get feedback that they need to do that.

[00:39:45] Ben I love that. I, you know, one of the, one of the inspirations, honestly, in us, originally starting our company Flux and now the mobility product at Beamery was, you know, I was running a large product organization at a startup that then became part of Comcast. Huge, And that got [00:40:00] harder to hire in certain environments.

[00:40:02] Nick Ionita: It was just, we weren't this startup anymore. And so it was a transition to both who we were recruiting, but we started realizing, look, there's people in sales engineering that make great product managers yet. There's this perception that, you can't become a PM unless you're an engineer or a PM.

[00:40:14] Nick Ionita: And so we really worked on that. And we started finding was. This one services group that was really becoming a feeder and the rest of the org, that group started getting incented with that. Those managers were bonused. We gave them greater recruiting support and it completely transformed both like how all of this worked and they got the support to ensure that as they were losing people to other parts of the organization, they were being supported to keep growing.

[00:40:36] Nick Ionita: And it was a really amazing experiment that kind of became a foundation for a lot of how we think about this now.

[00:40:42] Ben Brooks: And some of that bargaining needs to happen, right? Because if your CFO has a a hiring freeze, a blanket hiring freeze, which is always sort of a dumb move, that, you start to work through this where I had of HR can say, hey, I need to have an exception because if this manager gives up this person to go on another team or stretch assignment, I need her to [00:41:00] not be penalized for that, right?

[00:41:02] Ben Brooks: And so part of it is you have to advocate if you're in HR for your managers because you don't want your manager that's the talent exporter to have a loss. right? Because people are self interested and motivated and rational and so helping in that regard and that's where HR at a senior level can do some of this bargaining and trading and remove some of the organizational barriers.

[00:41:23] Ben Brooks: Even if you have formal systems to do that, even on a one off basis, it can make a tremendous difference because that's one of those things that people say, well, if I, if I give Laura, to this other team or this project or assignment, I'm screwed. Why would I want to screw myself?

[00:41:35] Ben Brooks: Because we have a hiring freeze. But if you say no, like we're going to let you backfill or we're going to bring someone else in, then they're like, okay, I'll be made whole or even better. That's again, where I think HR can play a powerful role in supporting managers is in the kind of transactional nature of some of these talent swaps.

[00:41:52] Laura Meverdan: I'm going to jump in real quickly and we're going to go to the next slide. And we're just going to talk really quickly that this is just a great overview [00:42:00] of some Gartner research. Learning development strategy in 2023 is to become an employee led. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that, I believe on the next slide, talking a little bit about how we connect on that.

[00:42:13] Laura Meverdan: So Nick and Ben, do you want to give us just a quick, your quick overview on this slide? Sure.

[00:42:19] Nick Ionita: Yeah, I can take a stab at that first if that's if that's good. So look I think one of the themes here generally is how do we break these formal structures down? They're there for a reason. We're not saying get rid of them, but we need to figure out how to let them go.

[00:42:33] Nick Ionita: People traverse between them and that then becomes, you know, I think rethinking how we do some of these things. I think really what's highlighted here is obviously there's a lot of different ways managers can aid in people's development, and I think most of us here are probably more familiar with the more formal structures.

[00:42:48] Nick Ionita: And I think sadly, if we take something like mentorship as an example. These formal programs say to get into leadership or certain things like that. They're great. They serve their purpose, but they're generally they're hard to administer. They're expensive, and [00:43:00] thus they're available to, to, to very few.

[00:43:02] Nick Ionita: So we've got to start also thinking here how we can democratize this more. And I think when I look at this, one of the things we see, and we focus on at Dreamery is just how do you make some of these exercises a bit more employee led, right? This isn't just about.

[00:43:16] Nick Ionita: Someone making a transition, like take something like mentorship. Some of this may just be, a 30 minute zoom with someone who's made a move before who can give advice on something to aid in that transition, right? This is maybe a bespoke thing that hasn't happened before. That person is probably best equipped to give that information, right?

[00:43:33] Nick Ionita: Or how do we break down some of the more formal L and D things, not throw them out, not create new content, but just understand if we only need a part of Portion of this, how can we take that and aim it at what that person needs? Right? So this gets down to knowing what somebody needs to transition.

[00:43:48] Nick Ionita: It's learning, it's manager support, it's support from peers. And the beauty of a lot of this is, we can let the employees also help drive some of this. And we see this a lot in the employee aided. transition where again, [00:44:00] like my background's product, someone who's moved from customer support to product is going to give very different advice to someone than the person that was in finance and went to business school and landed in product afterwards, right?

[00:44:10] Nick Ionita: Those are different roads, but both can tell you what being a PM is, but what that person needs at that point in time is how do I move from where I am and the people who have done it are going to be the best equipped if you can just connect them as an example. But, Ben passing to you on your thoughts.

[00:44:25] Nick Ionita: Yeah. I think that if you think of just like

[00:44:27] Ben Brooks: the cafeteria metaphor, if you think of being a kid in school in the cafeteria, they had your tray and they'd put this down and this we're eating today and it's green beans. It is mashed potatoes and it's chicken, right. And you've got the tray and that's it.

