Scaling Empathy within Organizations with Debi Yadegari

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 group, and today I am joined by Debi Yadegari and Debi's here, CEO and founder of Villyge, and she's all about scaling empathy, which is a fantastic topic. So welcome to the show, Debi.

Debi Yadegari: Thanks, Dane. Excited to be here. Excited to chat about the topic.

Dane Groeneveld: So I always like to ask our guests to explain to listeners how did you get into what you're doing? So scaling empathy is an interesting place to be right now, but you've got an interesting background before that time, so maybe you can join the dots.

Debi Yadegari: Yeah. So if you take a huge step back, I went to law school, became a lawyer, not the natural connection to empathy. Not exactly what we inaudible. But yeah, I did the big law corporate Wall Street thing starting out at a big firm. Then I moved in- house to be in- house council to the investment banking division of a large global investment bank. And despite seeing and witnessing the various manager- employee interactions my entire career and really coming to think that that was just kind of normal. As employees, we were meant just to put our heads down, wait to collect that paycheck and kind of do what our bosses said and told us to do. It was at the Global Investment Bank where I had the best boss of my life. He was really just truly a gem of a manager, but I experienced a life event. Employees across all organizations are experiencing life events, and at Villyge we define life events as those things that are personal, but that affect how we show up professionally. They affect work and teams. So my life event was becoming pregnant. I was newly married, pregnant, having a baby. Very, very, very plain vanilla. I think all of us have heard of this thing happening before in the workplace. It's not too uncommon, but sadly, what is also not too uncommon is how managers respond to these life events. While I tell you, I had the world's best manager and we lost touch, and I'm always afraid that one day he's going to listen to one of these podcasts. While being incredibly well- intentioned, he said and did all the wrong things, and he just didn't know how to support me through a difficult pregnancy, going out on leave, coming back from leave, needing lactation accommodations. All of that stuff that I say is, like I said, very, very, very plain vanilla. So if we take a look under the lie or under the hood of what's going on in everybody's personal situation, it's not just becoming a parent that's affecting how people show up in the workplace. Being a caregiver in the workplace gets a lot of attention, but there's so much that goes on in the background of employees' lives from taking care of an elder, from going through a divorce, from happy things too, wanting to get married, going through a divorce, struggling to get pregnant, going through the fertility journey or adoption, a surrogacy, coming out, transitioning gender, experiencing a loss or a miscarriage. These are things that stop managers in their tracks and kind of have them fumbling so often. And HR leaders too, don't always know how to respond. So it was my own personal life event that caused me to eventually jump ship. And when you look at the stats, 41% of all caregivers are going to leave their employer within that first year of having a baby. And all employees who have had, I mean, if you look at all employees, 49% of them, so about half of all employees have walked away from a job at some time during their career based upon how a manager has responded to them personally during that personal life of the moment. So I kind of was checking the boxes on both. I was a caregiver, new mom, walking away, checking out within the first 12 months of that birth. And I was also a person who had a manager who didn't respond in a productive, appropriate manner that caused me to walk away. So I started to scratching my head and said, " Gee, how do we solve this?" And fast- forward, that's why I'm talking to you about Villyge.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. So obviously that was a formative experience for you, and it's something that you want to solve for a lot of other people.

Debi Yadegari: Yes.

Dane Groeneveld: How did you land in a platform?

Debi Yadegari: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: That's a big shift.

Debi Yadegari: Huge, huge, huge, right? We're like, oh, okay. Yeah. I did not come out of the gate saying, " Let me create a SaaS tech platform that's going to deliver the exact thing that managers need to realize in that moment." It was definitely an evolution. So when I first stepped out, I really focused on motherhood. I had four children in five years. If anyone out there is a parent, they know that's a inaudible. That's a tight-

Dane Groeneveld: That's a sprint.

Debi Yadegari: Yeah. Yeah. Total sprint in parenthood. So did the mom thing hardcore. And when number four went off to preschool, I started working with organizations to enhance the employee experience for women returning to work, building a corporate lactation programs, working with companies on the policies to support working mothers, and coaching working mothers on how to keep their career on an upward trajectory.

Dane Groeneveld: Cool.

