PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Jessica Hughes (00:00): Welcome back to Fork and Lens, we are very excited to have Chad Harvey on the podcast today. Chad is a business coach, strategist and Vistage Chair just like Claudia was. He is here to bring some insights for us. He understands that every leader has their own journey and everyone goes about things based on their perspectives and their experiences. So, really everything is really personalized when it comes to Chad. I always love that, but he makes it very impactful by taking insights and offering observations and questions and methodologies and tools to hone our skills as leaders and deepen our learning and allowing us to achieve our desired results. So, hopefully today you will be able to take something very personal from our conversation and put it into action where you are living and breathing and working. So, here we go.

Welcome to the Fork and Lens podcast, brought to you by VisCul. Ooh, smells delish.

Chad Harvey (01:25): You’re very welcome, it’s my pleasure to be here.

Jessica Hughes (01:28): So, tell me a little bit about how we can create alignment internally? What is the foundation to that in terms of mission, values, all those different things?

Chad Harvey (01:39): Sure. That’s a really interesting question because it’s very contingent upon the type of organization that exists, the length of time the organization has been in business, the industries it serves. I see that question pop up a lot, especially in mid and senior management. And usually when that question gets asked, they are masking a deeper issue in terms of a lack of some of the things you touched on in your introduction in terms of mission and vision and values, shared history, stories. So, the place to really start is you have to start at the top. If you are in that middle management or that marketing manager role and there is a lack of alignment in the organization, it’s very difficult to both manage up to get your superiors, your owners, your CEOs moving in the proper direction as well as manage down with your team.

If you don’t already have the core components in place, it’s going to be very difficult to drive that through the organization. So, I wanted to mention that at first since you started with the marketing manager role, assuming that you do have the buy in from the folks that are able to make the big decisions, that’s another matter entirely. I see a lot of organizations that … So, let me back up. When I was in college, I studied history, it’s a different bent here for people that work with leadership in business, and it’s one of those fuzzy liberal arts things that people disregard a lot of times as maybe lacking value.

But it gave me a real appreciation for the stories that we tell and the culture that we build, because when you read world history, American history, and you read all these different stories, you begin to get an appreciation of how people can come together under a common banner. When I work with the organizations and we start to dig under the hood and really examine some of these questions about alignment that you’re talking about, one of the places I like to start is actually with the history of the organization, why was it founded? What are the owner or the founder stories? What stories are being told within the walls? Where are the critical milestones where the organization either made the proper turn, they just ignore what was going on in the world around them, or maybe they make the wrong decision, right?

It’s always easy to characterize the wrong decision in hindsight with that lens, but there’s value in unpacking that and figuring out what is your story, because if you know your story and you’re very clear on who you’re serving and why you’re there, then you can start to really dig into the underpinnings that make alignment possible. I recently wrote an article, very brief, it dug into the history in this country of shareholder value versus stakeholder value. Stakeholder value is something that we very conversant with in the United States business community, post World War II up through 1970s.

Then there was a very fundamental shift and we moved toward shareholder value, which essentially says, “We’re going to maximize return on investment for owners as opposed to stakeholder value which is, we’re here to benefit, not just our employees and our customers and our vendors, but our entire community at large, we’re here for a larger purpose.” I think even without using the language of stakeholder value, that’s a trend that we’ve seen accelerated in the last 15 years, the desire to get back to something that’s more than just about quarterly profits and dollars and cents. It’s not to say that we can’t, and we shouldn’t have profits because without a profit, you have no business. You’re running an NGO of some sort, which is fine, but without profits, again, all this other fancy stuff isn’t possible.

So, with that in mind, if you can begin to grapple with this issue of, “Are we here for just maximizing value of shareholders or are we here to maximize the value of all the stakeholders?” Then that can inform all this other soft stuff that’s going to speak into your story about mission and vision and values and purpose. So, I set this stage and all this background with all these fancy words and concepts, because at the end of the day, you’ve got to make sure that when you’re talking about alignment, the people that are working within your organization have a purpose or an individual reason that they can identify with the company story and the company’s purpose and mission and vision and values.

You’re never going to get a 100% buy in from everybody, it’s just not possible, we’re all very individualistic, we all have our own motivations, but if you can tap into a key component of why somebody gets up every morning, that’s where you’re going to find the basis for real one.

