Enabling Better Productivity through Better Culture with Kevin Oakes

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 group, and today I'm really pleased to have Kevin Oakes joining us. Kevin's the CEO of the Institute for Corporate Productivity and author of Culture Renovation. So welcome to the show, Kevin.

Kevin Oakes: Ah, thanks for having me on, Dane.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet. So I love the title of the book and I listened to one of your recent podcasts when you were talking about the whole concept of renovation, assessing with data and insights of the wider community, what's good that we want to maintain and protect, and then where we're going to make our adjustments. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you've come into the world of culture renovation and the work that you do with i4cp?

Kevin Oakes: Yeah, sure. I'll start with just a background on who we are. We're actually a fairly old company. We had been around for a few decades as the Human Resource Institute. I took it over a little over 15 years ago and we rebranded it, the Institute for Corporate Productivity or i4cp. Today we're doing more research than anyone on the planet in the HR space. And it's always where the business lens of what are high performing organizations doing differently with their people practices versus low performing organizations? And while we come up with a lot of best practices of companies, what we're really honed in on are next practices. We're looking for practices that have specific correlation to bottom line business impact, yet not a lot of companies have yet put that practice into place. So we label that a next practice, and it's something that we think companies should be on the lookout for in the future. And so culture ends up being a topic that really fits nicely into what we do as an organization. It's been very clear that high performing organizations generally have very healthy cultures. I would argue to anybody that, that's where you start. You start with a healthy culture and you will create a high performance organization, it doesn't usually happen the other way around. And so we've done quite a bit of research into that topic overall. The culture renovation study, which ended up being a book, was one of the largest studies ever conducted on corporate culture. And we looked at over 6, 000 organizations really with one thing in mind. We recognize that changing culture is quite hard. Most CEOs will tell me they find it almost impossible to change culture. My dad, even as a CEO of a very large insurance company, told me that he wished he had the book a long time ago because he found it impossible to change culture. But there are companies that succeeded doing it. About 15% have success. And so we wanted to find out was there a blueprint or a pattern that other organizations could use in order to effectively change their culture? And that was the genesis of the culture renovation book.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. I didn't realize it was that much research. That's a huge sample of businesses and practices. Over what time period were you looking at that?

Kevin Oakes: This started before the pandemic and then I wrote the book during the Pandemic. We have since done research from the beginning of the pandemic to now on what has happened around corporate culture. In fact, we just published a brand new study just a couple weeks ago called Culture Fitness. And we looked at what are the elements of a healthy culture versus a toxic culture, which leads into, okay, if you have a toxic culture, what are the steps you can take to really make it a healthier culture going forward?

Dane Groeneveld: Now, with that comment that you shared Kevin from your father about, " Gee, I wish I had this book a while ago." I likewise had a dad who was in a fairly successful C- level role, had a good career. And when I started talking to him earlier in my career when I was facing some culture change issues, he would always tell me, his experience was that it was easier to change people as in, change them out of the organization than it was to get them to change within the organization, when you ran into some of those problems. In the labor environment that we're in now, that's not a luxury that many employers have. You really need to work with the people that you have. And the way that corporate knowledge, corporate memory has evolved, you can't afford to let some of that institutional knowledge walk out the door either. So how are you seeing the labor shortage impact the importance of culture and doing some of this experimentation with building culture from the top down?

Kevin Oakes: Yeah, I think a lot of organizations recognize that, they have to improve their culture for the future. Almost future- proof it so that we can create a workforce that accepts change. We're in an environment that is constantly changing. And it's very clear that high performing organizations not only accept change and view it as normal, but embrace it and view it as an opportunity. Versus low performance organizations, they generally avoid change or dread change, and you've got a workforce that just complains about change all the time. And so that all revolves around what is your culture made up of? Do you have a workforce that is change ready, a workforce that is going to do the necessary things to continue to stay competitive in an increasingly competitive market? And so culture renovation is a sequential 18 step process that organizations can take to make positive changes to their culture. It's peppered with lots of different case studies from companies that have successfully changed culture. Microsoft is a good example, but all kinds of companies are profiled in the book from 3M to T- Mobile to F5 a high tech company. Where these organizations have taken those sequential steps to improve not only their overall culture, but the financial performance of the organization. So I've been thrilled that many Fortune 500 companies and even military organizations are using the book right now as the blueprint of how they changed their culture.