Debi Yadegari: Age myself, that was back when we referred to things as maternity leave. Very quickly, we started talking about family leave and parental leave, and there was a shift culturally to make this a gender- neutral leave process. So slowly companies started to say, " Hey, we're getting great traction and amazing results from the working moms. Do you do anything for working dads?" That snowballed. Well, what about working caregivers? inaudible elder care? Then the pandemic and throughout all of this team was kind of wearing the legal hat as well, kind of shaking our finger and saying, " This is what you say and this is what you don't say and be careful. And this is how to navigate those waters." So during COVID, we were like, how do we take all of this information that we've gathered, all of these learnings that we've accumulated, and really scale in a way that's going to support employees at a deeper level? Because when you come in and you do a manager sensitivity training, like I said, we started out focusing on working parents, but then now today we're focused on all life events. Managers are going to forget what you tell them about 15 seconds after you tell them. It goes in one ear and out the other. And we knew this, and so certain companies would have us back on a quarterly basis or a biannual basis, and it still doesn't make sense, right? 15 seconds its out of the ear. So during COVID, we really had the grace and the time and the luxury of sitting there and saying, all right, what do we do from here? And so we delivered Villyge, which is a platform that delivers the information, what we call just in time, so managers understand what they need to know, when they need to know it, very specific to that particular employee's situation that's on their team as that employee is going through it in conjunction with whatever team goals are being advanced at that moment to help managers understand how to stand in their shoes of their employees, how to support them in an empathic manner, and also how to push goals forward for the team. It's really striking that balance of managing through a project, but also showing up for that employee, which is what today's employees need more than ever.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, absolutely. I like that. So as I hear it, you built a consulting practice first, and then once you'd proven out the work, you then built the platform.

Debi Yadegari: Bingo. Yes.

Dane Groeneveld: Very cool.

Debi Yadegari: Yes.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that. And this concept of just in time is very critical right now because I think managers, not only are they impacting the mental health of their employees in the way that they show up, but I also think their mental health is being stretched and strained because they're getting flooded with all these initiatives and new tools to be operating within these hybrid and remote work environments. And in this, let's call it hypersensitive working era that we're in right now, where employees rightfully thinking, " Well, what is my company doing about this? And what is my company doing about this?" But managers being expected to have all of the answers right away. So just in time's key. How do you position then to be just in time for a manager? How do they interact with your work? How does that sort of empower them?

Debi Yadegari: Sure. So the platform is set up to open dialogues and conversations between employees and managers. So employees can kickstart the process by going onto the platform and sharing a life event. That then initiates a sequence of nudges to the managers that allows them to understand where that employee is along that particular journey and how to support that employee at that moment in time. Now, if an employee decides not to share through the platform, but let's say the manager hears through the proverbial grapevine that the employee is going through a specific journey or experience, that manager can also dig in to our on- demand library of guidance to understand what they need to know about that employee's particular journey. And going back to a point you just made, you pointed out that yes, there's more pressure on managers to deliver than ever before, and it's not just all these tools, and they're trying to juggle hybrid remote workplaces, but they never had to tune into how their employees were feeling before. It was something that we weren't really talking about, but coming out of the pandemic, employees really expect their workplaces to care about them as an individual because there's options now. The gig economy has been larger than ever. It doesn't matter if you're a white collared professional or somebody who who's throwing widgets in a box. You can find a gig that pays on a daily basis if that suits your schedule and your lifestyle. And so employees have more options. Coming out of the pandemic I think all of our lives were turned upside down and we reassessed our priorities. And so companies really want, I mean sorry, employees really want to feel like they're part of a mission and that they have a place of belonging, and for them to feel that they need to know that their manager sees them as a whole human being, not just as a worker. So we're seeing, what's been interesting about our platform is that no surprise, we're seeing that younger employees, millennials and Gen Z are more likely to use our platform than Gen Xers or baby boomers, but Gen X and baby boomers do too. But what's been really fascinating to see is that the people utilizing our platform on the most frequent basis are the middle managers and middle managers are coming onto our platform to share with their managers that they're going through a life event, which tells us two things. It says that middle managers recognize the need to loop your manager into what's going on in the background of your life, and also it shows that they understand the importance that a manager can play in the life of an employee, not just with the Kumbaya feeling supported. And yeah, I'm part of a team, but also in helping that employee to address their goals and to get work done and to shift projects, shift priorities, understand true timelines, and when there's conversations around what's happening in an employee's life that include what needs to get done for the team, it becomes a win- win situation where the employee wants to give more, the manager's seeing the employee as a whole human being, and at the end, the company is the winner. We're greater loyalty, we're going to see greater employee engagement that leads to greater innovation, greater profitability, all of that good stuff. So this is definitely a new concept within the workplace.