Jessica Hughes (06:26): Well, and I think that what you’re talking about, I think, especially as we look at the past 15 years, we’re seeing the development of B corps, we’re seeing Simon Sinek talking about Your Why, and what’s your purpose, and getting back to that. I think it’s important as an organizational leader to understand what causes your employees to get up every single morning and show up to work and apply themselves. But even I’ve noticed there are certain employees that come up, they get up, they come to work, they do their work and they leave, but they don’t take ownership in that work. I think that’s a distinctive characteristic of really great people in your organization when they actually own it, when they’re not an owner, they’re just a stakeholder that is completely invested in the company itself.

Chad Harvey (07:14): That’s a really good point. I think there’s another component to this as well, and it goes beyond what we’re talking about here. It goes to actual management philosophy. For a long time, I’ve been beating my drum about the need to move away, and I think for the most part, organizations in the United States have done this, but the need to move away from command and control style mechanisms in an organization, that was something that the baby boomer generation learned at the feet of the World War II, Greatest Generation. Then when my generation came into the workplace, we’re starting to look around and say, “What is this all about? In the mid to late 90s, why are we doing this? Why are we just being fed this stuff and being told what to do? We’d like to be invested, we’d like to have a greater stake in what’s going on.”

So, if you frame this conversation in terms of the larger shift in management philosophy that’s been going on in this country for 25 years or so, it all begins to make a little bit more sense because you still find these pockets of command and control, and this desire to drive engagement by just telling the people what to do instead of actually talking with them and working with them. I mean, I’ll share a story with you about two and a half years ago, I was hosting a networking event for business owners in the community. We had a speaker come in and they spoke about engagement. One of the owners is a tech entrepreneur, and this individual was asking the question, essentially what you asked, “How do I get these people engaged? Why can’t I get them to do more than just leave their job at 4:30 or five o’clock and become invested in this?”

The answer was really simple, “Well, you got to talk to them? You got to figure out what’s going on with them. You got to take an interest in their personal lives. The entrepreneur looked right at the expert and he goes, “That just sounds exhausting?” I think right there is a perfect summation of why we don’t have alignment engagement in a lot of organizations. It’s hard work. It’s really difficult [crosstalk 00:09:18]

Jessica Hughes (09:18):

It is, it is hard work. It’s one of those things that … and this is going to lead me in probably to my next question, but it’s just like taking the time to be able to look at things from a 10,000 foot view and the one foot view, you have to take time to do that just like you have to take time to have those conversations and to build that rapport with an employee. You can’t expect to just have one conversation and know their entire life story and the nuances of their personality and what makes them tick, it has to be a recurring thing. There’s employees that have been with us for, gosh, five years, that I’m still learning new things about on a daily basis.

There was episode before this one where we found out that someone that we hired a couple months ago, we knew that she had cats and dogs, but then we found out that she had horses in the midst of a conversation that we were recording for the podcast. We were like, “Wait, hold on, you have horses?” So again, it’s just having those conversations and getting to know people, and Chad’s right, it’s work. It totally is work. So, how do we make time for this? How do we make sure that we’re engaging people, we’re bringing people along for the ride that we’re understanding them, but we’re also being able to look at things from a 10,000 foot view down to the one foot view at all in one little compact thought?

Chad Harvey (10:40): Sure. So, where I see organizations … and it’s probably easier to start with where do they go wrong initially, where they go wrong with this is, a lack of transparency. All right? When you couple a lack of transparency with a lack of being able to knit together that larger vision with the work that’s being done at the line level, that’s where you get this misalignment. When I work with organizations, one of the things that we do is we spend a lot of time, not just on the mission and the vision, but the values of the organization. Okay? Then when we get to crafting the strategy and the individual tactics, that’s the filter for what we’re going to do as an organization. If it doesn’t line up with one of those key areas, then it’s probably not something that we should be doing.

Jessica Hughes (11:24): All right.

Chad Harvey (11:25): I worked with a revenue strategist many years ago, which was very unique industry niche, I don’t know that there’s very many of them out there.

Jessica Hughes (11:32): So that’s a new one for me?

Chad Harvey (11:34): Yeah, right. Actually you find it in the hospitality industry sometimes, you’ll find internal roles where people’s job is to maximize revenue and focus on how they can increase that with, say a hospitality group, something like that. This was an organization, they were industry agnostically across the board internationally. They’re very unique, but in any event, one of the things I learned from them is that strategy really involves what you’re not going to do as opposed to what you are going to do, and so when you’ve got this strategy and you’ve got this filter for what you are and are not going to do, and you’re able to make that list or that set of tactics and strategic initiatives transparent within the organization, that allows people something to latch onto, to see themselves in the bigger picture.