Dane Groeneveld: And I must apologize, I haven't had a chance to read the book. I've seeing a lot of your posts, which is why I was eager to get you on and have this conversation, but it can be operated as of blueprint. So if I was to come on and look at it there, it's going through chapter by chapter, there's staged exercises to be doing with your team surveys. Is that the way that you've built it?

Kevin Oakes: Yeah. As we got into this, Dane, we originally were using the term culture transformation, which is the more common term that people use when they talk about changing their culture. And we recognized that when we explored those, that few percentage of companies that had successfully done this, none of them transformed their culture. Instead like an old house, they sort of carefully renovated what they had. And they recognized there were certain aspects of the company that were very unique or hard to replace. Things that made them successful to begin with that they wanted to keep, but they improved other aspects of the culture like you would in old house just to improve the value long term. And so that's where we came about the renovation theme and using that theme, we divided these 18 action steps into three phases, plan, build, and maintain. And a lot of organizations that set out to change their culture, they skip the planning phase, that's pretty normal. And specifically a lot of new CEOs do this, where they dive right into the build phase. But like an old house, if you just start knocking down walls without a blueprint of what you're supposed to do, you're going to end up taking the whole thing down. And there's a lot of examples of that. There's a lot of examples where companies have essentially done that. They tried to change things too fast without going through the necessary planning steps to make sure that they're doing the right things. So I'll give you a couple of examples. I tell senior teams this all the time, the worst thing you can do is lock yourself in a conference room and amongst yourselves decide what's good and bad about the culture today, because you're going to get it wrong. Things are filtered by the time it gets to the senior team. What you really need to do is have a very comprehensive listening strategy throughout the organization so that you can collect employee sentiment and analyze what are the issues throughout the organization from a culture perspective. We advise companies to not only do that internally but also externally and look at what people are saying on glassdoor and other sites about the organization, what's your employer brand externally? From there, you can begin to formulate what is your vision? What do you want to set as the culture for the future? But you need the cooperation of a number of people inside the organization. There's no getting around the fact that it has to be leader led, so you have to have the support of the CEO and senior team to make this happen. But you need the cooperation of key influencers throughout the organization. And so I have a whole chapter dedicated to this concept of influencers and energizers. Again, if you ask senior leaders who are the key influencers in our company, they're going to get it wrong again, they'll get maybe half of them right. But they tend to think in terms of hierarchy and that's not the way workflow and collaboration and influence in most organizations happens. In fact, you can think of any organization that you've worked in, there are these go- to people that others seem to turn to and they turn to them for information for subject matter expertise. A lot of times they turn to them just for energy. When you walk away from a conversation with these key people, you're fired up, you're pumped up. Where there are others in the organization that just drain the life out of you when you have conversations with them. Those influencers and energizers should be your culture ambassadors. You've got to bring them under the tent very early on, on what you're trying to accomplish from a culture perspective, get their buy- in so that throughout the organization they can make it happen at the ground level. These are some of the planning steps that I described in the book that are important to put in place before you really start trying to build out the culture change that you envision.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that actually resonates a lot. I know we instituted a people and culture team for some of our businesses and some of the feedback we got from those managers was, some of this stuff feels like it's raining down on us. It doesn't feel like we're a part of it, we understand why we're doing it or when. So I think that network analysis, organizational network analysis that you do there is really key. And it's been coming up as a common topic in a number of our other conversations last year as well.

Kevin Oakes: And if people aren't familiar with that term, we have a nice primer out on our website. But what it really means is surveying the workforce. And there's a particular technique you use to do this to find out who are those influencers throughout the organization. Most of the time they're hiding in plain sight. A lot of times they're introverts, not extroverts, and so they're not necessarily easy to spot. But when you pull the workforce and ask them some very pointed questions, you can triangulate to who are those critical people. And that's not only important in culture change. It's important just in day- to- day operations. We talk about this talent war. If one of those people leaves the company, it often takes months to rebuild the network around them, rebuild the workflow and collaboration that they were all holding together like glue before. So there's a lot of reasons why you want to know who those people are.