Dane Groeneveld: Very.

Debi Yadegari: But it is a lever that companies are just starting to pull tapping into the personal side of employees, and it is providing very fruitful for the forward- thinking companies that are already there.

Dane Groeneveld: It makes a lot of sense that you're seeing more usage amongst the earlier generations. But the middle managers, when you look at just pure economics, people are generally getting married, having kids, twenties, thirties, first house, and then they're looking at second houses, then colleges, not necessarily second houses, they're upgrading their house, whatever it might be, but they're going through these big changing events like moving house is hard. Moving cities for a job is hard. So there are these kind of, I guess, stepping stones through life. And historically we don't talk about those things a lot, maybe in the break room with a close friend, but you're not talking to your boss about them. So this concept that you share about an employee being able to kickstart a dialogue is very intriguing. With that process, where are you seeing the unexpected impacts there in terms of the team's morale, belonging, sense of sharing information? Once they start these dialogues with their manager, do they feel safer all of a sudden to talk about their life events at work? Or how's that play out?

Debi Yadegari: It starts to change the culture. So by helping managers to understand how to respond to those specific life moments that are so important, like a move or some of these bigger things happening in their lives, it starts to change the way managers think and act overall on a daily basis. And so it is changing morale. Some of the other interesting things that we're seeing is that by providing a safe space for employees to share what's happening, like you said, managers are becoming privy to information that they wouldn't have otherwise. At a certain point an employee's going to stand up on Zoom, and you're going to see their belly, even if they haven't shared. Certain things like that happen. Or if someone's getting a divorce, they're going to go to HR, they might take somebody off of their benefits plan. There's certain things that at a certain point they happen. There's other things that we will never know. One of those things is burnout is talked about a lot within journals and newspapers, but where it's not being talked about a lot is between managers and employees saying, " Are you personally burnt out?" Well, experiencing burnout is actually one of our life events, and no surprise, it is most often shared again by middle managers. So an interesting thing that we've seen is that not a single person who has used our platform to say, " Hey, I'm experiencing burnout," who's a middle manager or anyone actually, but has been most often used by middle managers, has that person ended up leaving the company. And-

Dane Groeneveld: That's really powerful.

Debi Yadegari: Very powerful. Because you would think, all right, if this manager is willing to share on this platform with their manager, " Hey, I'm experiencing burnout," they're pretty much probably feeling like they're done, right? So that means that when we're looping in their manager and we're helping to guide that manager on how to guide their employee, that middle manager, it's making a difference. Because when managers reach managerial status, it's usually because they were great individual contributors. At no organization have we said, " All right, there's 10 people here and he is the worst performing of the bunch, but he's probably going to be the best manager. Let's choose him." But in reality, that's kind of what we should be doing. That's oftentimes what the military does. The military looks for the best leaders, but we don't do that in the business world. We take the best individual contributors, take them out of that role and put them in charge of managing people. And they are not equipped to handle every single life event because they're humans and not a single one of us, including me sitting here as the founder and CEO of Villyge, has the answers for how to respond to every life event. None of us have lived and walked in the shoes of all of these journeys. So Villyge has worked with IO psychologists and subject matter experts and HR leaders and legal experts to really develop the best in class playbook for how to interact with employees and support employees who are experiencing these life events. And it's making a difference. And so one of those surprises that really able to get ahead of problems and in front of quits, it's not just a matter of supporting the employee experience, but it's a way to gain valuable insights into what our teammates are experiencing to help the team and lift everyone up a few notches. And that's really powerful.