The same is true for different metrics and financials and things like that. I see so many organizations, so afraid to share information either about profitability or poorly finance reports, things like that. They think it’s just something that the managers need to hold tight. My advice to them is always very simple, it’s, “Look, you don’t need to open up the books to every single employee, but you do need to give them a picture of what’s going on so that they have an understanding of where they fit in the larger role and how the organization is doing as a whole.” It’s that top down transparency, it’s the marriage of what you’re doing today versus where you want to go in the next quarter, in the next year, and then filtering that all through what you’ve painstakingly developed and then telling that story.

That’s really how you do it, and I know that sounds very abstract, but again, it’s a lot of work down in the trenches but it’s a lot of forethought ahead of time to make sure that you know what you’re doing and you know that the people that are working with know what’s going on.

Jessica Hughes (13:28): That’s a really good point and something that we’ve started using in the past year and a half, VisCul has been Traction and the EOS system. I feel like that has been really good for us in the sense of there are documents that you fill out with that system that allows you to say this is where we want to be in 10 years, and this is what our vision is, and this is what the values are that are going to support that. But it also breaks down metrics and rocks or goals that you set for yourself on a quarterly and yearly basis. What we’ve started doing is on a weekly basis because we’re such a small team. We sit down for about an hour and a half and we go through the metrics for the week prior and say, “Okay, like this was … how many podcasts went out or how many were recorded or prepped.”

We talk about the profitability of projects or the efficiency of everyone in the studio and all the things that we’ve set up as these are the metrics that tell us that we’re being successful and what we’ve based the business upon, and these are the rocks that are going to push us forward. So we’ll review those and everyone is accountable to their own. I think having a system like that, whether you’re a team as part of an … or an internal team is part of a bigger corporation, or you’re just a team as a small midsize business, it makes a lot of sense to have that because there’s something strategic there and tangible that goes back to your point of, it’s not necessarily opening the books, but saying, “In order for us to be successful, these are the things that need to be achieved and that we need to track over time and make sure that we’re hitting those numbers.”

Chad Harvey (15:03): Yeah. Trying to take it up even to a higher level, people don’t think about what success looks like and how they’re going to define it. So I was working with an organization a couple of weeks ago, fairly large, they’re about $75 million company, fairly large for central PA, anyway, and they were in the midst of doing some different turnaround projects because they’ve been struggling with profitability. So they had hired a new Ops director, they had hired somebody to come in and overhaul a botched IT, ERP implementation, things like that. The owner and I were chatting and he said to me, “Well, things should be turned around by August 15th, this is going to be great, we’re on track …” I said, “What’s on track?” He said, “Well, everything.” I said, “What is everything? How are we going to measure this?”

We spent the next, probably two hours drilling down, what are the key numbers in the four or five individual departments here that really need to move, and how are we going to know if we’ve moved them? It’s fascinating to me that sometimes people don’t sit down to define what success looks like, even on a project basis or for their organization as a whole. It’s just like we get in there every morning and we crank that crank and we’re going to make the donuts, and it doesn’t matter if the donuts have rocks in them or chocolate bits, we’re going to make them. It’s fascinating.

Jessica Hughes (16:22): So, how do people go about determining what those metrics should be, and how to hold their team accountable to them as well?

Chad Harvey (16:31): Again, very specific to every industry. You’ve got to figure out, so let’s say if you’re in transportation, on time delivery matters. If you are in the hospitality and service industry, then I would imagine for you that wastage is very important, that spoilage is important and things like that. You got to look and see what impacts your customer experience, what impacts are there upon your supply chains and your vendors, what are the impacts upon not just your customers, but also your employees? The way that you figure all this out is you take a step back and you try and put aside what you think you know, especially if you’ve been in the industry for more than two or four years, because you’re probably the most dangerous person in the room there because you’ve already seen it all, and you’ve got a ton of preconceived notions.

Jessica Hughes (17:24): Exactly.

Chad Harvey (17:27): Honestly, the best people to help you determine where some of these gaps are, are new employees, right? It takes, I think, approximately 60 to 90 days for a new employee to lose perspective in an organization, and to also become acculturated to the point where a lot of times they don’t feel that they have the right to speak up or make observations about what they’re seeing. So those new employees are a prime source of this.

