Tackling ‘Brilliant Jerks’ and Team Dynamics

Tom Tessmer Tom Tessmer: [00:00:00] The other part of that is the risk within thinking about culture I is that the cancer of culture is really hypocrisy. It's where you have people saying one thing and then either doing or having people experience another thing. Speaker 2: Welcome to the Roots of Success, the Premier Landscapers podcast that brings you the latest tips and strategies for successful landscape business. I'm Jim Calli, one of the principles and coaches of McFarland Stanford. Jason New and I started McFarland Stanford to coach landscape businesses after years in the industry ourselves, now more than 10 years since we began, McFarland has a deep bench of coaches and subject matter experts who work with our clients on very specific issues of business. Whether you're struggling with people. Profits or just day-to-day challenges Our coaches and guests have the real world experience and practical advice to help you build a thriving and profitable landscape business. Barrett Chow: All right. Welcome back to Roots of Success, the Premier Landscapers [00:01:00] podcast that brings you the latest tips and strategies for building a thriving landscape business. I'm Barr Cha, one of the coaches and the director of recruiting at McFarland Stanford. My whole career has been in the HR space spanning multiple industries, but it was my time at as a McFarland Stanford client, and that ultimately inspired me to step into coaching. I found my greatest success in the green industry. That hands-on experience with building teams, managing growth and solving people challenges, shapes the way I work and coach. Today at McFarland Stanford, I serve as an executive coach director of recruiting and lead our HR practice. While recruiting remains a core focus of my work, I also collaborate with a deep bench of coaches to help our clients solve the most complex challenges within their business. One of the best parts of my role in facilitating ACE peer groups. Is getting to meet the amazing people who help these businesses succeed. Today I'm joined by Tom Tester, founder of [00:02:00] QLVR, and we have a lot to talk about today. But before we dive in, Tom, tell us a little bit more about yourself and QLVR. Tom Tessmer: Definitely. Thank you Barrett. So my quick intro is for the audience that's probably listening to this, I have been a I'll say self-employed individual for the last 20 years. So I've run a consulting business that is focused in the world of Walmart and specifically in the world of how do we improve the customer experience and that. It turns out has a lot of connections to the idea of how do you improve an employee experience. And so after 20 years of doing that consulting the pandemic gave me a little bit of time to think about and explore some other things in life. One of which was considering how to translate the tools and methods and models that I applied in that area. Into the idea of creating a better employee experience through the idea of research and using data to make more [00:03:00] informed decisions. And so ultimately that has led to launching this business called QLVR which is really built around a nine component method Today, I think we're really just gonna be speaking on one of the diff, one of the dimensions within that. But the main idea is to realize that there's a lot of. Assumptions and instinct and intuition that can go into how people make decisions for their business. And sometimes that's very extraordinary and it's great stuff. And there are very skilled HR people out there. I'm not one of those people. And so I wanted to build a tool that removed the black box magic of that, and instead produced more objective information. That a team could all openly debate together or interpret together and decide how to act on that. And so that really is the essence of what QLVR is, is that it's about how do we produce data that a team can use to figure out, well, based on this, what hypothesis can I develop that would imply [00:04:00] if I went and do this thing, it will lead to a better outcome for my employees and a better outcome for my business. What is an employee engagement survey? Barrett Chow: That's amazing. You know, my, my education is human resources and information systems management, so I geek out over this just as much as you do and as one of those HR professionals. I thrive on that data to make sure I'm building the best culture, the best strategies for my companies. So I, I think the big question here is, you know, why should a company do an an engagement survey and what is an employee engagement survey? Tom Tessmer: Yes. So let's ground this on, you know, one base equation. And that is simply the equation, that satisfaction equals expectation divided by experience. And this applies in the customer world. This applies in the employee world and the the way to think about the power of that extraordinary simple equation. Is that you drive better [00:05:00] satisfaction, which I'll use as kind of a swappable with engagement based on managing what people expect to, to be their experience and what their actual experience is. And critically both of those have a degree of reality or object objectivity to them, but they also have a significant degree of perception. You can change how someone looks at the exact same situation depending on, on a bunch of factors. Individuals at the same time can look at the exact same situation in totally different ways. And, you know, I would translate this to something that dogged me for a long time in my career until I was able to put a label on and articulate it better. And that's simply one of the big expectations I have, or a lens that I look. At my profession or my work through is being a challenger