Dane Groeneveld: That is. I love that phrase that you use, getting in front of quit, because we often spend a lot of time focusing on our under performers in business, and we go in and we put them on a performance improvement plan and we roll out additional training and whatever else, but we're not looking at some of our key talent who may be high performing, who may be burnout out candidates. And if you can get in front of a quit with that person, I sense that there's two major impacts. One, you saved a great person who's going to be hard to replace, but two, you've probably just created a champion who's going to now embrace the platform, the approach of scaling that empathy through the organization. And that's got to be huge.

Debi Yadegari: 100%. And so often also for the struggling employees that are put on a performance improvement program, usually there's something going on in the background of their lives too.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Debi Yadegari: So if we can tap into why, we might be able to, again, get in front of the problem there.

Dane Groeneveld: Absolutely.

Debi Yadegari: inaudible problems, ahead of quits, it really makes a difference. I always talk about how sports teams operate. They're truly a family. And while a lot has been written on like, look, we're not a family, you don't fire your family members, things of that sort. There is something to be said about how sports coaches, the most high performing ones, they know their team members inside and out, their players, their weaknesses, the strengths, when to play them, what they're feeling, what their inaudible are. Is this one, is their knee hurting that day? We need to take some of those lessons to the workplace in order to know how to play our team at the best of its ability in that moment.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that. And you also talk about, and we'll dig into this in the platform setting in a moment, but you made another interesting point on leaders often being individual contributors that got sort of promoted. I wonder if maybe it's too early to see in the platform, but I wonder if there's a sense that if leaders are starting to adopt these approaches to conversations around life events and using a platform like Villyge to be in the dialogue, whether that in itself is a leading indicator that, hey, we've got someone here who's going to be an empathic leader, who's going to be someone that other team members are going to be drawn towards working with.

Debi Yadegari: Oh, I like that. So if they're feeling like open and I want to be part of this team and have people see me, I like that. That's really interesting.

Dane Groeneveld: Because you don't... It's not conventional leadership training, is it? Conventional leadership training is, oh, how do you do time management and How do you set up clear expectations?

Debi Yadegari: Yes.

Dane Groeneveld: But not how do you have conversations about life events with employees and show how active you are in creating that culture of belonging.

Debi Yadegari: Right. Absolutely. And to be clear, we also are encouraging productivity and things of that nature, but it's how can we work with this employee and provide the flexibility in that moment, recognizing that there's these other characteristics of this particular journey. An example, most big companies these days have some sort of fertility support program. One in eight employees experiences infertility or needs a little bit of help starting a family. And this is a popular benefit and it costs companies a lot of money. Well, earlier on I was saying how those first 12 months after having a baby, the attrition rate is 41%. There's a 41% chance on-

Dane Groeneveld: It's huge.

Debi Yadegari: Who's an employee, huge. And doesn't mean that they're not going to come back from leave, means they're going to come back to leave and maybe in month 11 they're going to say, " Hey, the culture really isn't good here for my new family." So that attrition rate is even higher after a fertility journey. And so it's like, holy cow, companies are paying all this money just for a greater chance to lose someone. And no, I am not saying do away with fertility support. What I'm saying is that we've got to say, " Why is that happening?" And it's because of the friction that builds up between employees and managers throughout that experience. For anyone who's gone through the fertility experience, they know that there's like lots of absences. There's weekly appointments at your clinic. So your manager might think, " Hey, are they out every week interviewing again? What's going on? Where are they?" They don't understand. There might be certain times where that employee might say, " I can't really make this client meeting this afternoon," because their labs hit certain levels. And their doctor said, " Hey, you got to come in right now." And that manager again, doesn't understand why that employee just left them in a lurch. Or when someone's going through the fertility journey at certain times, they're not able to travel. They need to stay with their close proximity to their clinic. So again, if they say, " Can you send Bob on this trip? I can't make it." Again, the manager's starting to bring in their biases. And so you follow that up with nine months of pregnancy and leave. And that's why the attrition rate is higher. Now compare that with a situation where the manager actually understands, " Oh, okay, all right. Great, you got called in, you got that call. Awesome. High five." I got the meeting. Right. It's like it's a different experience when employees understand, I'm sorry, when managers understand what employees are going through the way they approach this. Another time that we lose a lot of employees that oftentimes workplaces here are not so forward- thinking about, talking about is menopause.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, yeah.

