Dana Dowdell 00:00
This episode is brought to you by quirky HR coaching. If you've been working in human resources and are feeling burned out, and have always wanted to start your own consulting company, then this coaching program is for you. With quirky HR coaching. We'll meet one on one over a series of sessions to craft your consulting company exactly how you would like it. And we'll cover all of the important details, contracting pricing, how to engage in customers, how to deliver your services, who you want to meet with, how to fire a customer, all of the things that come up when you own your own business. So if you're interested in signing up for quirky HR coaching, head on over to boss consulting HR, and click on the quirky HR tab, and sign up for a one on one so we can chat more, and find out if quirky HR coaching is meant for you. Hey there, welcome back to another episode of quirky HR. I am joined by Lou Blatt, and he is the CEO or Chief Operating Officer of join digital welcome, Lou to quirky HR.
Lou Blatt 01:17
Oh, thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
Dana Dowdell 01:19
Thank you for being here. So tell us a little bit about join digital what you do and how you got here.
Lou Blatt 01:28
Yeah, well, Dana, I'm doing good digital is in the business of creating amazing work experiences. And, you know, everyone remembers it wasn't that long ago, when COVID happened, and everybody went home to work? Well, since that time, there's been some movement back and forth. But between the constant progress of video conferencing technology, and the benefits that some people have experienced, and working remotely or hybrid, we've arrived at a point where 77% of the population is hybrid or remote. And there's a lot of discussion going on about what's the most appropriate way through managing in hybrid join digital started with focus on putting in networks and sensors, occupancy sensors, or corporate real estate companies. But that soon, wasn't really necessary because no one was in the corporate real estate space. And so we looked at the company and realized that the very same infrastructure can be extremely useful to companies that reside in the corporate real estate space, because they're going to have to figure out what to do with their space, they felt like they had maybe too much space, and certainly knew that even if they didn't have too much space, it had to be completely reconfigured for the new way of work.
Dana Dowdell 03:04
And so you took this technology, and you transitioned it into being a data source for decision making, right?
Lou Blatt 03:12
That's right. Every customer I talk to, I'd say the one commonality was, we need better data, they had access control data, you know, when you use your badge to get into the office. But that often gives you data about who comes in, but doesn't give you data about who leaves and you have absolutely no information about what the employees are doing in the space when they're there. So that combined with the lack of engagement data, the inability to really ever measure productivity and knowledge workers, which is a very difficult thing to do. All of this resulted in one common requirement, we need better data. So we take the network, we connect all the sensors and any other source of information, you might have zoom information, teams information, access control information, occupancy information, indoor environmental quality information, put it all into one data set, and provide it back to the customers as a dashboard.
Dana Dowdell 04:20
The HR and me is always like privacy and play privacy, employee rights, you know, so I'm curious, how do you how do those conversations play in this in terms of employees concerns over you know, tracking or whatever it may be?
Lou Blatt 04:37
grade point data, it's a huge requirement for the system that you protect the anonymity so we often don't need I can't remember a single situation where we absolutely needed to know that this person was named Sal. And so we just need to know which people how many people are using what spaces and are is it useful, so For example, we have several sensor, we don't manufacture the sensors, we just get sensors from third party companies. But the ones that we do that work on camera technology, we don't actually look at the image, we turn the image of the human into what is like a little digital mannequin with a colored dot over their head. So one person is red, and the other person's purple and the other person's yellow. And nobody knows who's who.
Dana Dowdell 05:27
And so what are you seeing in terms of like rolling this out in organizations? What are you seeing companies do internally to communicate kind of the business need to have this to their employees?
Lou Blatt 05:43
Yeah, I think where it's most effectively done, there's a significant communication task, which is all about engagement, and bringing passion to the job, we know that 20% of employees actually state that they're passionate about their work. So it's kind of a epidemic of dispassion. And I think properly communicated, roll this out with a mentoring program, and tell the employee base that we're really want to engage and, you know, in our vibrant culture and create an environment, that's better every day, I think that's where you get a lot of commonality between managers and employees, landlords, everybody wants to have a more productive, healthy, passionate place to work. And so I think a communication program around the broader goals of this whole program, not just that we're collecting data is very, very useful.