Dane Groeneveld: A bit of a curve ball there for you, Kevin. So there's been a lot of hyper on ChatGPT lately. And I know some of the big organizations like the Googles of the world have got these massive intranets that have got all of this available data on process and tools and workflow. Are you seeing any of the larger organizations from your studies starting to think about how they digitalize those influencers and energizers into a bot or some other workflow?

Kevin Oakes: Not so much yet. And I was just talking to Google about this recently. I think we're really early in the game trying to figure out how to leverage AI tools in general and automate certain processes and procedures. And that's really where I think most organizations are focused. First is what kind of rote procedures and routine things that take up time of those very influential people can we automate? Let's start there, take the mundane stuff off their plates so they can really use their talents for the more complex things. I think we're a ways away from where a bot is going to replicate the influence that a very strong influencer or energizer might have.

Dane Groeneveld: I actually like that. So if I play that back for a moment, what I'm hearing, Kevin, is that it's easier to automate the mundane work and maybe by inference, if you do that, then you can create more time for the humans in your organization to become influences and energizers as the culture, as the products and services, as the business evolve.

Kevin Oakes: There's no doubt about it, and we've got a long way to go before we automate the mundane in most organizations. This is going to take years to do. And companies are just beginning to think about this and really disaggregate jobs into tasks so you can understand what tasks could be automated and which tasks are taking up a lot of time. One of my board members, John Boudreaux, who has been a longtime professor at USC, he's written a lot of books. He speaks very eloquently about how to disaggregate jobs and has a book out there about that. But I think that's a concept that only a few companies have really embraced yet to this day.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's huge. I mean, I've grown up in the world as a recruiter, so I've seen the imperfections of these job descriptions that have been designed to bundle enough tasks into one person's role so we can hire Bob or Jenny at how much of money they're asking for. But 80% of the time they're doing tasks that are not optimal for them. That's just where we're stuck as an organization and we need Bob or Jenny to work for us. So I think once we get better at that disaggregation, there's huge potential for unlocking a lot more of the workforce too, because you get retirees, you get students, you get work from home moms, you get so many more people that you can bring in to the organization to drive that traction and velocity.

Kevin Oakes: You're exactly right, Dane.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool. I'm excited. So I'll definitely look up John's work. That sounds really interesting. Getting into the build phase. So we talked a little bit about plan. So as you get into build, are these culture initiatives, there's a saying in the industry that culture initiatives fail because they're culture initiatives. So are these culture initiatives once you get into the build, are they tied to business goals, governance models, ways of measuring and monitoring performance in any of these given work streams that are being focused upon?

Kevin Oakes: Yeah, the last step in the plan phase is actually about measurement. And we found that two thirds of companies that were successful in changing their cultures, they set the measures upfront around how they were going to monitor their progress over time. And more startling was that 90% of companies that were unsuccessful didn't do this. They didn't set any measures up upfront. And so the measurement part is something you should think about early on because it's going to really influence how you're tracking your progress over time. And there's a lot of ways to measure culture. A lot of companies will use employee engagement and that's fine, but keep in mind that typically that's a survey that companies do at most twice a year, usually once a year, once every two years. And it's a point in time survey that will just give you information from that point in time. We're much bigger fans of ongoing feedback and doing much more frequent pulse analysis, sentiment analysis of the workforce. Even using some of the more recent natural language processing NLP tools to allow the workforce to express their sentiment in their own words rather than pre- described or predefined liquid answers on a liquid scale question. That'll give you a better idea of what's happening in the workforce over time and tracking things from a trend perspective is really what you're going for. And then moving beyond just the surveying side, looking at things like employer net promoter score, which a lot of companies are now looking at these days, or employee net promoter score, just like customer net promoter scorer. You're asking your employees, would you recommend this place to your friends, to your family as a place to work and tracking what's happening to that over time. And then looking at a number of other things like how many people are moving internally inside the organization? Do you have solid mobility inside the company? Which I think is a really critical talent process that organizations can put into place. Looking at your unwanted attrition, the attrition of your first year, second year, people looking at attrition of your high potentials, those are all going to be indicators from a culture perspective of whether this is taking hold or not.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I like those particularly internal mobility, even referral hires. I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day that in today's world, referral hires are so important because if someone in the organization brings someone in else in, there's vouching for them, but showing them that not only is that someone, they want to work here, but they'll probably go the extra few yards to onboard them, help them understand who to go and talk to, work with. So I think some of those things are reflective of culture. What about actual business metrics? Do you find in that planning, in that last stage of planning? When you look at measurements, they're looking at revenue per employee. I mean, we've seen in the tech world in the last four years, explosion of employees, and I don't know if that's gone in the right or the wrong way as far as metrics of productivity. I'm intrigued to know in your study, did you see anyone who was measuring and monitoring real output to the business?