and simple term, you probably don't need a strong definition to figure out what that is, right? It it means that I assume when I'm engaging with people, that [00:06:00] debate is a way that I connect with them. Now, this is how we go and learn new things. This is how we both get smarter. This is how we arrive at a better decision. And so for a very long time, that is who I was. Now, I never said that. I just figured that's the way the world worked. Thought everyone's a challenger, right? Like people love to do this. And what it took me forever to discover is that there are a number of people out there that think I'm a prick. They think I'm a, because they have a different view of things. Like a very simple different view would be, is that they view their engagement through the lens of being a peacekeeper. That their goal when entering an organization, when interacting with others is how do we all get along? And so you can imagine that me as a challenger and someone as a peacekeeper would have some significant rubs. And so that is really part of the foundation of what QLVR's been built on. And more specifically, I'd articulate it simply as founding it on the importance of compatibility. The goal is not for a company [00:07:00] to have a bunch of homogenous individuals that all look the same, that all act the same that all do the same stuff. That the most successful organizations are the ones that have people that come with different viewpoints, that do have some degree of conflict, but importantly, they can communicate with each other, they can cooperate with each other, and when conflict inevitably happens. They've got the ability to work through and resolve that in an effective way. And so for me, the idea of an engagement survey is to start to more objectively articulate what that looks like within an organization. And so what are the perceptions that people have? What are the expectations that people have? How do people view this experience that they have? Barrett Chow: Of course, and you know. I've seen a lot of companies, including my own in the past, in all my different industries, right? We, we see us hiring the same people, right? We feel like, you [00:08:00] know, like you said earlier, like the homogenous, we like to hire people who are like us, but if we have a bunch of peacekeepers on a team too, we don't challenge each other. We don't get better in, in, in asking those hard questions and, and making it better. So, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've seen it on the other side of, you know. I didn't understand our culture or our people enough to understand that Tom was just challenging me to get better and I just thought he was a prick. Right. So it, once you understand who these people are and Right, that's personality assessments and all these other things, that is a whole nother subject we can go down, but how your culture works. If, you know, in these engagement surveys we talk about, do you feel. The opportunity to express yourself or challenge the norm or that your ideas are heard. If, if your employees don't feel that and you have a challenger, the challenger will really [00:09:00] feel like he's always swimming upstream and isn't part of that culture when really it, it, it can get, it's, it's a deeper level of understanding of how do we make this a part of our culture, or how do we engage Tom in the right way. To grow the business and have everybody be successful. Tom Tessmer: Yep. Yeah, so there are, so, again, so many layers and, and again, I'm sure we could go on a long time here, but the way that I, that I like to think about it is, an organization gets empowered where it has better labels and language to communicate that stuff. So to begin with some sort of engagement. Survey doesn't fundamentally change anything. What it's really doing is just gathering truth, gathering the information. You know, the first one is really just a moment in time. But what that does is it helps unlock a lot of new understanding that simply through no change, except the ability to articulate stuff, improves it. So for me, you know, the example is when I can go into a group and say, Hey everyone, I just need you to know I'm a challenger. And [00:10:00] so if I come across as harsh or if I debate with you, that's who I am. And so, you know, help me dial it back. But don't be offended with that. You know, other simple examples are, you know, if you would talk to probably almost anyone in any company and ask them, do you care about doing quality work? 99% of people are gonna generally say, yes, I care about quality work. Now the catch is how the heck do you define quality? And part of doing something like an engagement survey is to, is to recognize. When people talk about doing quality work, are they talking about something that is uncompromisingly high standards or are they talking about something that is just good enough without wasting resources? And so this is where you can get that ridiculous conflict that can drive businesses crazy when everyone's proclaiming. We're all about quality and yet one guy is going and. Just doing the bare minimum because he truly thinks that's the right thing to do, get the job done, and move on to the next as fast as possible. And then someone else will take a project that should take a day and a [00:11:00] hundred bucks and spend a month and a thousand dollars on it, thinking that they're serving the business equally well. Barrett Chow: Yeah. Who's looking at the quality? Is it finance or is it operations? Right. So you know, I think that we can agree that engagement surveys are. Are, are a good place to start, right? If, if you, you said it earlier, right? Like if, if you don't know, you're, you're really acting off of feelings and, and