Dana Dowdell 06:51
So we were talking offline about just this idea of remote work and this idea of hybrid and how people, leaders often form opinions about what's the right thing to do, and then seek out the data that supports their opinion. Right. So what are what what does the data actually support? What are you seeing in terms of remote hybrid, and then also to our conversation offline? In other countries, what are you seeing in terms of the work environment that way?
Lou Blatt 07:24
Yeah. That's right, Dan, I don't think anyone has the right answers yet. You know, Google just got lambasted basically in an article for their policies by their own employees saying, why would you require us to come into work when I get here, I have no place to sit. If I do find a place to sit, I find myself doing, you know, Google Hangout or teams or zoom with other employees that may even still be in the same building. And I could be doing this from home and have saved hours of time. Amazon employees walked out. Metta reverse their policies, to three days a week in the office, at&t told all their employees that they need to come back in, I think it's October, when they do come back. You may not have the same office building that was there when you were going to work before. In fact, if you're building on Play, asked my closest buildings 40 miles away, what should I do, and they were told they should move. This is all public information. And JPMorgan Chase is now required all the managing directors to come in five days a week. So there's this push back towards the office, no one really knows the right path forward there scores of companies that are completely remote at this point of successful companies, you know, Spotify, Shopify, Airbnb, on and on just a ton of really successful companies. So what's the right path? And what are we observing? I think what I'm observing is that if you can push the decisions down to the individuals who are actually doing the work with the right set of information for them to make these decisions appropriately, then it's very encouraging for them. They feel that they're in control of their own work their own days, which they like very much and they'll seek out the right answer that if it's in a highly collaborative environment, or task, then they'll get together. If it's a focus work, then they'll do it more remotely. And then in the hybrid situation, they contend much better to the ideas of making all the people in the meeting equal We'll, and really sensing more feedback from the video systems. There's some interesting research out there in nature 2022, the journal Nature, they published a really good article about collaborative tasks. And they showed that people who were doing collaborative creative tasks in person came up with two extra ideas than the people who were on video conferencing counterparts. Well, that was interesting in itself. They kind of researched why, and they had different, you know, theories, why there's still some research to be done there. But a lot of people spend enormous amount of time watching themselves on video conferencing, and it steals cycles from mental cycles from the task at hand. So they were thinking that could very well have something to do with it. Now, of course, there's features where you can turn yourself off in your video conferencing system. But I think a lot of people would find that very difficult to do, because they come to light that continual feedback on how they're being shown shown up on the on the video conferencing system, but it may not actually support the task.
Dana Dowdell 11:25
And that's interesting, too, because I feel like I've had clients where they've adapted their policies for virtual meetings to require video to be on. Because they viewed that, that if it wasn't on they would, they would assume that the employee is less engaged. They can't, you know, track them that way.
Lou Blatt 11:46
Yeah, that's right. I in fact, I abide by that rule, I like all my employees to turn the video on, it's the last little bit of feedback, we still get better and really tight to that, I think the thing that kept them from coming up with as many creative ideas was watching themselves, others people can watch them, that's not a problem. It's when you're watching yourself, I think that this journal article pointed out, it was a problem. And on that indoor environmental quality work, there's clear evidence that if you can, you know, improve seven different aspects of the physical environment, you gain 20% productivity improvement, and they've done that in scientific ways, looking at different knowledge tasks. So better light, better temperature, better, lower levels of noise, and then a bunch of different aspects of the actual air, methane, tracking co2, particulates in the air, etc, to make sure that the space it promotes wellness, and also results in a higher level of productivity.