Kevin Oakes: Oh, for sure. In fact, I use Microsoft as an example of that all the time. It's very clear that a number of the culture measures that Satya Nadela and the HR team, Kathleen Hogan, Joe Whittinghill, a number of people at Microsoft put into place had tremendous impact on the business and the overall shareholder value of the organization. You can always look at business measures and say, well, there are other things that impacted that. The markets impacted that our products did acquisitions that we've done. But it's very clear in all of our research that culture can have a tremendous impact. And if you go back to Microsoft and ask people there, what aspect of culture really influenced this? Nine out of 10, we'll tell you that probably had the biggest impact over anything else that we did. Was just how we changed the way we operated inside the organization. One small change they made, which had a big impact, was around how they did performance management. Microsoft was famous a couple decades ago for doing force distribution or stacked ranking. And that forced managers to rate their employees, one to 10 or how many employees they had. With the idea that you would be constantly trimming that bottom 10, 15%. It sounds attractive when you're a bloated organization or you need to move some people out. And I see some companies who have been talking about that these days. But the culture it creates is that, Dane, if you and I are working together, if we're coworkers, now my motivation is to beat you, your motivation is to beat me rather than the two of us cooperating to beat Apple or Google the competition that a Microsoft had. And so that was a big change they made and cooperation became a much bigger thing inside the organization than it ever was before. Yeah,

Dane Groeneveld: Actually I've seen that we've worked a lot with large global oil and gas companies and they tended to rely quite heavily on some of that ranking. And I've had conversations with friends that work there that will say, " I'm really confused because I actually rank above that person, but they're in a higher role than me. And it just creates a whole lot of noise and unnecessary dialogue in my opinion.

Kevin Oakes: Yes, a lot of noise, a lot of internal disputes for sure. Though it's generally not a very healthy practice.

Dane Groeneveld: So have you found Microsoft being a great example, but have you found that the tech businesses, because of the sheer scale of change that they've been driving through in the last 10 years have been at the forefront of this? Or did your study point to some more traditional industries, equipment intensive industries where they were able to make some of these changes as well?

Kevin Oakes: Yeah. Well, lately it has been the tech industry that has probably reverted back to forced distribution force ranking more than any other industry just because of the hiring that's taken place and then the subsequent layoffs. And they are using performance as a reason for laying off certain segments. I think it's dangerous to do that. You're signaling to the workforce that now performance reviews aren't about improving my performance. It's more about who do we want to get rid of, who do we want to trim inside the company? So I think it's just a dangerous thing to link to layoffs in general, although to a lot of business people, it just seems natural. It seems like an easy thing to do.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that makes sense. And I noticed looking at your profile, your early career, you had a lot more time in learning and development. So, how are you seeing that landscape change? There's a lot more learning available online, which means that, we're almost like opportunity rich, but when companies are really thinking culture and they're thinking about internal mobility and succession planning growth, how are you seeing them weave that learning and development learning management systems into their whole platform and program for people?