Jessica Hughes (17:55): Yes.

Chad Harvey (17:55): This is also why consultants exist, as much as they are maligned, they do bring a set of perspectives and a different view to what’s going on in your organization. But in terms of how you dig into this, I think you’ve got to get everybody to the table. So, for a small organization, with 20 or 25 people, it could be a handful of three or four folks and maybe a line employee or two, and you got to put a stake in the ground and figure out, “Alright, here’s what we think we need to measure.” Then you go out and you test that. Right? A lot of what I see is … and this has been changing a lot over the last five to 10 years as technology advances at a very rapid pace. But a lot of what I see is a lack of real-time data.

I see a lot of people using lagging indicators instead of leading indicators, and that’s a critically important distinction because if you’re always looking backwards, it’s going to be very difficult to understand what’s happening in the business right now as opposed to even what’s going to happen in the next week or three or a month or two. So, if you can get access to more real-time data, and it exists, you just got to figure out a way to unleash it. There was a famous quote in Silicon Valley years ago, it said, “Information wants to be free.” Whether you buy into that or not, information may or may not want to be free, but it doesn’t want to be seen and it wants to be seen in real-time.

Jessica Hughes (19:20): Yes,

Chad Harvey (19:21): Yes, if you could implement those kinds of dashboards, even in a rudimentary way with some Excel sheets, things like that, then you can position yourself to get to the next level.

Jessica Hughes (19:30): Yeah, you can, and actually there is a podcast episode that aired a few weeks ago that talked about how there’s advancements in media buy in that can give you real time results that you can pivot as you’re seeing those results come in, and you’re not just waiting for a report two weeks from now. So there are definitely technologies that are allowing us to be very proactive with data and marketing and how we’re pushing information to consumers. I think about social and just the advancements that we’ve seen in social media period in terms of insights and being able to track engagement and those sorts of things over the years. So there’s a lot of different nuances to that that we can pull from.

Chad Harvey (20:20): I should have touched on the human element as well, because your question was basically, how do we get to this information? How do we uncover these KPIs? So, with respect to the human element, one of the things that I often see, and I’m going to pick on two roles in particular within an organization. I’m going to pick on IT and I’m going to pick on HR. All right? A lot of times, the people that are running organizations, don’t bring IT and HR to the table in a way where they can drive value. Okay?

Jessica Hughes (20:48): Yes.

Chad Harvey (20:49): HR, a lot of times it’s focused on compliance. It’s focused on checking boxes, filing paper works, making sure benefits are paid instead of talent development and really working with people. If you can bring an HR professional to the table in your organization and get them focused on those components as opposed to the compliance and the busy work components, that’s going to help you figure out what your people metrics would be. Similarly, with IT and I jokingly refer this to some friends of mine in this space as Digital Janitor Services, that’s what a lot of organizations view IT as, they view it as, “Well, we just need to keep the email running and the website up and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

IT belongs at the executive table in a meaningful way where they can drive value, and they drive value through process improvement, through looking forward in terms of what are the trends and what can we do as an organization to better maximize the investments that we’ve already made and the ones we’re going to make in the future. And they can also help dramatically in crafting those KPIs or the individual metrics down to the individual person that need to be measured. So, don’t neglect the human element as well.

Jessica Hughes (22:03): There’s a lot of truth in those statements. I think oftentimes those are the two departments they get swept to the wayside and not focused on. There’s a lot of pressure on management to cultivate talent and those sorts of things, but someone needs to lead that charge, and HR is very much an important part of that. Honestly, HR should be the ones that are guiding managers and having those deeper conversations and those routine conversations, and also checking in on those managers to make sure that they have the resources that they need to facilitate those conversations. IT is the same thing, if they don’t know what the conversation at the top of the organization is, they can’t be helpful and forward thinking and bringing the best technology to the table to help the organization move forward. So, very good points.

All right. So, when it comes to metrics, how do we hold people accountable to them? And how do we have conversations around accountabilities and metrics that aren’t necessarily being met within an organization that really helps move things forward?

Chad Harvey (23:13): Sure. So again, it starts with making sure you’ve got the right metrics, which we’ve covered already. So, assuming you’ve got the right metrics in place-

Jessica Hughes (23:21): We’re assuming?