Dana Dowdell 12:57
You think in a way that we've gotten to kind of macro big about this, this idea of hybrid or remote work versus in office, and we're forgetting about the like, I think about, I believe that anyone can work remotely as long as you have the appropriate management structures in place and feedback opportunities and connection opportunities. But it has to be intentional. And I feel like sometimes we are we are just looking at the topic of remote in office or hybrid, and not looking at really the the things that actually have to happen organizationally. Do you have an opinion on that at
Lou Blatt 13:39
all? Yeah, I think you could definitely optimize. Everyone is going to be hybrid, I've right now. 77% of us are either hybrid or remote. So we ought to just accept that people who think Oh, everyone's coming back, eventually, they ought to give that up. And we ought to begin to optimize both our physical space, our processes, communication processes, etc. And our interactions with management and our fellow employees, in order to have the most productive environment that that we can I think that's a really common need for companies for employees. Everybody wants to be more productive, and you can't get too focused on one or the other. One person doesn't typically have just one kind of tasks each day either. So this will evolve over time. When augmented reality becomes part of the answer. There could be situations where digital is actually better than in person for creative collaboration tasks included. But today that the research doesn't indicate that the research indicates that for social events, which builds culture for collaboration, creative collaboration, and for mentorship, you're much better to be in person. So the environment has to support both what I'm seeing customers do is create a much more distributed footprint, I call it so where they used to have maybe 30 buildings. And now they're moving to much shorter leases. Many more spaces, some of those may be co working spaces, some of those may be office by the day spaces, and creating and using lots of different kinds of space. In order to optimize, we're getting people together with a less commute, because that's the number one reason why people don't go to work get to the workplace, it's because the commute is too long. So you got to you got to change the footprint. Nobody ever really thought we could HR always thought, oh, that's the real estate group. And they're in charge of that? Well, no, if you always assume that this is just office buildings, yes. But if you assume this is space to make our employees productive, and passionate and engaged, then it becomes an HR topic. And so HR needs to step forward, they need to take a leadership role in really defining the space of the future.
Dana Dowdell 16:21
That's one of the regular threads of conversations that we have on this podcast is is that idea of HR having a seat at the table. And, and I often ask my guests, particularly ones who are in your type of role as CEO or CFO? In what way can HR carve their path to having that seat at the table? Right? It's it's a it's an ongoing challenge. And I believe it's very organizationally driven and culture driven. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on that?
Lou Blatt 16:53
Yeah, look, I've sat in those meetings, right. I've been the Chief Product Officer, Chief Marketing Officer at large, publicly held technology companies, and people are making decisions based upon political clout and personal preferences. And I think the way HR really needs to take the leadership role here is to walk in with the data. So in fact, one of my customers that had a real estate, a very large technology company, she was saying that she gets a lot of questions in the meeting that she has to try to answer that they don't have the answers for right away. So it keeps people from making objective decisions, and just sticking with political clout. Oh, well, let's close this building. No, we can't close that building. You know, I, my employees need that building well, okay, so how often are they using it? Well, we don't know exactly. Well, the conference rooms are really important to us. Okay, how often are we using the conference rooms? Well, we don't really know that yet. either. That's even harder, because people sign out conference rooms, and they don't go or they go, and they didn't sign up the conference rooms. And you don't have really good utilization data on these most collaborative spaces. So when you redesign and you walk in, and, you know, your intuition says, Hey, we need to change the building, so that it used to be 80%, desks and chairs, now, it's going to be 80% collaboration spaces. People want data set behind that, to really make those kinds of huge changes, oh, we need to sell off or get out of the leases on 15 buildings and pick up lots of little spaces all around the suburbs of these major congested cities, that people come together easier from where the employees are, we need to map the employees, zip codes of their homes, to the footprint of our office buildings and make sure that the commute is not more than 20 miles because we know at 20 miles, they're not coming in. So you need a dataset for all of this. And it's going to be constantly changing, people move technology changes. So that's why having a data platform where you're constantly looking at similar questions, but how they change over time, is very, very useful.
Dana Dowdell 19:24
We talked about that all the time making the business case. And that's one of the ways that I think HR can really influenced changes is what is the business case? And I'm just thinking, you know, I don't think that I've ever thought in my career that HR decisions influence real estate. You know, and obviously, my clients are much smaller than the the scope that you have worked in, but I've never thought about, you know, the trickle down effect of those people related decisions.
Lou Blatt 19:55
Got done. I love your comment about the justification the cost, just certification and the business case, because it's not natural for a lot of HR people that I've worked with, it's, you know, they, and I kind of liked it a little like they educated me a little, I'm a little bit on the other side, always about, you know, well, what's the business case of all this. And they're like, who cares what the business case is, we have to have employees who are really engaged and passionate. Well, that makes a lot of sense. And I might start every business justification conversation with that, and then talk about how this is about spending less to attract great employees. This is about spending less on employee churn, because employees are more engaged and will stay with us longer. And it's also about probably shedding some real estate space, which is the second highest cost item for any knowledge based organization, after their employees. So more productive at less cost. But all intending to build an engaged and passionate workforce that where you can source the best people from wherever, because you figured out which tasks can be done on a remote or hybrid basis.