Kevin Oakes: Our research will show that also some of those best cultures have learning cultures. They've got an organization that freely shares knowledge throughout the organization. Again, if we go back to old Microsoft days, they had a culture where knowledge was power. And this is very common in a lot of companies where individuals withhold knowledge because it makes them more powerful, it protects themselves, it protects their fiefdoms, and they only selectively give out that knowledge. That can also be a very dangerous culture attribute and leads to toxic cultures. Companies that reward and recognize people for sharing their knowledge, they tend to be more agile, they move more quickly. We as smarter than me, so if you can get the whole workforce actively sharing with each other, what's happening in the industry, what's happening with competitors, latest developments, et cetera, that's one aspect of how you become much more agile. But longer term, I think certainly most employees want to be developed in their career. And we see this as a reason for choosing organizations. What company is going to help me develop personally and grow as an individual over time. And so I'm a big advocate of things like what guild education does. They're offering higher Ed degrees and content at a very affordable rate, and companies are embracing this to use it as part of their employer brand and use it as a mechanism to attract employees and retain the existing workforce and develop and grow that workforce over time. I think as this war for talent has continued to persist, that becomes an important aspect for how you attract and retain talent. But it also is important for how you move talent within your organization. And I ask this of companies all the time, if a manager has an opening in their group, is it easier for them to hire externally than it is to hire internally? And the answer is usually yes, it's easier externally. And then conversely, if somebody wants to explore different roles, explore different position inside your company, is it easier for them to do it outside your company versus within? And usually it is, the answer is outside. And that's because we hold on to these old notions that you don't want to poach people from others inside the organization, which is just ridiculous. You want to incent the opposite. You want to incent managers to actively promote moving talent around the organization, particularly high performing talent or high potential talent. You want to get them moving inside the company. That does wonders for the company, and increases collaboration, increases knowledge throughout the organization as well as the individual. And now individuals can grow, they see different career paths, they get to experience different things, even if it's a lateral move, it doesn't have to be promotions, it really does help those individuals grow. So I'm a huge fan of talent mobility as a development mechanism inside the organization.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I love that. I was fortunate early in my career, even following my dad's career, getting moved around different mine sites, towns. And it does, it gives you a range of different experiences, muscle memories, more cultural awareness. Because you keep getting thrust into new environments as the new guy or girl. So that's pretty cool, that friction of, and you mentioned that it's, there's stories, there's internal narratives around, hey, we shouldn't poach. But is there any measure of that friction? Are you looking at those metrics when you're in some of these larger organizations?

Kevin Oakes: Oh yeah, for sure. So it's only a small percentage of companies that have formal talent mobility programs where they talk about talent mobility. It's clear how you can move inside the organization. Managers do get measured on how much they're developing their talent and moving their talent. But that small percentage of companies that does that, they're almost always off the chart's high performing companies. They do great from a market perspective, from a revenue profitability perspective, most companies still allow talent hoarding to exist, where managers hang on to people, even hide good people because they don't want to lose them inside their organization. That's generally the hallmark of a low performing organization. So we've got a ways to go before tele mobility is more ubiquitous inside of companies, but as companies struggle to bring in outside talent, this concept of hiring from within is gaining more and more traction. Particularly as we develop skills databases, a lot of companies don't know the skills they have internally. For example, if you knew how to speak Mandarin Chinese, but you join a company where that's not required, generally nobody knows that, except you and maybe a couple people. But if it was in a database someplace, we might need that skillset down the road. And so if I have a skills database that I can tap into when I've got a new project or a new initiative and we're now deploying the right skills to those initiatives, we're going to be a much more agile organization, much more efficient organization overall. So that internal talent marketplace concept where I've got a database of skills that I can turn to is one that more and more companies are trying to put in these days.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's an interesting one. I know when I looked at your profile again on LinkedIn, you talked about a vendor free community. So I don't know if you're open to giving any plugs to systems that do that, but I have seen a few systems out there that are doing that internal talent mobility. I wouldn't say it's a marketplace, but at least it's a mapping and connecting tool for HR teams. Have you seen much of that in-

Kevin Oakes: Yeah, there are more and more tools that are specifically doing that. And even some of the larger talent management suites or HRs' are adding that capability to their suite. And so the general hangup is usually not the technology itself, it's usually settling on skills and competencies that we want to record. And I've seen a lot of arguments over the years around that in companies oftentimes are trying to record too many. We're Advising people just to start simple and get it put into place before you get too crazy with it.

Dane Groeneveld: I've actually done a little bit of work with transitioning veterans talent and there's a perfect example of where you've got totally different nomenclature for skills and certifications. And I think if we did have one global taxonomy for skills, it would free up a lot of time and create a lot more connection of the right talent to the right jobs.

Kevin Oakes: Yeah, that's correct.

Dane Groeneveld: Hopefully someone will be working on that behind the scenes. Maybe with ChatGPT, who knows.