these, these give you the ability to give you facts, not feelings, right? Whether your feeling is right or not, it can confirm and validate this is how engaged my, my audience is, or. Wow, I have no idea what's really going on day to day outside of my office. So you know, as we, as we look at this starting point, you know, Why are surveys important Barrett Chow: I would really love to understand like from your point of view, why is taking that first step and just getting that [00:12:00] baseline, that benchmark survey done so important. Tom Tessmer: So from my standpoint, I, I think that comes back to the reality that instinct and intuition is a skill that not everybody has. So when I was doing my, the, again, the, the lens I see is how to do business. So I. Built QLVR based on the idea of, well, let's go do disciplined objective research. Let's do a bunch of customer discovery, right? Let's be analytical in our design to this. And so I actually did a large scale study of HR managers and in that, one of the very interesting things that came back was that these individuals view their great superpower as being that instinct in intuition. They also recognize the fact that that's not scalable, right? Like me or you as an individual could have that, but can I go and take a bunch of other people and suddenly empower them to do it? Not necessarily. The second big thing that that it revealed was the fact that there tends to be a gap in those skills among an HR individual [00:13:00] versus those skills among a small business owner. There are a lot, and I would say the vast majority of small business owners don't necessarily have that same skill when it comes to instinct and intuition related to managing people related to building a culture related to improving engagement. So they probably have it related to their business expertise. That's probably why they started a business. But to translate that to to people is actually a very difficult. Process. And so that is really where the main idea of QLVR is to say, well, how can we do something that doesn't rely on that as a bottleneck? And the simplest way to do it is through saying, well, let's take that same objective research-based approach of what are some known questions that can provide quantifiable known answers that then. We can objectively evaluate, we can debate, we can choose to interpret this to say, what does this mean? And then most importantly, like all this is academic. [00:14:00] If it doesn't lead to what do we do? So let's learn stuff about our organization and figure out what we think could improve it. And then let's go and try some things to see if we can actually. Barrett Chow: It. I'm so glad you said that because one of my previous go hosts, or sorry, one of my previous guests, Nubia Gutierrez, we shared our experiences in HR in the industry, and one of the things we talked about is really making sure you. Give your team members, your employees, that opportunity to voice their opinion. Right? And, and what I hear you saying as well is like, this gives you that objective data to act on, find out what matters most to the team, right? What are we going to prioritize? And also what, what? Issues are actually going on that we can't see either, so that we can address 'em. And you know this, these surveys are meant to also give you a roadmap [00:15:00] or hopefully an action plan on how to make meaningful change for the team, not for the owner. Right? The, the, the experience that the team has will ultimately have a better experience for the owner, but not everybody, just like you said, can execute it with an HR mindset, and not everybody can run a business like an owner. So combining those two experiences really sets a company up to have the best growth in, in not only culture, but in in future successes as well. Tom Tessmer: Yeah, so I, I would add something I heard recently, and so I've been repeating this probably a lot as I tend to do with things that I find to be clever. Stuff that I discover in life is recently heard the definition of stress and so, right, this is a common term that. And we all know the idea of stress and we all probably can define it but the definition that I have latched onto [00:16:00] recently is that stress is when you have a bunch of acceptable options, but no clear way to prioritize which one is best. I think this applies so much to business owners and like for me as a business owner, I recognize that that definition is absolutely perfect when it comes to when I start spinning my wheels and trying to figure out, well, what am I doing wrong when it comes to how do I improve my sales? How do I improve operations? How do I better deal with staff? And so an employee engage. Survey in a sense, is entirely designed to start to narrow down what truly are the options that matter for you to go and act on. So if I've got $1 to spend on making my business better and I really don't have anything to tell me where it is, like I'm throwing darts, right? Do I go and take my crew out for afternoon to go golfing and hope that we bond that way? Do we go and have a dinner somewhere? Do I simply give them each an extra a hundred bucks in their next paycheck? Like if I've got no clue what's going to matter, it's, [00:17:00] it's extraordinarily exhausting. Barrett Chow: Yeah. Fortune favors the informed, right? And you can have much bigger impacts if you know where you're throwing your darts and what you're aiming for. So, you know, it, it, it's, it's. Understanding what you're getting out of these surveys. Right. Engagement vs Culture - whats the difference Barrett Chow: But one of the things that has come across my desk a lot is engagement versus culture. What's the difference? And, and, and are, or are they the same? And, and so I