Workplace Stories by RedThread Research

Former Goldman CPO Dane Holmes wants to remind us all of a huge truth: processes may end—but people don’t (you don’t stop learning once you’ve completed your module). So why don’t we look at Employee Experience that way?

For Vice President of Learning and Leadership at Walmart Brandon Carson, the systems we put in place ARE the employee experience. And if we want to change that, we need to help not just the cognitive worker, but that often-neglected other constituency in the EX debate—their physical worker equivalents.

For leadership expert and author Ashley Goodall, we get the employee experience consistently wrong because we just don’t want to look at the way humans really are out-of-the-box. Is he right?

A scene-setter for our latest set of Workplace Stories—a deep dive into where we really are with EX right now.

With a unique combination of experience across the worlds of the military, non-profit, government and commercial sector, mobile health entrepreneur Michael Madon shares what years of trying to make connection happen in organizations has taught him.

In this episode, CLO at online education leader Udemy Melissa Daimler—who recently published a new book on making workplace reconnection work, ‘ReCulturing’—sits down with Chris and Stacia to detail practical steps on making our new complex workplaces human once again.

It’s our special pleasure to share a conversation with renowned HR strategist Dave Ulrich around the importance of Connection and the practical steps leaders need to be making now to make it happen.

This week we sat down with Gretchen Murphy, CHRO of data center services specialist Service Express, to hear how only ever adding people who fit your culture but then constantly supporting them through conscious Reconnecting techniques really delivers.

Based out of San Francisco, Airtable is a fast-growing software product company with a mission to democratize software creation. It says it’s doing that by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs, but is that focus on openness and collaboration talk or walk? In this next debate on how to make reconnecting real, we find out from a great conversation with the company’s Global Talent Development Leader, Jessica Amortegui, who has a lot to say about walking the walk—from the way her company is really taking on the problem of connection at the individual, human level, but also how to better facilitate connecting with others on a one-on-one, team, and entire organizational level. Even more interestingly; that happens on both the virtual (90% of her fellow ‘Airtablets’ joined during the pandemic) but also on the physical level—and as you’ll also hear, gets instantiated with well-thought-out and battle-tested role tools and exercises, which we’re delighted to say some of which Jess has shared with listeners. She also has some very useful things to say about the demonstrable value of all this even the most results-focused managers and connection ‘skeptics’ find persuasive. Finally, we loved her persuading us about the importance of connection in the flow of one's day-to-day work—making connecting not some special thing that you do in parallel but can be structured to be part of any meeting if you want it to be. All in all, so many great soundbites—but if you want just one, how about, “The thing I would love to switch about our workplaces is how many of us end the day exhausted and feeling de-energized. Why does it have to be that way?” Abso-tootle!

For our second conversation about The Great Reconnection, we sat down with Matt Gosney, Vice President, Organizational Development at UCHealth, a major Denver-based healthcare provider that’s grown rapidly in the past few years. To make that growth work, the organization has been consciously doing as much as it can to enable connection and growth. We wanted to know more, so got Matt on to hear why connection and growth are now seen as critical to UC Health's employment value proposition, and also a significantly contributor to recruiting and retention. We also talk about how some of UC Health's previous talent processes, especially performance management, weren’t really helping on the connection part, and what Matt and his team did about it. A powerful new concept that’s proving really helpful is supporting managers to have what UCHealth calls ‘career conversations’ with every single employee has unleashed a tidal wave of connection, engagement, and contribution. An unintended but very welcome consequences of that work have been a dramatic improvement in talent pipeline diversity and a more organic (and thus, successful) approach to DEIB. We conclude with a story about lifetime-long transferrable skills that nearly wraps one of our most fun yet also thoughtful conversations for a while. The one key quote? “Connection is a baseline antecedent to progress and delivery of results.” Sounds bang on to us.