Kevin Oakes: Perhaps. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Okay. That's really cool. With the building stage, Kevin, so you've got the teams building. You talked earlier about these culture ambassadors. How much of the deployment rests on the shoulders of those culture ambassadors?

Kevin Oakes: Well, they're usually involved in initiatives that are rolled out. Some companies have hundreds of these people throughout the organization. I've actually presented to a few Fortune 500 companies, groups of culture ambassadors, and I think it's important to have them be involved in different initiatives. I've seen some cool efforts around hackathons, culture hackathons, which are just like hackathons that companies do around programming. But instead you're just focused on culture issues. And for two days we're going to ideate and really throw out a lot of ideas around how we can improve our culture. And so you get your culture ambassadors to lead those individual sessions or be very involved in those sessions and running the hackathons, I think is something that some companies have done very well. But yeah, they're critical to make sure that they're involved as you're building this.

Dane Groeneveld: And leadership, you mentioned earlier as well that it has to be a top- down driven initiative. So leadership are setting out the monitoring, their creating committees, steering committees, or how does it report back up?

Kevin Oakes: And being vocal about it throughout the organization is critical too.

Dane Groeneveld: So storytelling from the leader's huge.

Kevin Oakes: Storytelling becomes very important. And I devoted a chapter or a section of a chapter to the art of storytelling and really the importance of it. And I talked about how symbols can be a big part of this. Symbols are a shortcut to the stories. A lot of companies who have been successful at changing their culture have really leveraged storytelling and symbols overall.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that When it comes to experimentation, a lot of culture change when you read about it in textbooks is very intentional. As you said, it can be planned out. But where do you see the opportunities to be experimenting, whether it's in a department or a region or in a product, and to be learning from that experimentation on next practices that might be evolving within the organization.

Kevin Oakes: Some of that has happened in companies, particularly in geographic locations, or maybe it was with an acquisition where they've experimented or tried out some ideas first before giving it to the whole organization. I think that's fine, although I also caution companies you're always going to have microcultures throughout your company and pockets of different cultures and that's normal. It's normal to have a slight variations on culture in a geo or in sales versus finance or what have you. What you really want though is to make sure that those microcultures bubble up into an overall culture for the company. There has to be a real understanding of the purpose of the organization, the values of the organization, and those need to cascade down into those microcultures. And so those microcultures shouldn't go wildly against your purpose or wildly against your values. They should just have their own little nuances that are particular to them. So while going back to your question around experimentation, I think that's okay. I would caution make sure it doesn't go out of control. Make sure that you bring it back to the overall culture of the organization and have one culture for the company.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that makes sense. We had Gary Ridge, the former CEO of WD- 40 on, he's a fellow Australian, so we had a great, great conversation and he shoots pretty straight on what he achieved there at WD-40. I would say they're a great example of a high performing organization and what their journey's been.

Kevin Oakes: Oh, they are I love Gary. Gary is featured very prominently in my book.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, there you go.

Kevin Oakes: And I tell the whole WD- 40 story, and I think the world of what he and the team created there first for a relatively small company, they've had an outsized impact just based on culture.

Dane Groeneveld: And I love the way he describes culture being values plus behaviors, times consistency. So the behaviors element is probably the guardrail. This certainly is, as I heard Gary explain it, for when someone is experimenting, if you're empowering them to do things their way, if they know what the behaviors are, that reinforce the values and the purpose, then that keeps it safe. Yeah, that's neat. All right, all the more reason to read the book, Kevin. Ecosystems, you talked about this aggregation of job tasks. Now that can happen within an organization, but I'm starting to see more and more the need for it to happen across organizations. Whether, you talked about it earlier, for someone who wants experience in a different asset or work stream, maybe they have to leave the organization, but maybe they can leave and partner with a vendor or maybe they can leave and come back. I'm intrigued by that whole concept because, often you can't move your organization as quickly as the outside world's moving, but you want to keep your people and keep connected with those people. So are you seeing any examples of practices that are bringing supply chains or competitor, I guess organizations into the growth of people and the growth of cultures?

Kevin Oakes: Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you just go back to the mobility concept for a second, some very progressive companies view mobility not just as within our organization, but also external. And how could we place people with suppliers, vendors, partners, and give them experiences outside of our organization for a year or two and then bring them back. I think that's a very, very constructive way to think about developing talent in the organization. But more broadly, we're seeing companies recognize that there's an ecosystem of skills out there that we can tap into when we need it. And so more and more companies are using gig workers, they're using contractors who have particular skill sets to augment projects as they occur. And so you bleed people in and bleed them out as the needs arise. And then you also mentioned as people boomeranging back to the company too. I think we'll see a lot more of that this year, frankly. There's been a lot of evidence that in this great resignation time period, the grass was not greener for a number of people and they are returning to where they were. But I think a lot of companies miss that opportunity. They need to stay in touch with some of those people that exited 6, 9, 12 months ago. You can do so through almost an extended exit survey process and just ask them some questions. And then one question could be, would you ever consider coming back? Because you'll find there's a certain percentage of people that do want to come back. And I think that can be very healthy for the organization. It can work out very well for the employees. Some companies will reinstate their options from a vesting standpoint, so they didn't lose it. So there's a number of things that can be very powerful for both sides if you are boomeranging employees back.

Dane Groeneveld: Actually that, going back to referral hires, that sparks a light bulb for me, which is maybe referral hires in the future come from people that once work for you but no longer work for you because they've gone and landed another organization. They see talent that would fit where they've come from and they can make those referrals.

Kevin Oakes: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the worst thing you can do is treat that talent as you know that they're dead to you and you're never going to talk to them again. The healthiest companies don't do that. They recognize people aren't going to stay in one place forever. People are eventually going to move. Let's continue to have a good relationship with people. That used to be at our organization.

Dane Groeneveld: I've had a couple of great bosses earlier in my career that always adopted that mentality. So they'd always be checking in with you even if you're working for a competitor. But, and it wasn't always talking about work, but they always knew there'd be a way for us to reconnected. Invariably we did in some way or another.

Kevin Oakes: Yeah. Excellent.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's a great practice. Okay, so final question then. You talked about next practices. When you think about the roles of humans at work, and particularly I think the roles of humans and teams, which is what's creating these high performance organizations, what's your hope for the future? What do you think might be a big change in the world at large, not just in the Fortune 500s when it comes to culture and teams working together in the next 5, 10, 15 years?

Kevin Oakes: I think there's got to be some more recognition about the power of teams. Anybody in any organization typically is on multiple teams. And the success of an organization typically revolves around how well those teams operate, work together and how productive those teams are. So I'd love to see a little bit more emphasis on team performance. We put a lot of emphasis on individual performance, but the time has come to have more attention to team performance and looking at how that team worked together. But more broadly, I'll just go back to where we started on culture. I hear a lot of CEOs and companies who are forcing employees back into the office using things like increased productivity or collaboration or innovation as reasons why they want people back in the office. There's no data to support that, frankly. In fact, there's data to support the opposite, that if you give people the flexibility, that's when productivity and collaboration and even innovation improves. So I think we're in a new timeframe for a lot of folks. Where we're learning how to work and this hybrid and flexible work environments. We're learning how to manage hybrid teams and virtual teams. We got a long way to go. I would just caution everybody use data to help inform your decisions, not gut instinct. We've all had different work experiences, and so if your work experience has revolved largely around being in office with people, you'll think that's the best way to work, but it might not be the best way to work for a lot of others. And I think you've got to recognize that your experience isn't the experience of everybody else. So data will help you see through that.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's a great point. And so that's a nice segue. There's a lot that we've talked about relating to the book and also relating to i4cp and all the research you all do. If there are listeners out there that want to connect, become part of your community, learn how to work with you and the team, how do they do that, Kevin?

Kevin Oakes: Yeah, our website at i4cp.com is a good place to start. There's also a separate website for the book. It's called culturerenovation. com. And so you'll find a lot of info there. I'm easy to find, as are a lot of my team members through either site.

Dane Groeneveld: Well, thanks so much for the time today. It's been a great conversation. I feel like I could go on picking your brain for a good hour or two longer, but this is-

Kevin Oakes: Anytime you want, Dane. That's fine.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I will. I'll take you up on that, Kevin.

Kevin Oakes: Okay.

Dane Groeneveld: All right. Thanks again.

Kevin Oakes: Thanks. I enjoyed it.

Dane Groeneveld: Cheers. Bye.