Chad Harvey (23:22): Yeah. We’re assuming, right. And those are going to change over time too, and I think that’s an important point as well, before we get to the larger question you raised is that, you can’t just put a stake in the ground and leave it alone for 18, 24, 36 months, this stuff changes continually. When I work with organizations to craft strategy, a decade ago, you could get three to five years out of strategic plan. At this point in time, you’re lucky if you get 18 months out of it, all right? Things are changing extremely rapidly even before COVID.

So, the same holds true for the metrics that you’re holding people accountable to, you need to make sure that you are really looking at them at least on an annual basis to make sure that not just the numbers within those metrics need to change, but also are we still looking at the right stuff? Because a lot of times the ball moves and we continue to play over in a corner of the field and the game has moved on. All right?

Jessica Hughes (24:16): Right.

Chad Harvey (24:17): So, here’s an important point regarding holding people accountable, and this is going to seem to fly in the face of what I said earlier regarding transparency in the organization, but I think it’s important. We dilute people with data anymore, and we don’t necessarily tell them what is most important for them to focus on. So, if you are holding somebody accountable, you need to make sure, yes, that they’ve got access to the larger picture and they understand where the organization is going and how it’s doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis. But you also need to be crystal clear with them and they need to be bought into this, that there are one or two or maybe three particularly important or key sets of numbers that they are focused on. Right?

If you’re in sales, it might be one thing, if you’re in customer service, it might be another, but make sure that they are focused on just that one or two key number metric as opposed to the larger stuff all the time, because it’s very easy for people to lose focus. So, I would say, start with that. Number one, make sure that you understand what your individual numbers are because just like the tactics in an organization, when you craft strategy are going to get increasingly broader as you go up to the strategic level, the numbers are going to do the same thing.Think of them like a little Russian nesting doll, where you’ve got four or five pieces that you’re pulling apart.

You want to get down for that line level employee to the smallest doll that is still critically important, but it’s part of a larger hole, and as you go up to the supervisor and the department and et cetera, et cetera, those numbers are going to feed their way up. So, you’ve got to make sure when we talk about alignment, that there’s alignment between the numbers as well, and that’s important.

Jessica Hughes (26:08): So, obviously when it comes to metrics, is like black and white, it’s very clear, it’s quantifiable. Whenever we’re looking at creative, and it’s something very subjective, how do we create metrics and accountabilities around that? Because it’s not something that I can at … I can look at a cup for instance and say, “It’s perfect, it’s done, it’s the right shape. It has the right lid. It has the right color.” When we’re talking about creative, it’s interpreted by every individual and everyone has their different opinion about what does complete look like? What does perfection look like? So, how do you create metrics and accountabilities around something that is subjective?

Chad Harvey (26:53): I love that you used the term perfection, the elusive perfection that we are all [crosstalk 00:26:57]

Jessica Hughes (26:57): The elusive perfection.

Chad Harvey (27:00): Oh my gosh.

Jessica Hughes (27:02): There is no such thing as perfection, but-

Chad Harvey (27:04): There is not.

Jessica Hughes (27:06): Look at something and say, “That’s done.” Cup as that example, but then other people could look at something and say, “Well, it’s not done because you could do this and we could do that, but maybe time doesn’t allow for it or whatever it is.” So, it becomes very hard to create metrics and accountabilities around something that is subjective.

Chad Harvey (27:23): Yeah. I think that when you’re talking about creative work, a lot of times it needs to be iterative in terms of what you’re looking to accomplish. I can’t tell you how many times, because I’ve worked with different marketing and advertising agencies in the past. So I have a little bit of a window into that world. I couldn’t possibly call myself an expert on it, but I understand the process and how developmental it is. I think a lot of times the key work that gets done there regarding a metric, so let’s boil it down to the project level with a client, right?

Jessica Hughes (27:58): Sure.

Chad Harvey (27:59): A lot of times, the most important metric, there is going to be client satisfaction and with all due respect to the client, the expectations get set at the beginning of the engagement. A lot of that is going to be thrust upon the agency that’s working with that client to very specifically delineate the expectations of set engagement, and where I see things go wrong a lot of times is they just say yes, yes, yes to the client. “Oh yes, we can do that. Yes, we can do that. Yes, we can do that.” So you’ve created an open-ended contract with no definition of success and it doesn’t matter what numbers you’ve got. The client is never going to be satisfied because they’re still chasing that perfect idea. Right?

Jessica Hughes (28:39): Yes. Yes, it’s a true story.