Debi Yadegari: It's something that's very much talked about in Europe, but in the US we don't talk about it. Yet, one third of women going through menopause end up off ramping. Well, women go through menopause between the ages of 45 and 55, usually the time that they're very senior and able to grab that seat at the table that everyone's talking about delivering to them. So if organizations are not supporting employees through that process and helping managers to understand how to support an employee and explaining to that manager why somebody might be opening windows in Minnesota in the middle of winter, right? They're going to be at a disadvantage. So life events can become invisible career barriers. But when we open lines of communication and educate managers about what employees are going through, not their personal experience, but just high level, what that experience means to the team and their work, we're able to take not only a more empathic approach to supporting that employee, but a more productive approach to getting the best that we can out of our employees to push productivity forward within our companies and effect the bottom line.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Debi Yadegari: So there's so much that goes into this and it's really a new way of thinking that makes sense and it's kind of like, why haven't companies been doing this all along? But I think it goes back to what I said earlier on in my career, I just kind of put my head down and was like, okay, this is the way it is. I do what I'm told. And now employees don't do that anymore. They definitely question what they're being told, but we haven't figured out how to navigate that and bringing-

Dane Groeneveld: I think you're right.

Debi Yadegari: And so by bringing care to the workplace and having managers who care about their employees personally as well as professionally, that's the key.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. It feels like traditionally growing up in a couple of industries that I did, we were almost told not to put our foot in the mouth, not to engage in some of those conversations, go and talk to HR or send that person to HR. So that was a gap. And then there was actually one of my former colleagues, inaudible over in the UK, he bought a really cool talk tool to me called the Ladder Exercise that his former company used. And there was a way to talk about life events in a future leaning capacity, but that was really around dollars of the life event. Not feelings, emotions, distractions. So we would sit down with an employee and we would say, " Okay, you are now in your late twenties. You're a salesperson. You are planning to get engaged. There's going to be a wedding, there's going to be a honeymoon. So how much are you thinking you need to save? Okay, children, house." And you'd planned out over seven years and you would say, " All right, you're going to need about this much money at these different increments. How can we help tie that back to your productivity so that you're working towards these life goals?" And that was good because it showed that, hey, I'm working with Debi right now to make sure that she's thinking towards those expenses and those important times when she's going to want to have the resources, time, and money. But we weren't talking about the real time, emotional time burdens of dealing with some of those life events too. Planning a wedding sounds exciting until you're doing it.

Debi Yadegari: Yeah, absolutely. Or there's little things where managers might not know how to navigate. You don't want to have a bridal shower that's just women in the office. You want to make sure everybody's invited, you don't want to have a party or plan a bridal shower where you're serving cute cakes and cupcakes and everything during the month of Ramadan. You want to be sensitive to Ramadan when some of your employees will not be eating, who'll be fasting during the daylight hours. So there's different sensitivities that managers need to bring to the table now that they didn't have to before. And yes, as I mentioned, I come from big law where it's all about the billable of dollar. And there were definitely mental exercises of the same sort, thinking about how much business you have to bring in, how your hours are going to be, and if you have a baby before you hit partner level, how are you going to make up those hours? If you take off for three months, you you're going to have to definitely put in the extra time before going out. But that just I think goes more to the hustle culture, both of them. Which isn't the right way to think about it.

Dane Groeneveld: No, it's not.