would love to hear from you, Tom, like what's the difference on your side of, between engagement and culture? Tom Tessmer: Yep. Yeah, so great thing to, to get people grounded in as they talk about this, you know, we live in a world of a lot of buzzwords or cliches that people throw around, and I mean, that's just the nature of, of what our world is, but, but to be able to articulate stuff. Can make a big difference. And so the way I would think about it is engagement tends to be much more of an individual, individual thing that relates to individual [00:18:00] choices. And a cultural thing tends to be more of a communal or shared experience. And to use a sports analogy. Like the reality is, is someone can be a superstar on a team and they can be very engaged in their position. But they can also become very self-serving potentially. Or they can become more interested in their own stats. They can potentially you know, you'll be very focused on either the team winning or focused on other things. But what they understand is that from their standpoint, engagement is what do they choose to do to contribute in some way? That they view as advantageous to themself, which ideally is also advantageous to the team. And the reality is that that can can lead to something that that's very unhealthy from a cultural standpoint. And so culturally, it's much more the question of what truly are the team dynamics? What are the values? What are the principles? What are the guidelines that we all recognize exist Now, whether that's a poster that's hanging up. On a wall somewhere, you know, in the break room or whether it's [00:19:00] it's unspoken in some other way. What are those expectations that are defining whether we feel any satisfaction or loyalty to committing to what the company wants to achieve? And the simple reality is one of the biggest faults that exists in culture is that it's often crammed down from leadership. That it is I'll say the boardroom decides we're gonna make some proclamation of here's what we're gonna stand for. Now, often what they stand for is just another list of cliches, right? Like, we're all about integrity, or we're all about you know, teamwork or, or whatever you wanna insert in there. A lot of that stuff are cliches or buzzwords, and I define that as a cultural value where the inverse value of that wouldn't be a legitimate. So when a company says we're all about integrity, I challenge them by saying, point out a company that says we're about being liars and being deceptive and no one does that. And so for you to say we're about integrity is kind of irrelevant [00:20:00] right now. Back to my quality comments earlier on. You know, a company absolutely can say we're about uncompromisingly high standards because another company can absolutely say we're about doing it good enough. Like in, in the, my world of, of CPG products, like that's simply a private label is about, we're about doing good enough, right? We wanna create a product that satisfies people, but is sold at a significant discount. The premium brand name can absolutely embrace, we're the exact opposite. We're gonna throw every bell and whistle into our product and then charge as much as we can. For it. But if you don't clarify that, you get this ambiguity that leads to massive frustration. The other part of that is the risk within thinking about culture I is that the cancer of culture is really hypocrisy. It's where you have people saying one thing and then either doing or having people experience another thing. And now, most of the time, I don't believe this is intentional. I don't think there's anyone listening to this and that intentionally does hypocrite things but. Through an engagement survey, you can realize, oh, what I think I'm doing, again, back to me being a challenger, when I think I'm being a great leader, by essentially picking fights with people and challenging them to think, think differently, and to improve things. They could be looking back at me saying, man, Tom's a real prick of a leader. Right? And so by not, if you don't have some sort of a tool to gather that information, you, you either come across as hypocrite, hypocrite. You come across as inconsistent, as confusing, but at the end of the day, just very frustrating. That then drives back to the individual choice [00:21:00] of, do I truly engage and try to excel at my position on the team, or do I give up and disengage in some way? Barrett Chow: Yeah, and you know, I've, you know, throughout my career I've always defined engagement as simply. It's what you do, right? And and what you do at work. And do you engage in that job? And do you like what you do? Culture is how you get it done and who you do it with, right? And so to your point, the culture of a company can be defined. Objectively as hypocritical when your core value is integrity, but you're cooking the books. Right? But you know, I've always said too, you can have high engagement and bad culture, right? There's a lot of people who love being in accounting. That doesn't mean you love your employer, right? And and the opposite can be true. People don't always love the job they do. But the culture of the company is why they stay. They love the people they [00:22:00] work with, they love that they have the resources to do their job. And, you know, you started touching on a few things in, in my world, right, mission, vision, values, that could be part seven of another episode. Right? 