[00:44:37] Ben Brooks: And here's a carton of milk and here's your orange slices. And that is it, right. And that may be even better meal than you had at school. But, if you think about more of this continuum here in the research that Laura mentioned is more like a buffet, right? Buffets, big buffet in Vegas or something like that.

[00:44:51] Ben Brooks: Or a cruise, like you've got different stations. Some of it's more elaborate. You got the juice bar and you got the this and the that, and you got the pasta thing in the almond station. And so some of it's gonna be [00:45:00] very formal. And very structured. And some of it's going to be light and easy or quick or grab and go.

[00:45:05] Ben Brooks: And so I think that you want to think about sometimes to your point, Nick, we're a little too biased around the kind of you know, you're a level three person. So you're going to take this course and do this assessment and have this thing, right? Where to your point is it may just be a 30 minute conversation or a guest speaker on something or a job shadow for a day would be a tremendous unlock.

[00:45:25] Ben Brooks: And it can be just a dollop of something and it doesn't need to be a whole. plate of food around that, intervention, it can be just a little bite of it. Right. So I think that just thinking in a more continuum and it's okay at a buffet, if different people get different things, because it's part of what they want or what they need rather than everyone having to have the same.

[00:45:45] Nick Ionita: That's right. I think the one thing I'd add on that, I love that analogy is, one of the things on the buffet that is very easy to serve up is Learning through doing. And I think back to the startup point because I think this is important, right? Not every organization looks the same, it's the same [00:46:00] size, it's the same structure of opportunities.

[00:46:02] Nick Ionita: One of the things culturally to take and to think about here is, again, people can learn, like, we've identified, a certain set of skills we need to grow people into data scientists from a certain group. How do we take some work the data scientists, the data science team is working on and allow others to do that?

[00:46:19] Nick Ionita: And part of this is also reframing how you talk about it, right? I think when we talk about work and job description and these things, it's a list of responsibilities and tasks and things somebody needs to do. That's important. That's what the job's required to do. But I think we can also reframe these things as what is someone going to get?

[00:46:35] Nick Ionita: If they do this, what are they going to learn? And this again, to me plays into the self direction where if someone understands, Oh, this is what this is, I'm going to get exposure to XYZ. Cool. That completely starts reframing the I'm just doing extra work because I need to, and maybe this will get me somewhere versus, what is, what's in it for that person if they do that and we can take a complete learning lens to that just like we would with any course or anything else an L& D team would would [00:47:00] organize.

[00:47:02] Laura Meverdan: Excellent. Thank you. Thank you for that. So then going to the next slide, then I'm talking about how do we do that on the two picture of your talent based on skills. How does that work, Nick?

[00:47:17] Nick Ionita: Yeah. I mean, this to me takes us back to that first slide where we started, right? The ladder versus the jungle gym.

[00:47:22] Nick Ionita: Obviously, we need to understand what a job requires and who, kind of how we, how we get people into those positions. But I think a lot of what we've been uncovering here is we've got to find ways to create more visibility around what people can do and want to do. And if we can start taking more of a skills and experience view.

[00:47:40] Nick Ionita: This becomes easier to start understanding how we can apply people to new things, right? Because if we're just using a rigid job structure, can this person do this thing? We're stuck in that everyone's got to move up their lane and maybe somebody pops over every once in a while. So I think a lot of this is, the more we can understand what people can do and are [00:48:00] capable of, the better we can apply them across the things we need to do as a business, as an organization, right?

[00:48:05] Nick Ionita: And this also, again, let us be very tailored with our L& D strategies. One thing I just, I'll drop an anecdote here before passing to Ben. We had a customer who was having, again, like a lot of challenge hiring people in certain roles. And so they actually had to shift to hiring for potential.

[00:48:22] Nick Ionita: And what they identified was, Hey, If we can bring people in that can do these things and learn them fast, and they just need to learn these things. So maybe they don't have them right when they come in, but it completely transformed like the L& D strategy, right? Now L& D is starting to focus on it. Like part of onboarding is getting people ramped up on this set of skills so that they can actually do the job we hired them into.

[00:48:41] Nick Ionita: And now it's become a huge facilitator in how talent acquisition happens and not just TA because they've identified. We can bring people in and we can train on these things, then we can actually get what was harder to go get when we were looking for all of it on day one. Easier said than done, but I think starting to take this type of lens to how we think [00:49:00] about applying talent versus just what's needed for a job is really how you're going to transform a lot of how you operate here.

[00:49:06] Laura Meverdan: Right. Ben, I would love to hear your quick thoughts on this.

[00:49:08] Ben Brooks: Yeah. So I was mentioning, one of our customers is the head of DEI at Diageo, which is the big spirits company that owns like Don Julio and Kettle One, Johnny Walker. And Jeanine her job title previously was a supply chain management manufacturing so if you just look at Jeanine on that left side of the slide, Jeanine equals supply chain management, right?

[00:49:27] Ben Brooks: But you don't know that Jeanine, she says, she was born into a family of eight in the Bronx. She jokes she was born into a team, right? So she's really good at managing teams, engaging people, understanding emotional intelligence, problem solvers. She worked at the organization for 20 years. So she's now the head of DEI, right?

[00:49:46] Ben Brooks: So if you just look at supply, you never consider a supply chain person for the head of DEI role. You'd think, oh, an HR business partner, a talent management person, or, but Janine had all these other skills that are on the right side of this slide. So you have to look at the whole person, including [00:50:00] Janine's interest.

[00:50:00] Ben Brooks: Jeanine is from an underrepresented background, her kids and her family journeys that way as well. And so there's multiple levels of personal meaning and values. And so, we have many stories and again, those are the inspiring stories, but you have to look more holistically, the iceberg principle here.

[00:50:14] Ben Brooks: We just see the job titles, what's above the water, but there's so much more to the person, which comes out often in conversation. As much as we'd love to have it all in monolithic systems, and we'll get there over time, a lot of it, the manager needs to surface to understand more about the human being.

[00:50:29] Laura Meverdan: Excellent. Hey, Nick, can you tell us a little bit how Beamery can help?

[00:50:35] Nick Ionita: I will so like we've touched on here we're really focused on empowering organizations through what we've been calling skill based transformation. So a lot of what we touched on. So we provide a suite of tools that really, A, help you understand those workforce insights and what's here, across your organization, and then turn that into actions for your HR team and broader business.

[00:50:54] Nick Ionita: So a big part of this is obviously helping you understand who's here in your organization, how to best apply them and your [00:51:00] business needs are changing, right? So this is. This is constantly an equation that's in flux. So, whether that's unlocking, upscaling and interim mobility, like we've discussed to grow people in a hard to hire roles internally, or, these days it could be helping figure out how to reallocate existing talent when priorities change, our sweeter tools are really focused on that.

[00:51:18] Nick Ionita: And if you could just flip to the next slide, just in the spirit of this, we've really been focusing recently on how we've equipped managers and particularly hrps with these same tools to help foster more proactive collaboration around team progression and employee development. So if anyone's interested in talking at some point, I'd love to connect.

[00:51:34] Laura Mastrorocco: Thank you so much, Nick, Ben. So how can PILOT help?

[00:51:39] Ben Brooks: Well, I think, yeah, Nick's fellow founder and, I founded PILOT. We offer a product where we want everyone to feel powerful at work. And we talked earlier about self direction, tools, and culture. We help with all of that. The way that we do it is we provide an employee development program virtually in its scale.

[00:51:53] Ben Brooks: It's turnkey, includes coaching. individual reflection, fireside chats with your own executives, talk about your culture. And of course, [00:52:00] the really important thing we talked about in this conversation is bringing managers and employees together, not for a performance review, but to talk about the future, to talk about what's possible, to get people excited, to, surface those iceberg principles.

[00:52:11] Ben Brooks: And so we work with companies big and small. We work with a lot of startups and nonprofits and small businesses, et cetera, but also big companies around the world. And really as a former HR person myself, I just know that, everybody like development is one of those things like motherhood and apple pie like everyone's like heck yes development, but the reality is it's super hard to actually do it right and deliver it well so we've tried to eliminate a lot of the pain points and getting that out.

[00:52:35] Ben Brooks: And, Jeanine our Diageo sponsored nominees, we were named the supplier of the year for the company for them last year which we're really proud of. We'd love to help out so again we've got, we'll put a poll up at the end but but just like Beanery's got a great product and reputation and brand in the HR industry we're excited to help customers at a similar level of their excellence.

[00:52:52] Laura Meverdan: Thank you both for sharing all of this. And I think what we have to remember is that there are benefits to the business that healthy career progression. [00:53:00] It not only retains employees, but it also maximizes the organization's investment. And there is a lot of information here. You can see why this is important to the business.

[00:53:11] Laura Meverdan: It's just not for the individual. It's also for the business. So we're going to roll right now into if you have any questions and also right now Laura is going to drop into the other Laura is going to drop into chat on how you can get credit for this webinar that is going to happen. And you can see the activity code for SHRM, and then also HRCI activity ID.

[00:53:37] Laura Meverdan: So you also get credit for this.

[00:53:40] Laura Meverdan: On behalf of all of us here, both at for both organizations, we'd like to say thank you for joining us and sharing your time and talent and your resources of sharing to the conversation.

[00:53:52] Ben Brooks: Yeah. Thank you, Nick. I, you know, every time we have one of these conversations, I feel like I walk away smarter thanks to you. And so I appreciate, [00:54:00] again, challenging my thinking in the best of ways and really all, so many great comments today that again, I think has people really dialed in around, what they're doing in their organizations, what's working, what's not, et cetera.

[00:54:11] Ben Brooks: And, I think, again, it seems like this is such a priority for everyone. I'm really glad that we're able to engage in this dialogue.

[00:54:17] Nick Ionita: Same. Always love doing this with you, Ben. Thanks for the perspective and great questions, everyone.