Debi Yadegari: No. And going back to how do we get around problems, how do we get ahead of quits? Along the same topic, one of our life events is I'm retiring. Well this came to be because we pride ourselves on doing in- depth quarterly business reviews with our clients. And one of our clients said, " Hey, two employees gave us two weeks notice that they're retiring." Two separate situations, two weeks. That's not a time to do succession planning. So since adding this life event, employees are utilizing the platform to share that hey, they're thinking about retiring. They are retiring and it's allowing the succession planning process to begin a lot earlier to make sure that those employees leave the company feeling supported. There's goodwill there, other employees are watching how those employees are approaching their finish line and relationships are being set up so that way other employees can reach out to those retiring employees and can call someone on while they're gardening and be like, "Hey, how do I handle this situation?" And they'll be open and receptive. And so it's going to changing the culture for the long term in the moment in the lives of the single employee experiencing a life event, changing the way managers interact with all employees on a day- to- day basis. It's a new tool that we're pushing out that has so many positive ramifications.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's neat. And retirement, I mean, we've got so many boomers retiring in particular that have got insane amounts of corporate memory, corporate knowledge. And so getting two weeks notice is a disaster because you want that person to be around for a long time, even if it's not in a full- time capacity. So I'd imagine we're going to see more and more companies using tools like yours to start that conversation at the right time and plan it. So maybe I can keep Bob or Jenny on for another year or two by reducing them down to part- time hours or giving them more flexible work arrangements or whatever it might be, giving them a trainee who can start picking up some of those skills and experiences on the job.

Debi Yadegari: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that goes to another one of our life events is wanting to improve your career or discuss your career. For the audience here, everyone knows that performance reviews are absolutely broken at most companies. And oftentimes the emphasis is placed on that bonus amount, that dollar amount. And so until the employee hears that dollar amount, that's all they're thinking about. After they hear that amount, that's all they're thinking about. Oftentimes, not across all companies, but performance reviews are not a time where employees had the opportunity to really discuss where they want to go in their career. Some companies are now getting keen on separating out the two topics, which is what I recommend. But younger employees especially have a hard time kind of raising their hand and being like, " I really want to discuss this with you." So if you can marry someone who's retiring with someone who wants to advance their career and like you said, bring the two together, pair them up, there's so much that we can gather by just understanding where employees are sitting in their head space, that's going to help push companies forward.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's neat. So let's dive a little bit more to the platform. So we've spoken a lot at a high level, but when someone signs into your platform, a customer, and they want their managers and their employees to start interacting with it, what does that look like? Are you coming in and doing some of your early work to adjust policies and things like that? Or is it just plug and play, they can start jumping in and exploring an existing library? How does it work?

Debi Yadegari: A little bit of both. So you can absolutely jump in and start exploring. It's really off the shelf, but we do a fantastic job of what we internally call priming an organization for this. So we provide communication materials that can be disseminated that explain how Villyge works, why this is going to be beneficial, how the company is partnering with us to support the employee experience to upscale managers. We make sure that we come at managers with the attitude of, we know it's hard. This isn't us saying like you're clueless and you really need help here and we're here for you. Nobody can possibly have all of these answers. And so we're so excited to support you. So we do a great job of disseminating communications at the get- go. We do a whole empathic management workshop by a webinar that's recorded in case managers can't tune in to the live demo. We follow that up with a demo for employees. We do another webinar that's Q& A for everybody to come on board and be like, yeah, how do you use this? Every employee has a dedicated employee success guide that reaches out to them once the program is rolled out. And then once employees get on, they can completely explore. So at one side of its employees can utilize the platform to click share a life event. All these life events will pop up. They can choose the life event. There's disclosure language that when you opt to share a life event, we're going to take over the onerous task of educating your manager on how this will affect your work and your team. And then that, like I said, kickstarts nudges to the managers that will arrive in the manager's email inbox. From there, they click into the email. It'll just be a couple of lines. Mary Smith just shared with us that she has just experienced a loss, learn more here. They can click into the platform and it'll just be a snackable, easy quick to read little tidbit on what that manager needs to know then. And then there'll be a timeline. So we'll continue to nudge out what the manager needs to know. Back on the platform side, employees and managers can also access our Villyge experts. We have Villyge experts that cover cover over 100 subtopics. So going back to some of our examples, the manager can dig in with a lactation consultant and say, " Look, my employee returned from work. They're apparently breastfeeding'cause they keep needing to take pumping breaks. I think they're really taking Netflix breaks, they're disappearing all day long. What's going on here? Explain it to me." And while one of our nudges would've educated the manager on the frequency and normalcy of pumping times and lactation breaks, if that manager wants to dig in more, they can reach out to our experts in a number of categories. Employees also have access to our experts. So employees can say, " Hey, I'm having a co- parenting issue. I need help trying to figure out this elder care issue. I have questions about childcare." They can tap into our Villyge experts as well. They can schedule 30 minute Zoom sessions on their calendar based upon the employee's availability as it matches up with the particular expert with whom they want to meet. When it comes to choosing an expert, they're diving into bios, looking at pictures, they're able to find somebody who aligns with them. They can also use our chat feature on the platform to chat back and forth with their expert. We also have a deep on demand content library outside of the manager guidance the managers have access to how do I handle an employee who's just experienced a loss or death in their family. There's also a whole library that's all about all sorts of issues that affect employees personally. Coming out in the workplace, how to discuss pronouns with your coworkers. And all of that is in our content library as well. We also have a space on our platform called resources that lists all existing policies that might affect some of these life events, bereavement policies, lactation policies, leave policies that managers and employees can dig into without having to bother HR. And we also list other existing benefits because while they're going to exist elsewhere within the company, managers and employees are able to see what's available to them that might be related to that particular life event that they're going through. And also that employee's employee success guide is able to direct that employee there also. So besides helping managers, we're also lightening the load of HR. There's less micromanaging of the manager, there's less dealing with a lot of the friction that can develop from that lack of understanding between employees and managers and HR can just get back that valuable time that they need to do what they really want to do. So there's all sorts of, and I covered most of the bells and whistles, there's still other ones too. We provide managers with a bird's eye view of who's on their team, what life events they're going through, birthdays, anniversaries. We're going to ping employees and managers on when big events are happening, birthdays or anniversaries. We're going to provide suggested language for how to reach out or outside of the platform when there's something going on in current events or if there's a crisis. We're also going to be reaching out to companies and managers and helping them understand how to respond to those particular issues in the moment and how they might be affecting their team members. Whether it's like a formula shortage.