'cause it, it, it does bring a lot more intentionality around it. But these surveys are also, you know, really designed to. To, to pull out the validity of have you lived these core values and, and is it ingrained in your culture and is it helping people engage? And if it's not, maybe these aren't the right core values, or maybe we're not defining them right, or maybe we're not living them consistently. Tom Tessmer: Totally agree. Two things I'd add to that. So one is just thinking about your culture as a series of choices, right? Culture in a sense is a particular type of strategy. It's how do we believe as a company we can best achieve the outcome that we want to achieve? And so again, [00:23:00] simplicity back to quality is, is our objective to create the most premium product. Possible to serve our client or customer better than anyone, or is our goal to be good enough and then to use that to our advantage by being more price competitive or have something else related to that. And so culture is very much about deciding what are the values that that we believe best achieve what we want the outcome to be. Second thing I'd say and I'll give the, the credit back to Reid Hoffman is the guy that at least I've heard the term from is he talks about. People called brilliant jerks, and probably me as a challenger. If, if I wanna assume I'm brilliant, maybe I'm a brilliant jerk as a challenger when I've played that role in the past. But the real idea here is probably everyone listening to this within their organization has someone that's a brilliant jerk. A lot of times this might be a salesperson. That hits their number every day, that maybe they are critical to the company hitting their annual number, but the way they do it is not that appealing that they [00:24:00] maybe isolate themselves from the rest of the, of the team. They use tactics that don't necessarily align with the company values, and so the, the company or the leader. Has to be faced with this tension of, okay, how do I resolve the fact that I have someone playing their role and arguably doing it well if I'm solely measuring it based on them achieving their outcome, but that, that has a consequence on the shared experience or that culture of the entire organization, and that they are creating very mixed signals with what we accept or reward or embrace here. And I'm faced with a great dilemma of, do I also reward it by giving them their bonus or by holding them up as a example for everyone else to stimulate. So all of that, if you don't have foundational understanding of what do people value, what do they experience you're flying blind in a whole bunch of other ways. And other than I just add to that would be the opposite. Of that brilliant prick. I'm sorry. [00:25:00] That brilliant jerk in his terms. And that is a realization that I think the audience also knows is the fact that a bunch of individuals that are of average ability but are extraordinary at cooperating with each other and getting along often will far outperform. Those individuals that may be brilliant. And so that again, is part of the challenge here is then, well, how do I go and identify that reality and encourage that environment as well? So how do I go and make better compatibility and cooperation and ideally improve the average to be even better over time. Barrett Chow: Yeah. Right. We've heard the, the, the saying, right, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Right? And, and, and that's kind of what you're getting at there. But you know, I know that a lot of our listeners are going, wow, I've never done this, or, great, I'm gonna run out tomorrow and, and do this. But I like to slow down here really quick and, and, and really talk about, you know, what are the key [00:26:00] points you, we should be using in deciding to implement an engagement survey. Tom Tessmer: Yep. How do you know you really should do it first? Right? Like, there's a variety of reasons that in truth should shy away from it. So like everything you choose for your business, there's risk and there's reward. And the truth is for this, if not done right, if not done well the risks are actually very significant. And most importantly. I, I guess maybe not most importantly, but several that I'll mention, you know, one is that you need to do this if you truly believe in the idea of truth and that you believe in the value of finding where you're failing. So the worst thing you can do is to use a technique like this to attempt to just validate. What's happening today or to, to find that little needle in a haystack that you can use to justify the way that things are. So if you're looking to do that, absolutely don't waste your time at all. [00:27:00] Second critical thing to do is that this is an active engagement or interaction with your staff, and if there's not a way to close the loop back with them to communicate it, you're gonna find that there's a lot of frustration. So you could actually go and do a survey. Go dark and do a whole bunch of secretive things that make your organization a ton better. But if none of that is actually communicated back in a very intentional way with your staff, there's gonna be perceived frustration. There's gonna be people thinking, oh, wow. They asked me a bunch of questions and I poured my soul out to them, and then I got crickets. So it's, it's critical to take a lot of what you're learning and, and to be as honest and public as you can back with your staff. So they recognize the direct benefit of them offering up their information. I'd also say that out of all this separate from just being open-minded and willing to learn and to communicate that learning, it is that ultimate need that this is about taking action. This is not an academic practice. This is not getting a report that you read [00:28:00] and throw into the back of a file. Yeah, it is. Let's figure out how we can make a change that produces something positive for the business, for the individuals within the business. And, and then probably the last thing I would say is, is there can be a fault, and this