Chad Harvey (28:44): Wow. We’re talking about creatives right now, but a lot of the folks that I work with … So I work with industry and hard businesses but I also work with folks that are engaged in more intellectual businesses, attorneys and marketing agencies, things like that. This is a common question that comes up. It’s an issue that happens all the time, and then I think it is a lot of why … let’s pick on the legal profession for example, that’s a lot of the reason you don’t see bounded contracts and engagements in that profession, instead, you’ve got this idea of billable hours, right? We’re just going to continue to work on this thing until the client is satisfied instead of outlining upfront what those metrics are and what the deliverables are and what the success looks like.

So, I’m sure I’ll get some pushback from the legal profession for that statement, but I think I’m on safe ground here when I say that the entire legal profession has been under assault for about 20 years and they’re radically rethinking their model anyway. So, if I can be of service to any attorneys out there, give me a call.

Jessica Hughes (29:50):Well, honestly I think that’s why we’ve seen a trend in the agency side changing from that billable hour to rather value based project agreements or retainer agreements. So, it’s not necessarily based upon hours, but it’s based upon the value of that project and the return on investment that the client’s going to receive from it versus how many hours go into it. And it’s always interesting because I look at it from two perspectives. There’s actually, whenever I’m working on estimates, there’s someone that runs the numbers on like, “This is how many hours will probably need to be allocated to all these different things to accomplish what we’re being asked to do.” Then I have someone on the other side of it that says, “Basically, this is the value to the client, and I gut check it should be in this ballpark.”

Then I gut check of looking at it from the client perspective of what if they paid for something similar to this in the past, and has that been profitable for us? Or did it go out of scope? And look at it from that full picture, and I take all those things into account and break it out then for the client on proposals and estimates. So it’s very interesting that the legal profession, I will say not to throw them under the bus, but it is a little bit of a old fashioned way of billing for their intellect.

Chad Harvey (31:17): Yeah, very much so. Yeah. There’s a lot of industries that you hear a lot in the press about the coming disruption with artificial intelligence and et cetera, et cetera. That is an industry that’s definitely prime for disruption. In fact, any business industry sector that has a routine work. So think about contract review or even, for that matter, within the creative space, logo creation, things like that. I guarantee you that those are parts of that industry that are going to be automated and they are going to go away in terms of humans actually doing that work.

Jessica Hughes (31:58): Right.

Chad Harvey (31:59): When you look at those different components that are going to disappear, you really need to be asking yourself the question, “What do I provide or what does our organization provide a value that can’t be automated, that can’t be turned over to artificial intelligence that is really important? A lot of times the answer to that is the work with the people, and the understanding of people, because that’s not going away anytime soon.

Jessica Hughes (32:25): That just brings us right back to some of the initial points that we made when we started talking today is, it’s about the engagement and understanding people and having that dialogue with one another whenever we’re onboarding … excuse me, whenever we’re onboarding a client we go through something called discovery and we spend a huge block of time just getting to know our client, getting to know their competition and building this visual story, if you will, around their brand and a computer can’t do that. There isn’t enough empathy. There isn’t enough of that human element to have the compassion and the understanding and also the ability to ask the questions that need to be asked to dig further and deeper.

So, it’s interesting, especially as we start looking at artificial intelligence and how that’s going to impact different industries and the things that are happening, and you’re right, technology is constantly evolving. COVID, no COVID, we’re constantly redoing our strategic plan, just trying to stay attuned to where the industry is going, what our customers need and the technology that’s available to us. It’s interesting to watch it all. It is.

Chad Harvey (33:38): It absolutely is. You touched on the issue of onboarding from the client perspective, but to bring it back to the larger focus here in terms of creating alignment within your organization, onboarding is something that I see most organizations, even well intentioned ones, they miss the boat on with new employees. That’s ultimately where the alignment is going to start for that individual employee. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard of employees that show up, and on the first day of work, their desk isn’t ready, their phone’s not hooked up, their email’s not ready to go. All those things send a signal to the employee about their value and their place within the organization.

If that message isn’t carefully crafted and well executed from day one, then you are already off to the wrong start in terms of your ability to get that individual aligned within the organization. So, critical stuff, it’s basic but it’s critical.

Jessica Hughes (34:34): It’s critical, and I think everyone needs to stop and consider what does that look like in a work from home environment? Because I think the trend is going that a lot of us are going to end up working from home moving forward but not necessarily going to go back to the office, at least not full time, and knowing that we’re going to have to onboard new employees to learn an organizational culture, to understand the ins and outs and the vision and the mission and what we’re holding one another accountable to digitally, throws a little bit of a curve ball into the situation.

So, I think it’s worth the question of how are you onboarding people digitally to embrace that culture or how are you gathering your team together maybe on a regular basis. For us, we’ve been talking about doing quarterly off sites where we’re all together for a day that is really focused on that team engagement and having conversations and not necessarily working together but just understanding one another more or so, because we’re going to start missing that.

Chad Harvey (35:37): Absolutely. I think that a lot of that starts with understanding communication preferences and what the ideal form of communication is when you’re talking about a remote working environment. I am not a fan of email, I think it is one of the largest time sucks ever invented. I hate it [crosstalk 00:35:58]

Jessica Hughes (35:57): It’s my two hour block before I go to sleep at night.

Chad Harvey (36:00): I get this cleaned up.

Jessica Hughes (36:03): Exactly.

Chad Harvey (36:03): There are far superior ways to transfer knowledge and effectively communicate, especially with your teams. There’s a lot of different technological tools out there that make that possible. But at the end of the day, all those different tools are simply window dressing, and when we talk about alignment in an organization, this is something I work with leaders on a lot, is the idea of what are your organizational principles and philosophies and what are your personal principles and philosophies? So, do you have a philosophy like me that email is a huge waste of time? Do you have a philosophy that says email must be responded to within 90 minutes regardless of whether your manager send it 4:00 AM or not, right?

These are all key parts of your organizational culture, and they in turn inform the level and degree of alignment that employers are going to have. But to get back to my point here, which is about communication, communication with the remote workforce looks dramatically different than it does in person, in an office environment, I should say, because you’re not running into people at the water cooler, you’re not having those kinds of impromptu gathering. Steve Jobs, before he died famously had a great deal of input into the design of Apple’s new headquarters.

One of the things that he originally wanted to do was centralize the restrooms so that everybody had to walk to one place and they would have this random interaction in the halls. Now, he was eventually shut down by the rest of the team because it was completely impractical, but he understood what a lot of inventors and folks throughout the years have understood, which is that these spontaneous interactions in the workplace are important. So, to get back to the idea of communication, you can’t necessarily replicate that in a virtual or remote working environment, but what are you going to do to supplement it or replace it? How are you going to get people away from reading email for three hours a day and actually thinking and creating value?

Because it’s very easy for us to fall into a routine where our sense of accomplishment is dictated by the number of messages that we reply to or the number of boxes that we checked or whatever. That’s all a robot work and that’s going to go away. So, let’s talk about how we create value, what we do to streamline our communications. Another perfect example of this is meetings, and thank God, meetings are finally starting to transform as a result of what we’ve been through. I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve sat in my younger years where I leave the meeting and I have no idea what was accomplished. I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t what [crosstalk 00:38:43]

I’ll be honest, I was even guilty. I remember once or twice when I was running an organization, walking into the room and maybe it was like 3:30 or four o’clock, and I’d a long day, and I distinctly remember at one point in time shooting my mouth off and saying, “What are we even here meeting about?” Not a horrible thing for the leader of an organization to say, but fatigue with meetings is a big problem, and that’s why companies like Amazon have gone to narrative memos, when they require you to write down in detail, why you’re there, what’s going on. So, with that briefing stuff into a different format and then limit the time on those meetings so that you’re there actually make a decision and create value for the organization instead of just this informational transfer, and it all comes back to communication.

Jessica Hughes (39:29): Yes. Agreed, agreed. Well, is there anything else you’d like to add?

Chad Harvey (39:33): I don’t think so. I think we’ve mined this topic of alignment pretty thoroughly here. I’m happy to dig deeper if you or your listeners have any questions, but I think that about covers it for today.

Jessica Hughes (39:45): Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it, Chad.

Chad Harvey (39:48): Yeah, same here. It was a pleasure being here, Jessica Hughes, and thanks [inaudible 00:39:52] for having me on.

Jessica Hughes (40:16): All right, that is all for today. Thank you so much for joining us. If you’d like to follow up with Chad, you can follow him on LinkedIn @ChadCHarvey. You can also check out his website at chadharvey.com. The resources that you can find on there are plentiful. So, I really encourage you to check out his website. He has blog writings on there, he also has a YouTube channel. If you don’t really play on LinkedIn, check him out on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram as well, he is more than willing to answer your questions and provide insights. So, I encourage you to do that.

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