Dane Groeneveld: The Ukraine Russia crisis.

Debi Yadegari: Exactly. Exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, we had that conversation when that first started to break out with our employees because oftentimes we're interacting with someone who might have Russian heritage or Ukrainian heritage and it's like, what do you say? How do you have that conversation with them so that you are empathic and you're not just burying your head in the sand? I mean, we're living in a time when there's just a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of stress, anxiety, world events that is just going on in all of our lives.

Debi Yadegari: And we can't make assumptions. I was recently talking to a CEO who after the death of George Floyd, she made the point of calling every black employee within her company, hundreds. She made hundreds of phone calls just to say, " How are you doing? How can we support you?" And one of those phone calls surprised her because one of the employees she called said that he was the first in his family to get a white collar professional job. Everybody else is a police officer. And so he's a black man with a family, with a black family, all police officers, and he's having a really, really, really difficult time. And she wasn't prepared for that response. And so it was like the opposite side and he was dealing with a whole different set of emotions. So it's important for us just kind of, I think as a society, as managers, as coworkers, as employees, we're all navigating a new territory. And I think we all have to try to strip down our biases as much as possible, turn up our hearing a little bit more, and really try to see employees beyond their professional worker status and really get to know who they are and what makes them inaudible.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that are you okay, question. Because it's open, it allows someone to bring forward whatever they're comfortable sharing. And that's a really interesting one. Within your platform, if a dialogue starts, is the manager updating notes? I mean, how does this play with HR and note keeping on certain interactions with employees? Or is it just straight up nudges and they'll determine and keep their notes as they see fit?

Debi Yadegari: Yeah, it's guidance to the manager. That very first share to the manager, HR can choose to receive a notice that somebody is going through a life event and that is up to the company whether or not they want to be notified. And Villyge is not meant to circumvent any internal processes when it comes to having a baby and adding someone to your insurance policy. You're still going to have to deal with HR paperwork. This is a platform that's really just focused on those human interactions.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Debi Yadegari: And helping managers to understand what they should be doing, what's appropriate, what is the best way to interact with their employee at that moment.

Dane Groeneveld: Which is probably healthier too because you got to think that with all of the data and data science that's out there, most employees are a little bit worried about Big Brother right now. Who's looking at what notes about my life events?

Debi Yadegari: Yes.

Dane Groeneveld: So I like that. I like that it's guidance first.