Dana Dowdell 21:16
Yeah, you and I had talked a little bit offline as well about the this Japanese concept Kaizen Kaizen kaizen. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
Lou Blatt 21:28
Yeah, well, one thing I observed early on as we got join, going, after the pandemic, we have a major investor whose Japanese real estate company Obayashi, and they said to me, after I was talking much about same topics we're talking about here, they said, you know, we would never observe the same thing in Japan, that you're seeing here. And, Tony, tell me more about that. And we went on to talk to you about how when Toyota was really doing continuous improvement, which is what Kaizen really means continuous improvement, they realized that they got this incredible engagement of employees, where they were in a safe environment to point out where things could be better, and then make the changes, decide on what the changes are to improve things. And that that was incredibly engaging for the employee base, and such community forms around us, you know, people will stay the same job for their entire lives in Japan. So I say, hey, maybe we should take a page, that book and apply it even here in North America. So high Zen, for me, it's all about continuous improvement. And it's all about empowering the employees to make those decisions. So your policy, today, people are making policies for hybrid that they don't even know if people are actually complying with that policy. And even worse, they don't know if that policy is actually improving business or not. But in Kaizen, everything is really carefully managed and measured by the people who are closest to the work. So they can see if they're getting a better result from having a meeting in person, because it was a particular type of meeting versus another type of work. And I think that's has to be the essence of the policy is that you push the work, that decision making down to the individual employees who are doing the work, and give them the power to make these kinds of decisions.
Dana Dowdell 23:47
Does that all tie back to knowing and having a good grasp on what you value as a company and what your your company's values and vision is? Because I always think about performance. You can't you can't decide what is good performance or bad performance without knowing what what that look, you know, you have to have some influence to say that this is good performance versus bad performance.
Lou Blatt 24:14
Yeah, that's right. And I think that's a really good point. A lot of our customers are finding it effective to have like guardrails or guidelines, as opposed to showing up on Twitter and saying, everybody will come in on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays, you know, every week, or you your performance will suffer, your performance review will suffer. I think that that's just the antithesis of what we're talking about here. I think you can have guardrails that say hey, we stand for being a collaborative company. And part of that means getting together physically when we think that the result will be better as because we've done that. And so we're going to create an office environment, an office footprint that supports that. And we're going to also track the data and see if that's actually the case. And we encourage everyone to use that data to make their decisions on an ongoing basis.
Dana Dowdell 25:20
Do you have any success stories of any obviously, you can't, you don't have to name the company, but have a client that used the the data that they collected from your system, and really made significant change within their environment for their employees?
Lou Blatt 25:38
Sure, yeah, I can think of one really large technology company that's been using the joint system to put in a network, then connect all these sensors to the network, they're building management system to the same network. They also put in all the access control systems, and all that data is coming in. And so they could really track the utilization of the spaces better, they worked with the landlord to invest in the amenities around the building, great gym, amazing food choices, really good collaboration rooms and open conference areas, to attract people they even had a basketball court put in to get people to come in for social events around work. And lo and behold, they got great engagement score. So they track surveys, you know, to see how engaged employees are every six months, engagement increased, the company's doing very well, financially through all of this. And in terms of growth, revenue growth, and their cost structure for the real estate's actually decreased, because we were able to let some buildings go when the leases came up, and they consolidated into areas and then they did a working space outside of the cities in more of the suburban areas, to encourage people to come to get over that commute problem that we're talking about. So yeah, I see. I see companies already seeing the benefits of just being much more intentional about setting up their environments based upon the data that they're receiving.
Dana Dowdell 27:37
It's so interesting, Lou, this has been fascinating. Where can listeners connect with you?
Lou Blatt 27:43
Well, I think best is Louis dot Blatt at join digital.com. Right? You know, I, I will definitely respond. I love talking to people or just find me on LinkedIn and send me a message and we'll, we'll start a conversation from there.
Dana Dowdell 27:59
Fantastic. And of course everything about Lou and join digital and all the ways to connect with him will be in the show notes. And Lou I very appreciate very much appreciate you being on quirky HR.
Lou Blatt 28:10
Very sir. It's a pleasure.