probably as someone that does this service, can sound self-serving. There can be a fault of viewing this as a moment in time. One time, check the box. Barrett Chow: 100%. Tom Tessmer: The reality here is your, the experience of your culture, the engagement of your employees is a very dynamic thing that needs to be monitored over time. Because what pops up in an assessment that you do tomorrow could be and probably is gonna be fundamentally different than something that pops up in six months. And so, to a degree, you need to embrace managing culture and managing engagement as a bit of a whack-a-mole. Type of practice. It, it is truly like what has changed and a lot of times it's macro [00:29:00] environment things. It's stuff that's totally outside the control of your business, but it's still having an impact on your business. And so to be aware of all that is, is the critical aspect of doing this as more of a an ongoing monitor. Barrett Chow: Yeah. And, and, and once again, I'll circle back to my conversation with a previous guest in Nubia. We talked about if you're gonna ask for feedback, you have to take action on it, right? And if you're not prepared to do it, don't do the survey because you said it, I poured my heart and soul out to you, and you didn't do anything about it, or I didn't hear anything about it. Why would I do it again? Right? And the communicating those results and what the action plan is, is a big part of making this a success and encouraging more and more transparent and honest feedback from your team members. I think that the other side of this is you, you hit it on the head, is you. You can't just do it once you, as you do it in iterations. You're learning more about where [00:30:00] you're growing and what's working, but also the goal of this is to grow culture. And if you're growing culture and en and engagement and your business is growing, well, a $2 million company that you once had. And a $10 million company will have very different engagement and culture issues. And you have to stay abreast of what those challenges are to continually, to address 'em. And I think that that's, that's one of the biggest things for me you know, quick side note is I have had to coach a lot of HR or owners away from engagement surveys because of your first point, right? I, they wanted to validate that they have a good culture, but they didn't want to do anything else with the results. And this isn't a pat on your back exercise. This is truly how do we get better and what do we need to do to help the team grow? You know, and so as we kind of start to wind down here, one of the last questions I have for [00:31:00] you is, okay, we. We've come to an agreement that we are ready to do the survey. We're ready to implement it. From your point of view, what are the best ways to carry out a survey now that we've made the decision to do it? Tom Tessmer: Yep. So several principles here. And so the first thing I do is to separate out the idea of doing a organizational survey. And so the idea of this is really, we are gonna pool together everyone's responses, so aggregate those in some way and do analysis on that to produce insights that is separate from doing what would be more of an indivi individualized. Assessment or audit. And so there is a parallel to this, which is really the idea of how do I help an individual track their engagement and their contributions. So let's just separate those two to, to have that be clear. Now, the idea of an employee engagement survey. Really begins with something around making sure that you have trust. And so I would argue that most [00:32:00] organizations, if they have never done an employee engagement survey, there probably is a surprising degree of challenges with trust within the organization. And, and it's just, it is just kind of a circular argument, right? Like if I've never actually invested in this, to the point of, of monitoring it the way an engagement survey would, odds are there's a few squirrely things going on. There's some stuff that people aren't happy with right? There's probably some war stories. And so what you have to recognize is that's where you're starting. You're trying to figure out how do we build trust? First thing to do is to ensure that it's anonymous for everyone. So the great fear, of course, is that I speak up and I share my input and then oh my gosh, they figured out how to trace that back to me, and now I feel like I'm being Yep, exactly. So we, we wanna make sure there's absolutely no risk of that. The value of doing this is proportionate to how honest individuals can be. Because there absolutely is a risk and I've seen it happen and, and in truth, this happens in the broader world right now, if you're familiar with the net [00:33:00] promoter score as this common indicator of satisfaction, well. Companies have all learned that what I need to do is go give some people a very contrived request of, Hey, if, if I'm a nine or a 10, please fill this out, if not, move along, type of thing. Right. Or like there's a lot of ways that a company can lead some of the answers without just saying, Hey, we truly wanna know where we're at. And the reality is we expect that to not necessarily all be perfect. So let's allow people to answer anonymously so it's not being tracked back to them. Secondly, the reality is, again, our audience for this podcast probably have very bilingual organizations. And so let's ensure that this addresses. Whatever language is English and Spanish, probably the most two common ones, but make sure that it is adapted to be effective for that. I've also very much learned that there's ex execution elements of knowing. Do we deliver the invite or the request via email or do we do it via text? [00:34:00] And so there are certainly, you know, more individuals that may be more comfortable doing this over their smartphone. And so let's make sure that we're reaching them in that appropriate way. It's not gonna do a lot of good potentially if you've got, you know, a field staff that don't get on a computer once a month type of a thing. Probably don't use email very often, so let's make it easy for them to gather it. Other thing I I'd really emphasize is raw data is a great, fabulous, fun thing, but the magic happens in the analysis. So one of the other things we do that of course, anyone can choose to do this well, however they execute it is to also profile and anonymously profile your respondents. And so when we do, we help at least identify well, who is coming from different. Areas of the organization. We like to look at tenure. Can we go and attribute tenure to people? So in the background, we're not tracking who individuals are, but we have an ID that we know this respondent ID has [00:35:00] worked for the company for 10 years, they're in this part of the business or something else. That then gives us the ability to do more analysis on the backend to further understand where truly do issues exist. So is this something that exists within the office? More than in the field. You know, depending on the degree that you wanna get into it, you could go and figure out, does this exist under a certain vertical of management within the company? Does this exist more with our new employees versus our tenured employees? Things like that. Barrett Chow: Yeah, it allows you to actually pinpoint where the pain points are and, and address them, you know, not with a blanket solution, but with actually targeted solutions that will actually have the greatest impact. Right. So what I hear you saying, Tom, is the breath when, when you're ready to carry it out, one you have, if it's your first time, definitely find a way to make it anonymous. Right? Third parties, those are, those are a great way to do it because. We are not in control of the [00:36:00] data somebody else is. You gotta make it available and easy to all employees and it has to go to all employees, right? That includes your leadership team all the way down. And then lastly, I think it is right, taking the time to analyze the data and like you said, present it and take action on it, right? That's, that's the best practices around a survey when you're, when you're, when you've made the decision to do it. Tom Tessmer: Yep. One other thing I would suggest is the idea of this largely should be to go. And get quantitative information. So predefined questions that are quick for people to go through. You know, typically I would, would expect the commitment to be a five. There's certainly no more than 10 minute commitment from an individual, so it, it's not a big lift for them. But at the end the, I would suggest always having what we call and just an open mic. So it is a open text box. Hey, what have we not covered that you think is relevant? To communicate, and what you'll find in there is some people will have a great praise where they'll say, Hey, here's a thing that's really working well, please don't change that. Right? If you love something, don't ruin this great thing that we've got. At the, at the same time, there'll be things that will be popped up in there that weren't really contained. Within the structured questions that you had. And so there can be some very surprising things that can act, that can be very critical, that might actually be a root cause that a lot of the other stuff actually stems from. And so an example of like one of those that we've recently had with a client were issues related to onboarding and training. And so the assessment or the audit we were doing with them did not include a lot of probing into what the onboarding and training process was. But in that open mic in the last execution, we had multiple people decide to add with their own words, Hey, I have a concern with this. I don't know how to do my job. I was told that I would have this type of onboarding and guidance, and they threw me out there after the first week. And so a few of those things often can lead to something that's totally unexpected and at the same time, often something that is extraordinarily valuable. Barrett Chow: Agreed, and, and I think, you know, we spent a lot of time talking today about, hey, this is where you find your flaws. This is how you get better. But you, you brought up the other point. There's things that you do well as a company and you have to know what those are so you don't change that. Right. And, and, and there's also, you know, I always, when I was implementing surveys and I was doing the data, it's also the 80 20 rule, right? The squeaky wheel gets the grease in a lot of companies. So if you have nothing but unhappy employees being keyboard warriors, right? You listen to that feedback. 'cause that's the feedback you're getting. Whereas you have to encourage everybody to re respond even if they're having a great experience. 'cause you wanna know what is working within the company. So Tom, thanks for your time today. As we wrap up here, you know, what are the big three takeaways that you would want our listeners to understand if they heard nothing else today from our, our data and anecdote filled episode. Tom Tessmer: Yes, so totally agree. We can talk a lot and I know that people will, will walk away. Just a few basic things, so I, I'll actually springboard off of your last comment a bit. And so we didn't talk about it a bunch, but you're absolutely right that a lot of what needs to be considered is how do we preserve the things that are going properly. So we've talked a lot about change, but let's just get that in there, that businesses exist today, probably because they're doing a bunch of things, right? You should know what that is, and you should be sure you don't mess with that. Now, that being said. I would suggest these three. So number one, if you do this, embrace the fact that the entire goal is to find something to take action on. And that really touches on a lot of our conversations that the goal should not be be to validate we're fabulous and wonderful and our employees love us. Or just find all the things that are right. But it's really to say, well. What are the things that, that have room for improvement? And odds are when you start doing this, it'll be some very big things over time. Ideally those big, big things start to be resolved and it becomes smaller and smaller stuff that becomes perhaps a little more nuanced and that's a great sign. But the reality is, again, there are a lot of dynamics that change all the time. And so there always is gonna be a bit of a moving target. So do this with the full expectation of, I wanna find things that are a bit surprising or a bit uncomfortable that tell me I need to go do something to fix that. Second one is is back to the broader conversation around building culture. I would simply wanna remind people because I suspect some of the audience will be guilty of this, is that the culture is not about. The proclamations of leadership, it's really about the participation of the employees. It's about the shared experience. And so if you do have a wonderful full color poster in your break room that says, here's what we stand for, be sure that your employee's not there and say Absolutely. And that's the same thing I experience every day because the gap between those two things is where a lot of bad stuff happens. That is where the sense of hypocrisy exists out there. That is where the, where this dissatisfaction exists, where you've implied to set some high expectation and then have an experience that fails to meet that. And so generally speaking, the, the insight is. Encourage your staff to participate in helping shape and define what the culture is that you believe is gonna best achieve the outcomes you want the business to achieve. And then last thing I would say is recognize the ability for your culture and the ability for better employee engagement. To be an extraordinary competitive advantage for you. And so here, the simplest comparison that I'll make is the, the story of Progressive Insurance, if you've ever heard it that right? They're the ones that go out there and say, Hey, we'll give you our bid, but then we'll also bid several other competing insurance companies. And you think, wow, well, they must just be super honest. And that's so transparent to them. Well, the reality is that that stemmed from them. Having the belief that they had superior underwriting. And so by sharing competitors quotes, they believed they could actually send send potential clients to someone else in the worst possible way, in a sense. So they weaponized underwriting as a way that advantaged their business in disadvantaged their competition. So if you truly can better mon, better monitor, and build a healthy culture and better employee engagement, use that to your advantage. That should enable you to hire better individuals, to retain better individuals to likely get better performance on your individuals while your competition that is not doing this, essentially is now fighting over less qualified motive in mo, less qualified individuals. Less motivated individuals and just a poor remaining staff that's out there. So this can really become a major competitive advantage. By no means, view it as an expense, view it as an investment. Barrett Chow: Great. Awesome. Well, Tom, once again, thank you for your time. Before we break today, I want to give you a chance to, you know, let our listeners know where they can find QLVR and, and if they have interest in any of your surveys. You know, how can they get ahold of you? Tom Tessmer: Yes, so. For anyone that is interested in the services that I provide, what you'll be shocked to discover is that QLVR is actually spelled QLVR, so a modern little spin on that, that I hope the name itself is clever in its own right. But my website is QLVR.co, so [00:37:00] QLVR.co. And out there it walks through more of the principles around how I help companies improve their employee engagement. It provides more details around the full model that can be utilized. Again, we, we really focus today on just one of nine different dimensions that I believe exists in improving your overall employee experience. Obviously, if anything out there looks appealing to you there is email. The, the general inbox would be B, so the letter b@QLVR.co. So b@qlvr.co. Obviously welcome anyone that would love to engage or even just have conversations like this. Barrett Chow: Awesome. Well, Tom, thanks again for your time. Have a great rest of your day. Look forward to to talking to you soon and, and catching up on some more data filled analytics that we can help companies grow. Tom Tessmer: Absolutely. Really enjoyed it. Thanks. Barrett Chow: Great. Alright. Speaker: Thank [00:38:00] you for listening to this episode of Roots of Success, brought to you by the subject matter Experts at McFarland Stanford have a question you want our coaches to tackle in a future episode. You could submit that@mcfarlandstanford.com slash podcast. And to find more helpful content from McFarland Stanford, follow us on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. If this or any of our episodes have piqued your interest in ACE Peer Group. We encourage you to join us at Ace Discovery. Just check out the events tab@mcfarlandstanford.com. This is Jason New co-founder and principal at McFarland Stanford. We'll see you next time.