Debi Yadegari: And the employees, if they opt not to share a life event, they can still utilize the platform to connect with Villyge experts and read our on demand library. I mean, enter our on demand library. There's a lot of resources there'cause we understand not everybody is willing to share what's going on in their life. But what's interesting is once an employee does share, they're two times more likely afterwards to share another life event. So that also says that they were supported through the first time and felt that it had a good outcome or a positive outcome and experience.

Dane Groeneveld: I would imagine, particularly in this talent shortage that we continue to live through in so many sectors, it helps with referral hiring too. Because if someone's having a good experience and they're saying, " Hey, my employers give me access to this cool platform and it's helping me deal with life events," surely that's a reason for other people to want to be there too.

Debi Yadegari: Absolutely. But I think that there's a lot of great benefits out there across companies and we always say, and those are great tools for hiring too, companies love to put together their list of benefits. And I always challenge companies not just to list out their benefits, but to kind of put together a culture book of why they're investing in these and what it means and how it will positively affect the employee experience. But we're looking at it from the opposite side of like, we've got to clue managers into what's happening as well. And that goes to really creating culture. And so when going back to recruiting, 85% of employees will say that culture is more important than compensation. And especially in the hybrid remote work environment. Culture is not about Friday free pizza and the foosball table. It's about how somebody reacts to you across the screen here on Zoom. And that isn't something that we can buy off a shelf. That's something that we have to develop together. And so Villyge is a tool that helps to develop that.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's really neat. That's really neat. So my final question then, Debi, is that if people, if managers in particular, but employees too, start embracing this opportunity to use this available data and these experts to leverage the resources of their workplace, their relationships at work, to really navigate through life events. What does that mean for teams in the future? What do you hope to see if you roll forwards five years, 10 years?

Debi Yadegari: We're not going to see 49% of employees leaving companies because their manager responded to them poorly when it came to something personal.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Debi Yadegari: We're not going to see employees experiencing invisible career barriers. We're going to see employees with the ability to focus 100% on their work when they're at work and not having to deal with the emotions that they're feeling because a manager spoke to them or responded to them in a particular way. And the companies are only going to be able to do more because of that.

Dane Groeneveld: That's neat. So I'm hearing better attention, more personal and career growth, and then team productivity.

Debi Yadegari: 100%, 100%. I recently met somebody who had been working for a company for 18 years and it came up that she has had the most pittance raise in 18 years. And I said, " Why have you stayed?" And she said, " I like the people I work with. I couldn't leave them." So if delivery workplace could create an atmosphere where nobody wants to leave because they enjoy the people that they work with, that would be amazing.

Dane Groeneveld: It would be cool.

Debi Yadegari: Empathic leadership is the way to start creating that.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No, I love that, Debi. Well, thank you for sharing your story and the Villyge platform with us today. Getting ahead of quits, retaining corporate knowledge, or at least planning to transition corporate knowledge and memory, morale in the team. I also loved your point on separating our performance management from development planning and goal setting. There's so much there. And while on one hand that I know there's a lot of managers out there right now that are frustrated with all of the additional burdens they have to manage in the lives of their employees, I think your final point there is key. Do a good job of it and then the team will look after itself and drive the productivity and lighten your load. I love that. I love that sound bite.

Debi Yadegari: Absolutely. Absolutely. Dane it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet. And for our listeners that are looking to hear a bit more, contact you, learn about Villyge, how do they best find you?

Debi Yadegari: Villyge is spelled V- I- L- L- Y- G- E, the Y for Yadegari.

Dane Groeneveld: Nice.

Debi Yadegari: You can find us, we're villyge.com, on all social media @ villyge. Again, that's V- I- L- L- Y- G- E.

Dane Groeneveld: Cool. And I loved your post as well on LinkedIn that said Debi stands for Diversity, equity, belonging and inclusion. Thought that was pretty cool.

Debi Yadegari: Thank you. Yeah, it's literally my name. Literally my name.

Dane Groeneveld: That's awesome.

Debi Yadegari: Villyge is a tool that drives belonging forward.

Dane Groeneveld: That's awesome. Well, thanks for your time today, Debi.

Debi Yadegari: Thank you so much. I appreciate yours.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet.