Welcome to the How People Work podcast

Well­be­ing is more than just a buzz­word or a one-size-fits-all pro­gram. It’s indi­vid­ual to each employ­ee and a key deter­mi­nant of a healthy work life in the work­place. And con­trary to pop­u­lar belief — well­be­ing can be measured!

Cas­san­dra Rose, SPHR, SHRM-SCP joins Jason again this week to dis­cuss how to mea­sure well­be­ing and how HR teams can imple­ment well­be­ing pro­grams that are mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial to the employ­ee and employer.

Now avail­able on: YouTube | Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy

Key ideas and highlights

• The youngest gen­er­a­tion demands a pur­pose-dri­ven career. How can we keep up?
• There are 3 main work deter­mi­nants of health: lead­er­ship, orga­ni­za­tion­al design, and ways of work­ing across the organization.
• Well­be­ing now must be a part of the ben­e­fits equi­ty conversation.
• Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, well­be­ing is measurable.

Word of the day

• We haven’t for­got­ten about the word of the day! We’ll pick this back up when Jor­dan returns next week.

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:39 Well­be­ing as one of the most impor­tant met­rics in HR
• 4:18 The def­i­n­i­tion of wellbeing
• 6:17 Well­be­ing isn’t just a nice to have; it’s a need to have
• 7:24 Younger work­ers demand a pur­pose-dri­ven work life
• 9:04 The dif­fer­ence between hap­pi­ness and purposefulness
• 12:15 Adop­tion of respon­si­bil­i­ty and fulfillment
• 13:48 The dif­fer­ence between being a cog and a spoke in the wheel
• 17:14 Deloitte study on Well­be­ing and the social deter­mi­nants of health
• 18:17 The three work deter­mi­nants of wellbeing
• 23:07 Busi­ness bot­tom line and human flour­ish­ing aren’t at odds
• 25:34 Why your peo­ple need to have agency in their wellbeing ]
• 30:21 How to mea­sure well­be­ing and imple­ment programs
• 37:45 3 steps to design­ing the work experience

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work for near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to the How Peo­ple Work pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling leaders.

Jason (00:50):

Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. Every­one. Thanks for join­ing us today. We have Cas­san­dra Rose join­ing us again as a guest on the pod­cast. So I am host­ing. Jor­dan is not here today, but we are very excit­ed to have Cas­san­dra back with us to con­tin­ue the con­ver­sa­tion that we start­ed last week around peo­ple, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the idea of well­be­ing, which we touched on just a tad last time. We got onto some oth­er inter­est­ing top­ics. But there’s some real­ly inter­est­ing research that’s come out of this Deloitte study that we men­tioned, and we’ll post it in the show notes for those who are inter­est­ed. But that’s some­thing that I think will be real­ly inter­est­ing to delve into today, espe­cial­ly giv­en Cas­san­dra’s expe­ri­ence in the ben­e­fits space well­be­ing, work­ing at both small and large orga­ni­za­tions. And so I’m real­ly excit­ed to jump into this today.

Cas­san­dra (01:46):

Yeah. Well, thank you again for hav­ing me on the show. For the peo­ple who did­n’t hear it the first time around, I am the head of peo­ple here at Fringe and have about 20 years of HR expe­ri­ence. And I’ve worked in not just the ben­e­fits space, but also in cor­po­rate immi­gra­tion, in recruit­ing and learn­ing devel­op­ment and HR sys­tems. And I’m real­ly proud to be a prac­ti­tion­er of the HR dis­ci­pline. And what I think is so fas­ci­nat­ing about the well­be­ing study is that in the orga­ni­za­tions that I worked at that were For­tune 100 and were well resourced, well­be­ing was always a top item to be dis­cussed. And I think that we are now real­iz­ing it’s not just com­pa­nies who have the priv­i­lege of hav­ing ded­i­cat­ed peo­ple like well­be­ing has to be the way that you think about work, whether you’re the CEO or a first time employee.

Jason (02:39):

And that’s a big change that’s tak­en place. More recent­ly, and I don’t know if I’ve shared this yet, but my role with­in Fringe more recent­ly has been with­in our Inno­va­tion team. And so I’ve been con­duct­ing some research recent­ly with HR indi­vid­u­als. We did a big sur­vey where we gath­ered some data and then myself, some oth­er folks on my team have been inter­view­ing HR exec­u­tives and talk­ing about some of these top­ics. And I was actu­al­ly real­ly sur­prised. One of the things that came out of this research that we did was one of the ques­tions that we asked was what are the met­rics that are most impor­tant with­in the HR func­tion? And so we had all sorts of peo­ple from all sorts of dif­fer­ent HR roles that we asked them to rank order out of about 10 dif­fer­ent met­rics, what were the top five for them? And the met­ric that was most con­sis­tent­ly numer­i­cal­ly kind of rat­ed in the top five was wellbeing.

(03:38):

And I was real­ly sur­prised by that because, and nor­mal­ly you hear attract and retain, right? Recruit­ing met­rics, reten­tion met­rics, obvi­ous­ly those are very impor­tant to how the busi­ness oper­ates and the effi­cien­cy of the busi­ness. But well­be­ing, I was a lit­tle sur­prised, hon­est­ly to see that sur­face so high as a met­ric because one of the things to me that I think is inter­est­ing is I’m not sure that there’s a real­ly con­sis­tent def­i­n­i­tion of what well­be­ing means and how com­pa­nies or HR prac­ti­tion­ers think about that. So I’m curi­ous even your reac­tion to well­be­ing hav­ing been ele­vat­ed so high in that research that we did.

Cas­san­dra (04:18):

Yeah, I love what you said about hav­ing a shared under­stand­ing, a def­i­n­i­tion around it, because well­be­ing can be the soft and squishy thing at one orga­ni­za­tion where it could be hard facts and heavy invest­ment at anoth­er orga­ni­za­tion. And so when I think about the spec­trum of well­be­ing, it goes from some­thing as basic as we pro­vide ben­e­fits to our employ­ees and the major things, the core things, the med­ical ben­e­fits, den­tal, vision, all the way to how can I pro­vide for you from a men­tal health stand­point, from a finan­cial health stand­point, even some­times from a com­mu­ni­ty health stand­point. And mean­ing how do we cre­ate engag­ing spaces for you to be able to col­lab­o­rate with your cowork­ers, be men­tored, be spon­sored at the orga­ni­za­tion. So I think when we say, well, what is a def­i­n­i­tion of well­be­ing? It real­ly should be more com­pre­hen­sive than just phys­i­cal health. And as long as we’re hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion that includes that, but then goes past that, I feel like we’re in the right space.

Jason (05:21):

Yeah. Well, and I think what’s real­ly inter­est­ing is I’ve delved into this myself in recent months. It’s real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing that in the work set­ting or the busi­ness set­ting, there real­ly does­n’t seem to be a con­sis­tent def­i­n­i­tion. I mean, I’ve talked to lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of HR lead­ers and HR exec­u­tives, and if you ask any one per­son, what basi­cal­ly hap­pens is well­be­ing means dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. But when you get into the space of psy­chol­o­gy, which I think is impor­tant because we’re talk­ing about how peo­ple work, which is the name of the pod­cast here, it’s actu­al­ly much more sci­en­tif­ic. And so some­times what hap­pens is when we’re in the busi­ness set­ting, we say, well, these qual­i­ta­tive, these soft things, they’re nice to haves. They’re not need to haves. That’s the kind of a com­mon lan­guage that’s used. And what’s real­ly meant by that is, well, nice to haves don’t real­ly actu­al­ly mat­ter when it comes down to it, right?

(06:17):

Because nice to haves are just fluffy stuff. It does­n’t actu­al­ly impact the busi­ness out­comes in a mate­r­i­al way. And I think what’s actu­al­ly real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing by that is I’ve delved into this research that it could­n’t be fur­ther from the truth. That actu­al­ly, the ways in which we think about these qual­i­ta­tive mea­sures are actu­al­ly high­ly sci­en­tif­ic from a psy­cho­log­i­cal stand­point, these self-eval­u­at­ed, qual­i­ta­tive mea­sures of sat­is­fac­tion and hap­pi­ness and a sense of well­be­ing are actu­al­ly very mate­r­i­al when it comes to an employ­ee’s self-report­ed sense of these things. How that direct­ly impacts their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, their hap­pi­ness, their abil­i­ty to be cre­ative in their work, all of these things that have very impor­tant sig­nif­i­cant busi­ness out­comes that I think you can begin to con­nect. And so I think that’s a real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing thing as we talk about the idea of well­be­ing and what is a good def­i­n­i­tion, how do we bring maybe some of these things into the busi­ness con­text that haven’t been part of the con­ver­sa­tion before?

Cas­san­dra (07:24):

And if you think about the way that a lot of younger work­ers, and I don’t mean nec­es­sar­i­ly just in age, but the amount of time that they spent in the work­force think about pur­pose. They want to be pur­pose-dri­ven at work. That is essen­tial to their well­be­ing and the way that we spend time in our work, whether it’s the hours that you think about the weeks, the years of it, that’s a way that you’re con­tribut­ing to soci­ety more sig­nif­i­cant­ly than almost any oth­er thing that you do in this life. And so if we’re think­ing about what gives peo­ple pur­pose and how does that show up for them, I think that’s an aspect of well­be­ing as well. Because if you feel pur­pose-dri­ven, that can actu­al­ly help you reframe how you think about how you’re con­tribut­ing, how you’re tak­ing care of your­self, how you’re invest­ing in the things that you’re doing at work and in your per­son­al life, which I love what you say is that’s a blunt. Work isn’t this thing that I just turn off, I go home and I com­plete­ly for­get the address of where I’ve just come from for those who still go into an office, but it’s the abil­i­ty for me to con­tribute to soci­ety, con­tribute to some­thing that makes me pas­sion­ate and excit­ed, and use skills that I just nat­u­ral­ly have and want to fur­ther con­di­tion and then go take those oppor­tu­ni­ties to go do oth­er things for myself.

(08:47):

So I think for me, what well­be­ing could be show­ing up for me as well as the employ­ees that I attend to is real­ly just mak­ing sure that I’m, again, giv­ing a breath of resources that allows each per­son to feel what they need to get their purpose.

Jason (09:04):

So Jor­dan and I have talked about this in pre­vi­ous episodes and I’m curi­ous what you think about it. How can employ­ees or just peo­ple in gen­er­al go about think­ing about this ques­tion of pur­pose? Because I do think it’s some­thing that comes up and I think some­times we kind of gloss over it real­ly quick­ly and we’re like, oh yeah, total­ly. Every­one should have a sense of pur­pose. But I think we real­ly have to kind of peel back the lay­ers on that. And so maybe in your own per­son­al expe­ri­ence or with peo­ple that you’ve worked with, how do you see the sense of pur­pose com­ing to life and what peo­ple do day-to-day?

Cas­san­dra (09:38):

Well, first I want to clar­i­fy what I believe it’s not. Pur­pose does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly equate to hap­pi­ness. And for some rea­son we’ve con­nect­ed those two things. And if I’m not hap­py at work, then I’m not pur­pose-filled at work. And I’m not say­ing that you should be unhap­py with that either. If bad things are hap­pen­ing in your work envi­ron­ment, call them out. Make it bet­ter, not just for your­self, but for peo­ple around you. But when I think about pur­pose, I think about what does it even mean to work? And a good exam­ple of that is if you go to the gym and work out for an hour, but you nev­er break a sweat sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, it’s as though you did­n’t work out, you’re not hav­ing the activ­i­ty to pro­duce sweat that can actu­al­ly result in a change in your body. You’ve done things but you haven’t actu­al­ly done work, you haven’t worked out. And so when I think about pur­pose, pur­pose means that I have a vision of some­thing that I want to achieve. I want to change the world. I want to sell this wid­get. I want to bring some­thing to the world that does not yet exist. And so there are going to be hard days in that there are going to be great days in that there are going to be mid­dling days where I’m like, I did a bunch of stuff, but I don’t know if it actually -

Jason (10:52):

Was it in line with -

Cas­san­dra (10:53):

Mean­ing­ful to my OKRs if you do that thing. And so I think when you can actu­al­ly chan­nel peo­ple into believ­ing that your pur­pose can be here every day, and let’s find a way in the work that you apply for and the job descrip­tion that you have, let’s see how your pur­pose can be ful­filled. That to me is the mag­ic ver­sus going, how can I make sure you’re always hap­py in every day of what you do? Yeah, I don’t think there’s any point in life, whether you’re high school or some­one who’s in retire­ment where they’re like, I feel hap­pi­ness through and through every day. But I think you can get sat­is­fac­tion from the chal­lenge and that your hap­pi­ness is the end result of always focus­ing on your purpose.

Jason (11:40):

And so you prob­a­bly don’t know this, but Jor­dan and I, and maybe two or three episodes pri­or to this one talked about these dif­fer­ent kinds of hap­pi­ness and ful­fill­ment. And so what you’re describ­ing is what we would con­sid­er to be hedo­nism essen­tial­ly is not real­ly hap­pi­ness that ful­fills or sus­tains. And so there is a kind of hap­pi­ness that is actu­al­ly root­ed in this sense of pur­pose and mean­ing. And I think the anal­o­gy of exer­cise is a good one, because exer­cise at its best is uncomfortable.

Cas­san­dra (12:14):

It is.

Jason (12:15):

Right, even painful. Because lit­er­al­ly what’s hap­pen­ing when you get stronger is you exer­cise to the point of exer­tion that your mus­cles tear and then they rebuild them­selves and they’re stronger as a result. And so that’s what’s hap­pen­ing. And I think anoth­er anal­o­gy that’s kind of fit­ting in the sense of pur­pose is where it’s not always com­fort­able is I like to think of it as a sense of adopt­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty. When we adopt respon­si­bil­i­ty for some­thing that can actu­al­ly be real­ly cen­tral to giv­ing us a sense of mean­ing and pur­pose. So a real­ly great exam­ple that I think you’ll res­onate with is with chil­dren, chil­dren can be one of the things that dri­ve you the most insane and mad that you’ll ever be, and at the same time give you the great­est sense of ful­fill­ment and mean­ing and pur­pose for anoth­er human being that you’re charged with rais­ing. And so it’s the respon­si­bil­i­ty of hav­ing this human being that you hope­ful­ly bring into the world to be anoth­er human being that can con­tribute pos­i­tive­ly to what’s going on out there. That I think gives us this sense of, Hey, it’s not just about me. It’s not just about being hap­py and like, oh, I feel good all the time, but that actu­al­ly there’s some dif­fi­cul­ty that comes with what that looks like.

Cas­san­dra (13:38):

And weath­er­ing it togeth­er. And I think that’s what is also an impor­tant aspect to that of col­lab­o­ra­tion. And maybe in pri­or decades, because I’m pret­ty young, we’ve gone into work envi­ron­ments where it was need to know infor­ma­tion. Your man­ag­er was just giv­ing you just enough infor­ma­tion for you to com­plete your job. So in some ways it was job secu­ri­ty, but also it lim­it­ed peo­ple from expand­ing and being able to con­tribute in the best way pos­si­ble because they could only make deci­sions based on the infor­ma­tion that they knew. And what I love about how the tech world, espe­cial­ly in the last decade has democ­ra­tized the way that we work, is that the more peo­ple that know infor­ma­tion and how your con­tri­bu­tions are actu­al­ly help­ing hit the bot­tom line of some­thing real­ly res­onates with peo­ple say­ing, Hey, I can actu­al­ly make an impact. I can have influ­ence in what I’m doing.

(14:38):

What I’m doing is not just a cog in the wheel, it actu­al­ly is a spoke in the wheel, and I want to do that more. Whether that’s sell­ing some­thing or being in the peo­ple team or being an engi­neer, all of these dif­fer­ent parts have to come togeth­er and no one is more impor­tant than the oth­er. That’s the thing that I think has shift­ed a lot. And so when we think about well­be­ing, we have to think about the diver­si­ty of that ecosys­tem of how do I sup­port so many peo­ple who are doing so many dif­fer­ent things, who are in dif­fer­ent points of their career. We’re talk­ing about five, almost six gen­er­a­tions in a work­place. We’re talk­ing about peo­ple who are par­ents, we’re talk­ing about peo­ple who may have dis­abil­i­ties that need accom­mo­da­tions. There’s so many dif­fer­ent visions and aspects to what it means to be a human being show­ing up to work. And so that’s the chal­lenge, but it’s a good chal­lenge to have. That means that we’re becom­ing more inclu­sive, we’re being more thought­ful. And so I think the hard work that’s ahead of us real­ly is to fig­ure out how can we con­tin­ue to find solu­tions and inno­vate. And human beings have always been resilient in find­ing dif­fer­ent ways of work­ing and get­ting bet­ter at it. If any­thing, we’re at a tip­ping point where we could be at the best that we’ve ever been. Peri­od. Why not pur­sue that?

Jason (16:01):

Yeah. And I think that’s a great well said because I do believe that if one thing’s true is over the course of human his­to­ry, we found a way to inno­vate and over­come obsta­cles and these things that have been put before us. And so I think it’s actu­al­ly a real­ly great segue into this research from this Deloitte study that we’ve been try­ing to get to.

Cas­san­dra (16:24):

We’re get­ting there, we’re get­ting there.

Jason (16:25):

Around well­be­ing. And I think what’s real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing about it is that they were pro­vid­ing a frame­work, unlike any that I’ve real­ly seen before. It’s some­thing that we’ve talked a lot about around here at Fringe. And so it was real­ly excit­ing when I came across it cause it was like, Hey, maybe this is some­thing that’s becom­ing a lit­tle bit more wide­spread. Maybe it catch­es on a lit­tle bit more in terms of how we think about it. And one of the things I thought was real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing is they refer to these aspects of well­be­ing in a way that they describe these work deter­mi­nants of well­be­ing. And so for those lis­ten­ing, they might be famil­iar with social deter­mi­nants of health. So the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion for some time has had a num­ber of met­rics, if you will, or kind of aspects of what they con­sid­er to be the social deter­mi­nants of health.

(17:14):

So for you as an indi­vid­ual with phys­i­cal health out­comes, what are the things that impact that from a stand­point of envi­ron­ment, socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus? There’s a num­ber of dif­fer­ent fac­tors. And so what Deloit­te’s done here is they’ve said, well, work is a real­ly impor­tant aspect of the human expe­ri­ence. And so they’re not dis­miss­ing sort of work out hand out­right as this work-life bal­ance work is just a bad thing. Inher­ent­ly. They’re actu­al­ly acknowl­edg­ing the fact that work is actu­al­ly a real­ly valu­able part of the human expe­ri­ence. And then they go on to describe what are these work deter­mi­nants? What are these things that they believe to be real­ly core to what dri­ves a pos­i­tive work expe­ri­ence or dri­ves well­be­ing with­in work? And so there’s three things that they lay out in this research, which again, we’ll post in the show notes here, but they describe them as one lead­er­ship behav­ior at all lev­els of the organization.

(18:17):

So from the C‑suite all the way down to the low­est peo­ple man­agers, any­one who’s respon­si­ble for lead­ing or man­ag­ing peo­ple, what do those lead­er­ship behav­iors look like? And so we actu­al­ly talked about that a lit­tle bit last episode, right around how do lead­ers impact what that work expe­ri­ence looks like for their peo­ple? How the orga­ni­za­tion and jobs are designed is the sec­ond aspect of that. And so I think there’s some inter­est­ing things there to talk about. And then ways of work­ing across orga­ni­za­tion­al lev­els. And so essen­tial­ly, how’s the orga­ni­za­tion set up in and of itself? And so again, I think we talked about that a lit­tle bit in the last episode, but that could play into some of these aspects around how are peo­ple enabled to work in dif­fer­ent projects per­haps that might be cross-func­tion­al, right? Yep. Is there that kind of flex­i­bil­i­ty across the way the orga­ni­za­tion’s set up that allows for peo­ple to expe­ri­ence these things in a dif­fer­ent kind of way?

Cas­san­dra (19:19):

And I think the orga­ni­za­tions that are going to rise to the top that are going to be the lead­ers with­in the next five to 10 years are the ones that are focus­ing on that right now. They’re invest­ing in that finan­cial­ly and they’re invest­ing in their peo­ple beyond some­times what the research will even show. And I think the research is almost not an after­thought, but back­ing up what peo­ple are actu­al­ly see­ing. Yes. When we think about qui­et quit­ting, which I just think is the way that peo­ple have always resist­ed work. I’m going to do less or I’m going to just do the amount that I’m paid to do. I’m not going to go above and beyond my job descrip­tion. I don’t see that as nec­es­sar­i­ly some­one being lazy or some­one just check­ing out. I see that also as a fail­ure on the com­pa­ny that I haven’t inspired you to find a dif­fer­ent way to go about it.

(20:10):

That might be, and you said some­thing real­ly impor­tant in our last con­ver­sa­tion, that some­times cer­tain jobs just have an arc. That’s it. Like either you’re going to love doing the exact same thing for the next 40 years, which there are cer­tain jobs that have to be there. I’ll even say some­thing as typ­i­cal as pay­roll. You need peo­ple who are excit­ed about mak­ing sure every­one gets paid on time. I get excit­ed when I get paid on time. So you want some­one who is com­fort­able being in a very sta­ble posi­tion but has growth oppor­tu­ni­ties. Maybe it’s, hey, you might take on pay­roll in a dif­fer­ent coun­try, or maybe you might learn about some­thing else, but your true func­tion in what you do for the com­pa­ny is being able to make sure that oth­er peo­ple can meet their bills and meet their finan­cial com­mit­ments. And so when we’re think­ing about how we struc­ture work, I think well­be­ing has to now be a com­po­nent. That was­n’t even a thought process. It was just, let me take 12 or 13 tasks, throw them all togeth­er, slap a title on this and go get some­one to come do this work.

Jason (21:13):

Yeah. Well, and I think one of the things that is spot on about what you’re say­ing is the notion that well­be­ing isn’t sim­ply about cost sav­ing mea­sures. And so I think there’s been a sense maybe over the last two decades or so, that well­be­ing has been real­ly just about cost sav­ing mea­sures. Can we reduce claims costs? Can we do things that maybe are at worst manip­u­la­tive for employ­ees to try and save mon­ey. At best, maybe in their inter­ests, but still kind of dri­ven by a prof­it motive that aren’t real­ly about the sense of what the arti­cle describes as human sus­tain­abil­i­ty. And I think what we would describe here at Fringe is human flour­ish­ing, what are we aim­ing for? Are we aim­ing for a bot­tom line busi­ness out­come or are we aim­ing for a good human out­come for the indi­vid­ual? For com­mu­ni­ties? For soci­ety? And that’s a big difference.

(22:21):

If we’re think­ing about pro­mot­ing the well­be­ing of work­ers of the orga­ni­za­tion of soci­ety, then it does­n’t just come down to, Hey, can we reduce med­ical claims by help­ing peo­ple have bet­ter heart health? It’s a good thing. Of course, every­one, we would want peo­ple to have bet­ter health in that way. But at the same time, is that sole­ly the aim or do we just desire for peo­ple to flour­ish? And can those things be ori­ent­ed in such a way that humans desire for them­selves to flour­ish, that we’re not forc­ing these things upon peo­ple, but that mean­ing and pur­pose actu­al­ly comes from the adop­tion of respon­si­bil­i­ty, both at the indi­vid­ual lev­el, the com­mu­ni­ty lev­el, the soci­etal level.

Cas­san­dra (23:07):

You tie that togeth­er so beau­ti­ful­ly. I want to take a minute to say that, but also I think mul­ti­ple things can be true at the same time. So just expound­ing on what you’re say­ing, there is noth­ing wrong in sav­ing mon­ey because peo­ple are catch­ing can­cer at stage one and not stage four. Right? That is super impor­tant because it, let’s be hon­est, it saves mon­ey on a claims basis, but also we’re sav­ing lives. And so one of the things that I’ve always been an advo­cate of is ben­e­fits equi­ty. And equi­ty to me does­n’t mean just hav­ing the abil­i­ty to have equal out­comes. It’s real­ly mak­ing sure that there are facets that we’re mak­ing sure we address. So that way there’s peo­ple who are hav­ing bet­ter lives, tru­ly just bet­ter lives. Because if we have the resources, if we’re A) in the most edu­cat­ed soci­ety glob­al­ly we’ve ever been as a human race, why aren’t we doing bet­ter for more peo­ple? And so when I think about what an employ­er owes to an employ­ee, what the val­ue propo­si­tion is of you work­ing for com­pa­ny A ver­sus com­pa­ny B, I want the con­ver­sa­tion to cen­ter around, I want your life to be bet­ter after work­ing for me.

(24:28):

That can be in so many dif­fer­ent ways, but well­be­ing has to now be part of the conversation.

Jason (24:33):

Yeah, I agree. Total­ly. And I think what’s inter­est­ing, and even a chal­lenge in that is it’s a two-way street, right? Because I think com­pa­nies do have a respon­si­bil­i­ty if they are aim­ing for human flour­ish­ing. And that’s why we talk about this so much is if they’re aim­ing for the good of human beings in soci­ety to do good by their employ­ees, it can’t be sim­ply prof­it dri­ven motives. And at the same time, indi­vid­u­als have a respon­si­bil­i­ty as well. So when we talk about mean­ing and pur­pose, well, one of the things that’s real­ly cen­tral to the notion of mean­ing and pur­pose is, well, I, as a man­ag­er, let’s say, I can’t define that for you. I can’t tell you what your mean­ing and pur­pose should be. And so it actu­al­ly takes some work on your part as an indi­vid­ual to sit down and actu­al­ly think about what are the things that are most impor­tant in my life?

(25:29):

How’s the work that I’m doing con­nect­ed to that? But what’s actu­al­ly real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing about that is the research shows that when peo­ple actu­al­ly take time to lay out these val­ue hier­ar­chies as we might call them, and real­ly say like, Hey, what are the things I care most about? What are the val­ues that are most impor­tant to me as an indi­vid­ual that it actu­al­ly brings into their work set­ting those things that are most impor­tant to them? And so all of a sud­den work that maybe seemed real­ly triv­ial before can actu­al­ly take on a dif­fer­ent kind of pur­pose and mean­ing, because all of a sud­den it’s like, Hey, well, I know why I’m going about doing this work, or maybe this work is a means to an end. Maybe I don’t actu­al­ly love this work in and of itself. It’s not always just total fun and hap­pi­ness, but there’s some­thing more mean­ing­ful about the rea­son that I’m apply­ing myself to this. And because I’ve tak­en some time to artic­u­late for myself indi­vid­u­al­ly what those val­ues are, what those things are that I’m moti­vat­ed by, now all of a sud­den I can bring that into my work set­ting. And as an employ­er, I can’t do that for you. That takes some work on your part as well.

Cas­san­dra (26:37):

Jason, every job I’ve ever had has been so ful­fill­ing. I’m always shocked that I get a new one. If that were true, we would­n’t even need lead­er­ship books because all man­agers were just being nat­ur­al born lead­ers who could not only be a coach, but also just get work done through oth­er peo­ple. That is the ide­al stage. Now let’s look at real­i­ty and see how we can meet some­where in the mid­dle. I think it’s also being able to say, as a leader, you need to do more for your­self. You need to be full self-care, do the things that you need to do to be able to pour out to oth­er peo­ple. And some­times we for­get that. And so I think man­ag­ing oth­er peo­ple while try­ing to also man­age up while also try­ing to con­tribute is a tri­fec­ta of work that some­times we just ignore and just expect peo­ple to go from, I was an employ­ee, now I’m man­ag­ing peo­ple, but I have expec­ta­tions that are way above what it took to be able to be a good employ­ee and good indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor. So I think a well­be­ing pro­gram that’s real­ly well-tuned will include some­thing that is a focus and maybe even some­thing dif­fer­ent for peo­ple who man­age oth­er peo­ple with­in the orga­ni­za­tion. And I think that’s a real­ly impor­tant piece.

Jason (28:01):

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. So I want to talk a lit­tle bit about what this arti­cle kind of puts for­ward, because I think there’s some help­ful things, and I think there’s actu­al­ly some things that in my mind fall a lit­tle bit short of what might be use­ful to us as we think about maybe a more con­sis­tent frame­work of well­be­ing, let’s say. And so they talk about what they call a well­be­ing direc­tion. How do we start to put this into action in a more mean­ing­ful way? And so one of the ways they say we should be doing this is talk­ing about shift­ing from lega­cy mind­sets of well­be­ing. And so I think that’s real­ly help­ful. The par­a­digm that they use I think is extreme­ly valu­able. And so work is a deter­mi­nant of well­be­ing. It’s sort of dis­pelling the sense of work-life bal­ance with, we’ve talked about a bunch into work-life inte­gra­tion per­haps, but work being an actu­al mean­ing­ful part of our life experience.

(29:08):

And then well­be­ing being a shared respon­si­bil­i­ty, which is sort of exact­ly what we were just talk­ing about, that it’s one of those both-and sce­nar­ios. It’s both the indi­vid­u­al’s respon­si­bil­i­ty and the employ­er’s respon­si­bil­i­ty to look at well­be­ing and say, Hey, we own parts of this. It’s not one or the oth­er. And then orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­tures, which I do think falls more on the com­pa­ny to help lay out how do we as an orga­ni­za­tion design the way in which peo­ple can go about the work that they do, and that being a real­ly crit­i­cal piece to how we do it. But one of the things that I thought was real­ly inter­est­ing is they talked about the mea­sure­ment of well­be­ing, but real­ly did­n’t, in my view, offer any­thing sub­stan­tive as it relates to how should we be mea­sur­ing well­be­ing. And I think you being in the space as long as you have and kind of worked on ben­e­fits and well­be­ing ini­tia­tives. I’m curi­ous to talk about this with you. How or how should we be think­ing about the mea­sure­ment of well­be­ing in more effec­tive ways, perhaps?

Cas­san­dra (30:21):

Yeah, I think there’s a cou­ple of ways that you can find met­rics that make sense for your orga­ni­za­tion, but this is a super­mar­ket method that I would rec­om­mend. So take what you need, leave what don’t. One is just pure claims expe­ri­ence. So for those who may go, what are you talk­ing about when it comes to claims, when you’re look­ing at your med­ical infor­ma­tion, you get a sum­ma­ry very high lev­el about what are the top things that peo­ple are going to the doc­tor for when they’re using your med­ical insur­ance. It may not be by name, but maybe for some rea­son there’s a lot of peo­ple at your orga­ni­za­tion who have back prob­lems. They’re sit­ting around a lot, they’re not get­ting enough exer­cise, and maybe that’s some­thing that you need to do an ergonom­ic pro­gram around. And this is where it goes back to the claims data of like, oh, you’re just try­ing to get me to be a bet­ter work­er, so I show up in my seat every day.

(31:14):

Yeah, that’s one com­po­nent of it, but also we want to alle­vi­ate your back pain, right? That’s help­ful. One of the met­rics that I actu­al­ly dis­cov­ered work­ing in leave man­age­ment was the ratio of peo­ple who were going out on leave and how many women were com­ing back to work and how many women were actu­al­ly being pro­mot­ed into lead­er­ship posi­tions. So when you think about this dearth of diver­si­ty at the upper ech­e­lons of man­age­ment, some­times you can trace it back to those lev­els of well­be­ing. So if I know that I’m going out and just iso­lat­ing this to have a baby, but I don’t have pro­grams that allow me to bond with my baby, I may need more time when I come back. I don’t have any sup­port sys­tems for what I may need when it comes to flex­i­bil­i­ty, there’s a high­er chance that I may be leav­ing the organization.

(32:07):

So I think one met­ric of well­be­ing could be fol­low­ing par­ents, it could be moms, dads, or how­ev­er you may iden­ti­fy how many peo­ple are com­ing back from leave and how long are they say­ing are they stay­ing for six months? Are they stay­ing for a year? Are they stay­ing for two years? Just a longevi­ty thing. And then the sec­ond thing that you can mea­sure is, are these peo­ple con­tin­u­ing to rise with­in the orga­ni­za­tion? And so when you think about well­be­ing, that actu­al­ly can lend itself to diver­si­ty, equi­ty, inclu­sion, and belong­ing strate­gies that we’re think­ing about. And to me, what’s beau­ti­ful about being able to go into that space is just show­ing that, like you said, life and work are all inte­grat­ed. Any­time we try to seg­ment them out, that’s where things start to break down because we’re try­ing to see things in a silo. But if we’re able to see that by increas­ing well­be­ing, by mak­ing sure that we have pro­grams that sup­port par­ents or sup­port women or sup­port peo­ple who iden­ti­fy as LGBTQ, that not only helps that employ­ee and the orga­ni­za­tion and well­be­ing fac­tors, but that also lends itself to increas­ing diver­si­ty and the feel­ing of inclu­sion and belong­ing in your work­place, which also helps your bot­tom line.

(33:21):

So it can be a win and a win and a win. And I’m not say­ing these things are all easy, but we have to con­tin­u­ous­ly push our­selves to find ways to do that. One oth­er thing in the study that I found was fas­ci­nat­ing was fac­tors that actu­al­ly can be a detri­ment to your well­be­ing, could be micro­man­age­ment, which is a very rea­son­able thing, but also under­man­age­ment, that peo­ple are look­ing for more direc­tion in how their careers evolve. And I agree with you com­plete­ly that you have to also want to own your career. No one can tell you exact­ly what you’re going to do or what will ful­fill you from a pur­pose stand­point. But if you’re own­ing your career and there’s no one to help guide you, you’re going to lose some foot­ing there too. So I think that’s an impor­tant com­po­nent to com­pound on what you’re say­ing about it’s this rela­tion­ship of both employ­er and employ­ee com­ing togeth­er to evolve the idea of wellbeing.

Jason (34:17):

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I’ve talked to so many HR lead­ers and exec­u­tives, and this ques­tion of well­be­ing is one that just feels so neb­u­lous, and it’s one that I’m real­ly pas­sion­ate and excit­ed and kind of moti­vat­ed to help bring maybe some more clar­i­ty to. And I think one of the dis­con­nects is when I talk to HR peo­ple espe­cial­ly, there’s a lot of head nod­ding. It’s like, yeah, we total­ly get it. It all makes per­fect sense. But I think there’s still a dis­con­nect at the exec­u­tive lev­el with peo­ple run­ning orga­ni­za­tions often­times that say, well, these are still qual­i­ta­tive things. At the end of the day, they’re nice to haves, which we’ve talked about a lit­tle bit. And how much bear­ing do they real­ly have on get­ting busi­ness done? Right? And I think what we want to put forth is, well, it could­n’t be more important.

(35:12):

It lit­er­al­ly could not be more impor­tant. These things that feel qual­i­ta­tive, the sci­ence itself is point­ing to the fact that these self-report­ed mea­sures of so-called qual­i­ta­tive data are actu­al­ly real­ly core and valid mea­sures of an employ­ee’s expe­ri­ence to the degree that it will impact their sat­is­fac­tion, their hap­pi­ness, yes, their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. I mean, all of these things that you were talk­ing about around the sense of inclu­sion and belong­ing at an orga­ni­za­tion. And so I think one of the things that’s real­ly miss­ing is con­nect­ing the dots, right? Between the so-called qual­i­ta­tive mea­sures and the actu­al busi­ness out­comes because they are con­nect­ed. It just might be one or two degrees removed, and we’re not accus­tomed to talk­ing about these things in a busi­ness set­ting. But I would say in the con­text of psy­chol­o­gists, for exam­ple, they’ve been talk­ing about these things for over 30 years. I mean, I’ve been astound­ed by the papers I’ve read, which have been a num­ber of them up to this point where these stud­ies show one after anoth­er that, I mean, even the sim­plest things that increase some­body’s pos­i­tive affect, which is a psy­cho­log­i­cal term that just refers to some­body’s very basic sense of hap­pi­ness at a real­ly base lev­el, we’re not talk­ing about sense of mean­ing and purpose.

(36:43):

We’re just talk­ing about like, oh man, I got a lit­tle pos­i­tive lift from a gift that I received. The impact that alone has on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty with­in the con­text of a day is so pow­er­ful that I can’t imag­ine. I don’t under­stand, I guess why we’re not talk­ing about this more than we are cur­rent­ly. And I think some­one else I think about a lot is Mar­cus Buck­ing­ham and some of the research that he’s done around we’re extreme­ly poor eval­u­a­tors of oth­ers, but we’re extreme­ly good eval­u­a­tors of our own expe­ri­ence, right? And so our own expe­ri­ence of what is hap­pen­ing in an orga­ni­za­tion is extreme­ly valid, and we need to take that into con­sid­er­a­tion as peo­ple that work with peo­ple that run orga­ni­za­tions, that what peo­ple are telling us is going on. We can’t just dis­miss it out­right that we need to take those things into account as we’re think­ing about design­ing the work expe­ri­ence for people.

Cas­san­dra (37:45):

So let’s just give it to peo­ple in three steps, right? Yeah, I think every­thing that you’ve brought for­ward, espe­cial­ly from the study, is impor­tant for peo­ple to know and to think about. But I don’t want them to feel pow­er­less as to like, okay, well, I’m a man­ag­er here. I may not be in HR. I may be a first time peo­ple leader. I don’t even know how to climb this moun­tain. So some of the things that I would rec­om­mend, and I’d love to hear your thoughts too around this would be to first, start with your­self. What is your pur­pose? How do you ful­filled at work? What is the thing that gets you up out of bed and makes you feel like not only am I excit­ed about the work that I do here, but I’m excit­ed about what that means and what my next step could look like?

(38:32):

Because if you can find that path for your­self at the orga­ni­za­tion that you’re at, then you can start to help oth­er peo­ple find that too. And so I think start­ing with your­self is a great way to get into that. And then talk­ing about, just like you said, well­be­ing in the sense of how can I mea­sure it for my peo­ple? If I’ve had some­one who’s left the orga­ni­za­tion, do I have access to their exit inter­view? I actu­al­ly think we have a lot of the data points already just sit­ting with­in dis­parate sys­tems. And it’s time for some­one to be able to bring that togeth­er, pull your exit inter­views, even pull your newest peo­ple in. Why did you choose to apply to our orga­ni­za­tion? Why did you choose to accept an offer from our orga­ni­za­tion? Yeah, what did I promise you to get you here? And how can I make sure we make good on that promise?

(39:22):

I real­ly don’t think peo­ple wake up and go, I just don’t want to be a good man­ag­er today. I don’t want to be a good employ­er today. I don’t think that hap­pens. I think there’s things that fall through the gaps. I think there’s lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, I think lack of col­lab­o­ra­tion that leads us to not ful­fill­ing that. And so the well­be­ing dis­cus­sion is some­thing that gets us back into that point of if we focus on flour­ish­ing peo­ple, then we can con­tin­ue this hon­est­ly, wave of good good­ness that actu­al­ly improves prof­it. Yeah, I tru­ly believe that.

Jason (39:57):

Yeah, I agree. And I think some­thing that you put for­ward is well said, which is for those of us that are respon­si­ble for help­ing to lead peo­ple in our orga­ni­za­tions, there’s a respon­si­bil­i­ty to lead from the front and not just do, as I say, but as I’ve done. I mean, the eas­i­est lessons to pass on are those that we’ve learned our­selves. And so I think as we adopt that respon­si­bil­i­ty and take on those things our­selves and take respon­si­bil­i­ty for help­ing define our own sense of pur­pose and mean­ing, it’s going to be a whole lot eas­i­er and more pow­er­ful and com­pelling to share that with the peo­ple that we work with and lead. So I think that’s very well said. And so this is a great place to wrap up this conversation.

Cas­san­dra (40:45):

Already?

Jason (40:45):

Already. Yes, I know. And so we’re going to con­tin­ue this theme, I think. Well­be­ing and this sense of how that plays into our work expe­ri­ence is real­ly impor­tant to us. And we’re think­ing about that a lot here at Fringe. And so, Cas­san­dra, thank you for join­ing us. Yeah, this is a joy. These pod­cast episodes have been great hav­ing you a part of the con­ver­sa­tion here. And thank you every­one for lis­ten­ing. We’ll see you next time.

Wel­come to Episode 10 of How Peo­ple Work, where Jason and Cas­san­dra Rose, Head of Peo­ple at Fringe, dis­cuss how putting peo­ple at the cen­ter will future-proof your company’s work and well­be­ing strat­e­gy. In today’s busi­ness land­scape, com­pa­nies that pri­or­i­tize their employ­ees are the ones that stand out in tough times.

Cas­san­dra and Jason begin by dis­cussing the impor­tance of mak­ing employ­ee-cen­tric deci­sions, espe­cial­ly dur­ing dif­fi­cult times. They explore ways to pri­or­i­tize employ­ees’ well-being and sat­is­fac­tion, lead­ing to bet­ter busi­ness outcomes.

It’s an age-old say­ing: peo­ple don’t leave bad jobs; they leave bad man­agers. The role of peo­ple lead­ers is cru­cial in cre­at­ing a peo­ple-cen­tric cul­ture. Empow­er­ing and equip­ping them with the tools they need to sup­port their team mem­bers is key to build­ing a suc­cess­ful employ­ee-cen­tered strat­e­gy. Cas­san­dra also shares some best prac­tices for devel­op­ing and train­ing peo­ple lead­ers to fos­ter a cul­ture that val­ues employ­ees’ contributions.

Although there are few peo­ple who spend their whole careers at a sin­gle com­pa­ny any­more, employ­ees can still have sig­nif­i­cant impact at a com­pa­ny in 3 years. Jason and Cas­san­dra explore the impor­tance of not look­ing at one’s tenure at a com­pa­ny, but the employee’s life­time val­ue when look­ing at the impact made in time there.

Your peo­ple are your great­est asset, and invest­ing in them will ulti­mate­ly dri­ve your com­pa­ny’s success.

Now avail­able on Spo­ti­fy | Apple Pod­casts | YouTube

Key ideas and highlights

• Com­pa­nies that cen­ter around their peo­ple are the ones that dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves in bad markets.
• The best way to have a peo­ple-first peo­ple strat­e­gy is to empow­er and equip their peo­ple leaders.
• What your employ­ees say about your com­pa­ny after they leave can be so much more pow­er­ful than what they said when they were an employee.
• Deloitte Work­force Well­be­ing Imperative.

Word of the day

• We haven’t for­got­ten about the word of the day! We’ll pick back up when Jor­dan returns.

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 4:58 How peo­ple-first com­pa­nies dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves in the midst of eco­nom­ic turmoil
• 6:46 The key to your peo­ple strat­e­gy lies in what you as a com­pa­ny are aim­ing for
• 8:34 How to meet the needs of a diverse workforce
• 13:17 Why the best com­pa­nies equip peo­ple leaders
• 15:30 The evo­lu­tion of work and why we must rethink how we think about work
• 17:40 Three ways peo­ple lead­ers can empow­er their direct reports
• 19:46 How to bal­ance flex­i­bil­i­ty and the needs of the business
• 25:03 The pow­er of a boomerang employee
• 25:29 Life­time employ­ee value

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work for near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to the How Peo­ple Work Pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling leaders.

Jason (00:50):

Wel­come back to the How Peo­ple Work Pod­cast. It’s me, Jason Mur­ray. I am host­ing tonight. Jor­dan is actu­al­ly not here, but I have a very spe­cial guest, Cas­san­dra Rose, who hap­pens to be the Head of Peo­ple here for Fringe, and she’ll prob­a­bly be a reg­u­lar guest from time to time on the pod­cast here. We’re excit­ed to have her. And so Cas­san­dra, say hi to every­one here.

Cas­san­dra (01:13):

Well, hel­lo. I’m so hon­ored and real­ly excit­ed to be jump­ing on the pod­cast. I love pod­cast­ing because it allows me to mul­ti­task and learn at the same time. So thank you for allow­ing me to be part of this journey.

Jason (01:24):

Absolute­ly. So for every­one lis­ten­ing, Cas­san­dra’s far more expe­ri­enced in the area of how peo­ple work than Jor­dan or myself. So we are very glad to have her on the pod­cast today. And so I think it’d be great for peo­ple to just hear a lit­tle bit about your sto­ry. So if you don’t mind, maybe just share a lit­tle how you got into peo­ple work, maybe how you end­ed up here at Fringe.

Cas­san­dra (01:47):

Yeah, I’ll start at the very begin­ning. So I was born on a Tues­day after­noon. No, I’ll go a lit­tle fur­ther than that. But yeah, my name is Cas­san­dra Rose. I’ve been in the HR space for near­ly two decades, which I can’t believe, I don’t think any­one goes to kinder­garten and says, I want to be a human resource pro­fes­sion­al when I grow up. But that’s shift­ing a lit­tle bit, which is excit­ing because I think for a long time HR was this thing to just kind of be han­dled. It was all the awk­ward pieces of the busi­ness that just did­n’t fit some­where else. So they gave it to human resources. And now that peo­ple have tru­ly under­stand that to have a thriv­ing busi­ness, you real­ly have to have peo­ple who thrive and come togeth­er as a col­lec­tive. And that HR can be a North star to that.

(02:33):

I think that real­ly changes the con­ver­sa­tion. So it is great to have been part of this 20 year arc of how the HR space is evolv­ing as well. Though I fell into HR, one of the things that I made sure I did was go back and get a mas­ter’s degree in human resources because I think it’s impor­tant to under­stand how the aca­d­e­m­ic and the the­o­ret­i­cal por­tion of it can also apply to the real life expe­ri­ences. What you learn in a class­room does­n’t always trans­late into real life. And some­times real life sit­u­a­tions require frame­works to real­ly push things for­ward. So I’m hap­py to have both of those things. I’ve also been cer­ti­fied, I’m say­ing all these things just to show­case that I real­ly tru­ly believe in this dis­ci­pline, and I real­ly believe in the fact that if you have enough peo­ple who come togeth­er and say, if I care about my peo­ple and I pay peo­ple to care about my peo­ple and focus on them, that actu­al­ly frees up oth­er lead­ers with­in the orga­ni­za­tion to focus on what they do best. And that’s how we all rise to the top.

Jason (03:31):

Do you remem­ber when we first met?

Cas­san­dra (03:34):

Per­haps, it may have been over a call, a demo? Is that right?

Jason (03:39):

Yes. It was, yeah. The fun­ny thing is, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but when I first met you, it was on a dis­cov­ery call where some­how we had got­ten con­nect­ed. You were at Sprin­klr at the time. That’s right. There was some at least mod­est inter­est in Fringe. And I got on the call and I recall think­ing to myself when we were hav­ing that con­ver­sa­tion, if we ever get a chance to hire this woman, we should hire her. And lo and behold, here we are. You’re our Head of Peo­ple here at Fringe. So serendipitous.

Cas­san­dra (04:12):

Amaz­ing. If you can also hope for me that I win the lot­to next week, because appar­ent­ly your pos­i­tive think­ing works.

Jason (04:20):

I hope I could do that for you. But then you’d prob­a­bly leave us, so…

Cas­san­dra (04:24):

No, it depends on the lot­tery winnings.

Jason (04:28):

So some­thing you said, and I’m actu­al­ly inter­est­ed in your thoughts on this ques­tion, you know you men­tioned that because you’ve been in peo­ple work for two decades, you’ve seen some of the changes, some of the trends going on. And so for you, what are some of the biggest things that have been chang­ing in your line of work over the last 20 years and maybe in the last cou­ple years espe­cial­ly? It feels like some of those things are real­ly chang­ing for the good, I think, but would love to hear what you’re see­ing in peo­ple work and how that’s changing.

Cas­san­dra (04:58):

I think there’s a lot of cycli­cal trends that are appear­ing, and I think we just rebrand them. I got into the HR space and pri­mar­i­ly into the finan­cial indus­try, right around the time that we had a finan­cial cri­sis in this coun­try. And so it went from the hey­day of bank­ing being the big thing that every­one want­ed to go work in, and a pull­back of that because peo­ple saw some­thing that they saw as a liveli­hood that they could have for 40 years, retire rich­ly — just be so neg­a­tive­ly impact­ed. And we’re see­ing that now in the tech space where tech was the hot thing. Every­one was telling every­one, go to col­lege, get a tech job, you’re going to be safe. It’s all on the rise. And now we’re see­ing this dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of lay­offs that are hap­pen­ing and qui­et quit­ting, and just see­ing com­pa­nies that were what uni­corns and deca­corns fall from grace.

(05:55):

And so I don’t think nec­es­sar­i­ly that there’s just bad lead­ers who just move from one space to anoth­er. What I think hap­pens is that we move away from the pri­ma­ry respon­si­bil­i­ty of what we’re sup­posed to be doing at work. And what that tru­ly means is that there’s some focus that’s lacked or some­times bad actors, let’s be hon­est. But I think this gives us anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to look behind the cur­tain and say, what about the com­pa­nies that aren’t lay­ing off? Or what about the com­pa­nies that are doing it in as much as pos­si­ble a very eth­i­cal way? What are they doing that’s so dif­fer­ent that they have boomerang employ­ees? They have peo­ple who come back. And I think that’s when you’re putting peo­ple at the cen­ter of your deci­sion mak­ing, whether you have a bad econ­o­my or a good econ­o­my, you can still move for­ward and con­tin­ue to grow because you’ve actu­al­ly cen­tered humanity.

Jason (06:46):

Right? Yeah. Well, and that’s kind of in line with some­thing, Jor­dan and I have been talk­ing about a bunch in the episodes that we’ve had pre­vi­ous to this, which is this idea of human flour­ish­ing. And so what are we as com­pa­nies aim­ing for? Is it just bot­tom line prof­its? Is it what­ev­er our com­pa­ny’s about? Or do we have some kind of sense of greater pur­pose here? Is it some­thing that we can do good in the world for indi­vid­u­als, for com­mu­ni­ties, for soci­ety as a whole? And I like to believe that that’s pos­si­ble here and hope­ful­ly we’re doing our lit­tle part of that. It’s what we’re doing here at Fringe.

Cas­san­dra (07:23):

I def­i­nite­ly know that’s what we’re doing here at Fringe. At least that’s what you’re pay­ing me for. So look­ing at an arti­cle, a study that came out from Deloitte that you shared with me, actu­al­ly, the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion actu­al­ly looks at work as a very vital part of well­be­ing as a hu — just as human­i­ty. And when we think about it, one of the main ques­tions that we ask chil­dren are What do you want to be when you grow up?

Jason (07:48):

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Cas­san­dra (07:49):

I actu­al­ly want­ed to be an astro­naut. I thought it would be so cool to be able to go out­side of the earth and look down and do some­thing that if you think about it, even the smartest, rich­est peo­ple a hun­dred years ago, a thou­sand years ago, could nev­er even dream.

Jason (08:03):

Now you can pay to do it.

Cas­san­dra (08:04):

Now, you can pay to do it for about 11 min­utes, but you’re not total­ly going to out­er space. But that’s a dif­fer­ent top­ic for anoth­er day. Just blend­ing sci­ence, math, art, and what does it mean to be alive to me is some­thing inter­est­ing. And hon­est­ly, I feel like I do that every day. Being in HR and being not just in the peo­ple space, but work­ing at a com­pa­ny that talks about how to help peo­ple flour­ish because there is art to it and there’s sci­ence behind it. Being in the well­be­ing space does­n’t mean that you’re doing soft things or things that aren’t mean­ing­ful. You’re tak­ing dol­lars to make sure that you’re invest­ing in peo­ple in a way that shows up for them out­side of the four walls or the Zoom walls that they’re work­ing in. How do I make sure that par­ents in the work­place or peo­ple over 50 in the work­place or peo­ple who are just start­ing their career in the work­place, feel seen and heard and know where to go to find resources that they need to meet the needs of their lives in the sea­sons that they’re in.

(09:07):

There’s a lot of work that goes behind that. And for a long time, I think peo­ple were just throw­ing mon­ey at it and just putting perks in like hav­ing a ping pong table, but then they real­ized, hey, peo­ple actu­al­ly flour­ished when they were able to come togeth­er, right? And human­i­ty is about com­mu­ni­ty. Peo­ple flour­ish when they can have health insur­ance and know that their needs are cared for. So there’s so much more to it. And the fact that Fringe does this in a way that is, to me, rev­o­lu­tion­ary, makes me proud to work here two-fold.

Jason (09:39):

That’s excit­ing. Well, we hope to do that and we hope to inspire oth­ers. And I think that for Jor­dan and myself is a big part of what’s excit­ing to us about this endeav­or to begin with. Because when I look at my own jour­ney, there’s real­ly no busi­ness I have doing what I’m doing right now. I was a reli­gious stud­ies major in col­lege. I have no tech back­ground what­so­ev­er. I mean, there’s just a bunch of time in non­prof­it. And so in some ways, I look at what we’re doing here with Fringe and feel like, well, I real­ly have no busi­ness what­so­ev­er doing that. And Jor­dan has a very sim­i­lar sto­ry to myself, odd­ly enough. And I think we feel excit­ed and priv­i­leged and hum­bled in a lot of ways to be in a posi­tion where hope­ful­ly we can do this well for whomev­er we get to impact that as part of Fringe direct­ly in what we do and gets to be an employ­ee here.

(10:39):

But also for the com­pa­nies that we inter­act with. We hope even through this pod­cast, to inspire oth­ers to maybe think dif­fer­ent­ly about what they’re doing out there in the world. And I think some­thing you said, it real­ly res­onates with me because this whole notion of work-life bal­ance and the way peo­ple think about well­be­ing even I real­ly think needs to be dis­pelled to some degree. And even the fact that we talk about, and I know I’ve done this too, talk about some of these maybe more qual­i­ta­tive aspects of the work expe­ri­ences, soft mea­sures or soft met­rics. And just even as I’ve learned more being in this space and doing what we’re doing here at Fringe, I’ve come to see and actu­al­ly learn from the research I’ve delved into around human psy­chol­o­gy even that these things that we tend to say are soft in the busi­ness area real­ly aren’t psy­chol­o­gists that look at things around human psy­chol­o­gy and even self- report­ed mea­sures of hap­pi­ness and so forth. They’re actu­al­ly very high­ly sci­en­tif­ic and quan­ti­ta­tive. And so I think that’s rel­e­vant as we talk about this Deloitte study, for exam­ple, around well­be­ing, that it’s not just an entire­ly sub­jec­tive point of view, but I do think it’s help­ful to prob­a­bly think about, well, how should we be think­ing about well­be­ing? What’s a good frame­work for it? And I think this research starts to lay some of that out for us.

Cas­san­dra (12:15):

And I would even go as far as to say that it’s very easy to point to lead­er­ship, top line lead­er­ship and say, these peo­ple should be mod­el­ing what well­be­ing looks like, or to go to HR and say, hr, you’re respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing that for us. But it’s real­ly the peo­ple man­agers, the every­day line man­agers who are either push­ing for­ward some­thing that sup­ports every­one or with­draw­ing from their peo­ple and not real­ly shar­ing that infor­ma­tion. So one of the things that I’ve made sure to do at any orga­ni­za­tion I work for is to go, how can I empow­er peo­ple who lead oth­er peo­ple? And I think that’s where the rub­ber meets the road, because at the end of the day, you’re not call­ing up your CEO to say, Hey, I don’t feel like I have work-life bal­ance. I need you to make this bet­ter. It’s you call­ing your man­ag­er to say, Hey, I’m run­ning late.

(13:08):

I had to take my kid to soc­cer prac­tice, or I have this doc­tor’s appoint­ment. They don’t do week­ends. It’s that inter­play where we have to go, how can I equip some­one who’s a peo­ple leader to feel resourced, to feel like they are empow­ered, to be able to tell their peo­ple, I can, I got your back. I can sup­port you. I can give you that flex­i­ble sched­ule, or I can tell you about a pro­gram that we’re rolling out, or I can reward you and rec­og­nize you. Most peo­ple leave. I know this is some­thing that’s been said a mil­lion times. Bad man­agers, even if you have a great orga­ni­za­tion, if you have a bad man­ag­er, you’re going to have a bad expe­ri­ence. But if you can cre­ate bet­ter peo­ple lead­ers, you’re going to see that in your bot­tom line.

Jason (13:53):

So I think it would be real­ly inter­est­ing to dig into that a lit­tle bit, because some­times I feel like maybe I’m just igno­rant. Some of those things seem like com­mon sense to me, and this is me speak­ing as some­one com­ing from out­side of the HR space, even com­ing from out­side of the tech space. I haven’t run a com­pa­ny or been part of the lead­er­ship com­pa­ny pri­or to Fringe. And so there’s some things that we do that to me seem like, well, that’s obvi­ous. I have chil­dren. Some­times you’re late. Stuff hap­pens. And you know, can’t just pre­dict that all the time. And so I’m inter­est­ed your take on why is it that there’s this gap some­times where maybe the expec­ta­tion is like, Hey, just show up and do your job. We give you a pay­check. Why do you want any more than that? I mean, I cringe when I hear peo­ple say that kind of stuff, but more com­mon­place than I might expect. You’re prob­a­bly a lit­tle less sur­prised by that giv­en some of your expe­ri­ence. But what is the dis­con­nect there? Why down at the man­ag­er lev­el where some of these things hap­pen and peo­ple lis­ten­ing to this pod­cast, many of them lead peo­ple, what is going on at that lev­el that’s cre­at­ing maybe some of that dis­so­nance that peo­ple don’t maybe under­stand or empathize with just the human experience?

Cas­san­dra (15:19):

I think I’ll approach it from two dif­fer­ent places. One, the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion. You haven’t prob­a­bly heard that word since 11th grade.

Jason (15:27):

We’ve actu­al­ly talked about it actu­al­ly on the podcast.

Cas­san­dra (15:30):

That’s right. So when we think about where human­i­ty was pri­or, you either were a farmer, you were just doing things to sur­vive with­in a com­mu­ni­ty or with­in an aspect. The Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion brought for­ward an abil­i­ty for peo­ple to make mon­ey and take that mon­ey and go do what­ev­er they want­ed to do with it with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly being con­nect­ed to a com­mu­ni­ty. And those who rose to the top, the Hen­ry Fords of their day made it so that way work was just that. It was this thing that you came to do. It was­n’t meant to be fun. It was hard. It was dif­fi­cult. So when you cre­ate an assem­bly line and teach dif­fer­ent aspects of peo­ple to just do one func­tion, what you actu­al­ly take away from them is inno­va­tion, is cre­ativ­i­ty, is the abil­i­ty to actu­al­ly grow. And I think even though we’re a hun­dred years plus for­ward in time, what’s actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing is that men­tal­i­ty still exists, that you’re replace­able. And peo­ple feel that in their job descrip­tions. They feel that in the lack of growth. When I talk to my man­ag­er, I’m like, what’s next for me? And you give me a blank stare. It makes me feel like you haven’t thought past that. For me, if we’re ask­ing peo­ple to stay with us for four or five years, but we only have plans that exist for six to 12 months, there is the dis­con­nect right there. And that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a peo­ple prob­lem, that’s a struc­tur­al prob­lem. We need to rethink how we think about work.

Jason (16:56):

How do we start to do that? Because I, I’ll admit for myself, when I was lead­ing a team here at Fringe that had quite a num­ber of peo­ple a part of it, I’m not sure I always did as good of a job as maybe I could have around some of those things. And I’m just won­der­ing for peo­ple who are lis­ten­ing that might be think­ing like, Hey, how do I do that bet­ter? How do I help peo­ple that I lead or influ­ence maybe feel like they have a path for­ward or not just treat it as kind of a cog in the wheel, so to speak? How could peo­ple be think­ing about that maybe more proactively?

Cas­san­dra (17:40):

Yeah well, three things I would always rec­om­mend. One, the sim­plest and least expen­sive way to do it is just ask them what they want. We may assume, Hey, hey, go do this learn­ing devel­op­ment thing. Go get this cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Oh, have you explored this pro­gram? But some peo­ple like the job that they want and maybe they just want to be able to do that for two to three years, keep it sta­ble for them­selves. Or maybe you have some­one who’s like, I real­ly like what I’m doing, but I’d love to be able to learn a lit­tle bit more about this. Give them a stretch project. Or maybe they’d want to do some­thing com­plete­ly out­side of the realm of the work that you’re doing, but they want to have the per­mis­sion to be able to do the side hus­tle. And if your com­pa­ny allows for those things, encour­age them to do that.

(18:24):

We dis­con­nect these things and say that you must be one per­son at work and then every­thing else, you can be out­side of my para­me­ters. A man­ag­er, a real­ly good peo­ple leader will say, how can I incor­po­rate the desires of what you want to become and help you achieve those things? And that makes you a bet­ter employ­ee just psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly. So that would be step one. Step two would be to explore the pro­grams avail­able. I think we lim­it our­selves by think­ing that we always have to be the solu­tion to some­one’s prob­lem. And that’s what sys­tems are cre­at­ed for. So if there are oth­er resources with­in the orga­ni­za­tion, refer, advo­cate, spon­sor some­one and say, Hey, I see this per­son as an emerg­ing leader, or I want them to be able to stay here at this com­pa­ny. What can we do for them to devel­op them in their career in some­thing else and make sure that they’re get­ting con­nect­ed to that resource. And then the last thing I would say is take a chance on peo­ple. If there is an inter­nal mobil­i­ty oppor­tu­ni­ty, and maybe they don’t have the skillset, but they have the dri­ve, go to bat for them and say, I think you should go try some­thing else. Worst case sce­nario does­n’t work. We can bring you back on the team and make sure that’s a true state­ment, but real­ly take the time to see how I can devel­op some­one with­in an orga­ni­za­tion before exit­ing is a part of that strategy.

Jason (19:46):

Well, and I think what’s inter­est­ing about that, and I gen­uine­ly don’t know that I know the answer to this, but it feels like one of the ten­sions that can arise when you’re in a posi­tion of lead­er­ship is, well, if we start giv­ing peo­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties over here, what does that mean for the needs of the busi­ness, whether per­ceived or real? We’ve hired peo­ple to do cer­tain roles or ful­fill cer­tain respon­si­bil­i­ties. And so if we start maybe cre­at­ing some of that flex­i­bil­i­ty, how do we man­age the ten­sion then that comes with, Hey, we’re try­ing to give peo­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow, try new things with — the busi­ness has cer­tain things that need to take place or cer­tain roles that need to be exe­cut­ed in a cer­tain way. I think that’s a challenge.

Cas­san­dra (20:34):

Oh, absolute­ly. And I think there should be gov­er­nance to it. It should­n’t just be ad hoc or — No one has a cer­tain strat­e­gy to it, but what I would say is that any com­pa­ny that’s grow­ing always has an oppor­tu­ni­ty for some­body. You’re either giv­ing it to the peo­ple who are cur­rent­ly with­in the orga­ni­za­tion or you’re giv­ing it to peo­ple who are new to the orga­ni­za­tion, but noth­ing that’s liv­ing, which an orga­ni­za­tion is, does­n’t come with new chal­lenges pre­sent­ed, whether it’s the econ­o­my, whether it’s a polit­i­cal cycle going on, whether it’s just your own orga­ni­za­tion going through its matu­ri­ty phas­es, you’re always going to find oppor­tu­ni­ties. So I can’t imag­ine there’s ever a time that you’re so stag­nant that that’s not a possibility.

Jason (21:16):

Yeah, no, I think that’s true. And I think it’s prob­a­bly then incum­bent upon man­agers of peo­ple then to be hav­ing these con­ver­sa­tions proac­tive­ly. And it’s prob­a­bly help­ful to have frame­works for under­stand­ing like, Hey, how do I have con­ver­sa­tions with my peo­ple that can help guide them towards places that give them life, help them feel more con­nect­ed to the work that they’re doing. So one of the things to me, I don’t know that I always did this well, but I would always ask peo­ple, what are you most excit­ed about? So to the degree that you can do work that you’re good at and that you feel excit­ed by and have most of your day filled with those kinds of things, then your work expe­ri­ence is going to be more pos­i­tive. And so try­ing to ori­ent maybe projects that employ­ees are part of towards that kind of work, seem­ing­ly is more crit­i­cal. But I think what’s inter­est­ing then is man­agers then need to feel that they have that autonomy,

Cas­san­dra (22:20):

100%.

Jason (22:20):

And lat­i­tude to be able to maybe give peo­ple work that’s a lit­tle bit out­side of a real­ly for­mu­la­ic kind of job descrip­tion. Because I think what you’re describ­ing is a vision of work that helps peo­ple feel more con­nect­ed, helps peo­ple grow, feel more alive in what they’re doing, but also requires a lev­el of, Hey, we don’t, maybe the out­come every sin­gle time isn’t going to be exact­ly what we expect­ed. Or maybe some­times this project that we assign some­body to, it’s just going to kind of bomb out, but we should­n’t have that indi­vid­ual feel­ing that their job is jeop­ar­dized because that par­tic­u­lar project maybe did­n’t go well because we’re will­ing to exper­i­ment, we’re will­ing to let peo­ple fail. And I think that’s prob­a­bly an impor­tant part of the expe­ri­ences, let­ting peo­ple know that hey, fail­ure is part of growth, not just for the indi­vid­ual, but also for the orga­ni­za­tion to learn in giv­ing peo­ple these oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow. It’s not always going to go exact­ly the way that we think.

Cas­san­dra (23:23):

Oh, I think that’s a beau­ti­ful segue into that sec­ond part. So we’re think­ing about one, just the struc­ture of work and rethink­ing it, the sec­ond com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Because I think exact­ly to your point around A) man­agers hav­ing the author­i­ty, do we empow­er our peo­ple lead­ers to actu­al­ly lead, or do we just give them a bunch of ran­dom infor­ma­tion and say, best of luck if your team is suc­cess­ful, that was us and you. But if your team fail, it was com­plete­ly you. And leav­ing them up to try in that way.

Jason (23:55):

Unfair respon­si­bil­i­ty.

Cas­san­dra (23:57):

A hun­dred per­cent. And so when I think about what you say­ing, giv­ing peo­ple appro­pri­ate space to fail, a lot of times peo­ple just are ter­ri­fied to fail because some of it is school­ing. If you just got an F, there was real­ly no com­ing back from that. But some of it has also been, again, this idea of if you sep­a­rate work. So that way I only work on one thing. If I do feel like that one thing, there is no space for me to go and try some­thing else. And one of the ways that I live my per­son­al life is to focus more on what I’m good at and just man­age the things I’m bad at. And some­times we try to get peo­ple to be bet­ter at the bad things and -

Jason (24:35):

Improve your weaknesses

Cas­san­dra (24:36):

And improve your weak­ness­es. But what you should do is be sharp­en­ing your strengths.

Jason (24:40):

So be real­ly good at what you’re good at.

Cas­san­dra (24:41):

You should be great at what you’re good at, and let’s fix the oth­er things. Let’s tweak it. So that is real­ly where you get peo­ple to under­stand their assets. And some­times I think orga­ni­za­tions may be wor­ried that what if we get some­one so good that they leave us? And one of the things that we have to real­ize is there is no 40 year career anymore.

Jason (25:02):

Not any­more.

Cas­san­dra (25:03):

Peo­ple are going to leave us, but if they leave you and they cham­pi­on you after, they can actu­al­ly some­times do even more for you than when they were a cur­rent employ­ee. And that’s why you’re see­ing boomerang employ­ees con­tin­ue to grow as a huge pop­u­la­tion of peo­ple who come back to an employ­er because they need to go out, get the expe­ri­ence that they need to get, but they want to bring it back because you’ve cre­at­ed such a place that makes them desire to come back and do great work.

Jason (25:29):

So that brings up an idea that I’m kind of inter­est­ed in. I’m curi­ous what you think of it. And then I don’t have ful­ly formed opin­ions on it yet nec­es­sar­i­ly, but we’re a soft­ware com­pa­ny here at Fringe. And so as a soft­ware as a service,SaaS com­pa­ny, as peo­ple call it, there’s cer­tain met­rics that you think about. And so life­time cus­tomer val­ue is one of them. And I came across a post, I think it was on Medi­um recent­ly, where they talked about life­time employ­ee val­ue. And so obvi­ous­ly when you first hire an employ­ee, there’s a cost, you got to bring them on cost of hir­ing, et cetera, et cetera. And so real­ly it’s a sunk cost until a cer­tain lev­el where an employ­ee reach­es pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. And so I think the ten­sion that I’ll acknowl­edge is always, well, peo­ple aren’t num­bers, peo­ple aren’t just mon­ey. And I ful­ly agree with that point of view, but there’s some­thing I think to what you just said, which is, well, peo­ple aren’t going to be here 40 years, but in order for it to work eco­nom­i­cal­ly for busi­ness­es is like, well, you need peo­ple to be at an orga­ni­za­tion long enough that they reach a lev­el of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty or life­time employ­ee val­ue that is at least greater than what it costs to bring them on.

(26:39):

And so I’m curi­ous what you think about that as a par­a­digm, maybe how we think about the time that employ­ees spend at an organization.

Cas­san­dra (26:48):

Yeah. First of all, I want to bring that here. Because I love that con­cept because it’s not just about the dol­lars and cents, but it’s also help­ing peo­ple to under­stand their own val­ue of what they bring to the work­place. When you come in, can you bring in the val­ue of what your salary is rep­re­sent­ing? Not because I’m just try­ing to get you to a hard and fast num­ber, but it helps you to bet­ter nego­ti­ate for your­self to under­stand your true val­ue from an eco­nom­ic stand­point of finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty. And that’s what we’re all seek­ing. Work should be fun, but work also gives us the abil­i­ty to seek out things that maybe for myself grow­ing up in an envi­ron­ment where both of my par­ents were blue col­lar work­ers, I did­n’t need for any­thing, but we did­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have a lot of excess. And so for me, their wish was that I would go to col­lege and be able to have more options in career, have more options in finan­cial sta­bil­i­ty that they were seek­ing by com­ing to this country.

(27:48):

So I think we need to get very com­fort­able with hav­ing employ­ees talk about mon­ey, what it means to them, and how that shows up in their well­be­ing and in their hap­pi­ness as well. So when peo­ple under­stand their val­ue, they under­stand, wait. As an orga­ni­za­tion, not only can I bring val­ue, but how can I help oth­ers bring val­ue? How can I be a leader among lead­ers? Or if I’m an indi­vid­ual con­trib­u­tor, how can I still have influ­ence? Now we’re all think­ing in a busi­ness mind­set, now we all bet­ter under­stand how we influ­ence that bot­tom line. And some­times I think that dis­con­nect is that ten­sion that has been uncom­fort­able for so many decades.

Jason (28:27):

Well, and I may be guilty of being ide­al­is­tic around these things, but I like to believe that there can be kind of a win-win-win sce­nario where what’s good for the indi­vid­ual is also good for the orga­ni­za­tion. And so I think that’s what I like about this notion of a life­time employ­ee val­ue. It rec­og­nizes the fact that, well, some­body prob­a­bly won’t be here for­ev­er. That’s just not the way the world works any­more, that peo­ple’s growth oppor­tu­ni­ties. And I see that even here at Fringe, it’s like the needs that we have at Fringe, there’s prob­a­bly a ceil­ing for some indi­vid­u­als in terms of what they’re capa­ble of or what they want to do. And so if they move on from here, it’s prob­a­bly very rea­son­able and prac­ti­cal for their own career advance­ment that they may need to take anoth­er step beyond what Fringe is able to pro­vide them right now in terms of career oppor­tu­ni­ty. But at the same time, think­ing about it in such a way that you know what the indi­vid­u­al’s con­tribut­ing, what the busi­ness needs, like those things aren’t total­ly at odds with one anoth­er. And I think that’s a more pos­i­tive vision, I hope, where the needs of the busi­ness, the needs of the indi­vid­ual can be matched up in such a way that every­one’s kind of win­ning in that scenario.

Cas­san­dra (29:43):

I’ll even boil­er­plate it. I saw a meme once where some­one asks in an inter­view, why are you inter­view­ing for this job? And the per­son answered, well, aren’t you hir­ing? The employ­ee employ­er rela­tion­ship has always been sym­bi­ot­ic. It’s always been some­thing that you need ful­filled and I can ful­fill that need. And if you just make it trans­ac­tion­al, that’s when it feels like I can just leave. I can just walk away. But if I can add val­ue to your life, not just finan­cial­ly, but who you are as a per­son, and you can add that val­ue through your cre­ativ­i­ty, through your inno­va­tion, and some­times just through your dili­gence in get­ting your job done and doing a good job, how could that not be a win-win situation?

Jason (30:28):

I mean, what you said there is some­thing we talk about a lot here at Fringe and I think is real­ly prob­a­bly at the crux of the mat­ter, which is work sim­ply a trans­ac­tion or is there some­thing poten­tial­ly more mean­ing­ful? And I think some­thing we’ve been try­ing to put forth in the con­ver­sa­tions that we’ve been hav­ing on this pod­cast is that work is a more sig­nif­i­cant part of our lives, even just as human beings, than a sim­ple trans­ac­tion of time for mon­ey. And I can appre­ci­ate how peo­ple maybe have got­ten there. And I have a cyn­ic in me that can under­stand that, hey, insti­tu­tions as they grow don’t always have the best inter­ests of indi­vid­ual human beings in mind, but in a world that we’re try­ing to aim for human flour­ish­ing, which again is some­thing that we talk about a lot here, I like to think that there’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty where the rela­tion­ship between an employ­er and employ­ee isn’t sim­ply transactional.

Cas­san­dra (31:37):

I think that hap­pens day in and day out. I think the good com­pa­nies that do it do it so well that their peo­ple just nev­er leave. So maybe they’re not telling oth­er interviewers.

Jason (31:48):

Are you say­ing there are 40 year careers?

Cas­san­dra (31:50):

I’ve done anniver­sary par­ties, I’ve seen peo­ple work some­place for 50 years. But I think you could also have an amaz­ing career arc in three. And I’m very thank­ful to the Mil­len­ni­al gen­er­a­tion, which I may or may not be part of, and even Gen Z who are solid­i­fy­ing that that could be an exam­ple of a great career. And if you are hav­ing these three year arcs, but the com­pa­ny real­ly is being pro­pelled for­ward by the inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty of hav­ing new peo­ple come in with fresh ideas all the time. And we lever­age that instead of think­ing of it as a dis­ad­van­tage. Think about where we’ll be as a soci­ety, as a whole human race in 50 years.

Jason (32:32):

Yeah, absolute­ly. Well, we real­ly did­n’t get to a whole lot of that Deloitte study that I know we want to talk about. Yep. But this is a real­ly good stop­ping place for the con­ver­sa­tion today. And so thank you, Cas­san­dra, for join­ing us. Cas­san­dra’s actu­al­ly going to be join­ing us again for the next episode. And so every­one stay tuned and we will actu­al­ly dig in a lit­tle bit more into that study because I think there’s some real­ly inter­est­ing data and some top­ics that stem from the con­ver­sa­tion that we had today. And so thank you every­one for join­ing us on How Peo­ple Work.

Cas­san­dra (33:05):

Thanks for hav­ing me on.

In this episode of How Peo­ple Work, Jor­dan and Jason dis­cuss lead­er­ship, the gam­i­fi­ca­tion of work, and the impor­tance of cel­e­brat­ing the small wins at work.

As a leader, it’s impor­tant to rec­og­nize that fail­ure is not the end of the world — it’s actu­al­ly an essen­tial part of the learn­ing process. By giv­ing your employ­ees room to fail, you’re encour­ag­ing them to take risks and explore new ideas, which can ulti­mate­ly lead to inno­v­a­tive solu­tions and increased pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. When employ­ees feel free to take risks with­out fear of pun­ish­ment, they’re more like­ly to exper­i­ment and come up with cre­ative solu­tions that can ben­e­fit the entire team.

Gam­i­fy­ing work can mean using game-like ele­ments such as points, rewards, and com­pe­ti­tion to moti­vate employ­ees and improve per­for­mance. When work organ­i­cal­ly feels more like a game than a chore, employ­ees are more like­ly to be moti­vat­ed and invest­ed in their tasks. Addi­tion­al­ly, gam­i­fi­ca­tion can fos­ter a sense of friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion among team mem­bers, lead­ing to increased com­mu­ni­ca­tion and teamwork.

Jor­dan and Jason also dis­cuss why cel­e­brat­ing small wins is an essen­tial com­po­nent of build­ing a pos­i­tive and pro­duc­tive work­place cul­ture. When employ­ees are rec­og­nized for their achieve­ments — no mat­ter how small — it can lead to increased moti­va­tion and a sense of accom­plish­ment. By acknowl­edg­ing and cel­e­brat­ing the small wins along the way, you’re rein­forc­ing the idea that every con­tri­bu­tion mat­ters and that progress is being made towards larg­er goals.

Now avail­able on: YouTube | Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy

Key ideas and highlights

• The impor­tance of giv­ing your employ­ees room to fail and why it’s one of Fringe’s core values
• How gam­i­fy­ing work can help your team win and make even the mun­dane tasks enjoyable
• Cel­e­brat­ing the small wins, or even the ​“not loss­es” is essen­tial to a pos­i­tive work­place culture

Word of the day

• Recuse — said @ 27:50 ✅

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 4:50 What we can learn from chil­dren about play
• 6:20 Why being will­ing to fail bold­ly should be a part of your com­pa­ny values
• 9:36 Why being will­ing to fail is a key way to approach life
• 10:56 Why you must give your peo­ple the free­dom to fail
• 12:36 How to cel­e­brate the wins that are often overlooked
• 16:15 How your def­i­n­i­tion of wins defines your com­pa­ny culture
• 18:02 Gam­i­fy­ing work helps your team win
• 19:24 How gam­i­fy­ing work can make mun­dane tasks interesting
• 25:45 Why we have to go back to child­hood ten­den­cies of play and work

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Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work? For near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to the How Peo­ple Work pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling leaders.

(00:50):

Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. Let’s jump in. We — last week, we talked about work as play. Jason and I talked a lit­tle bit about our child­hood, some games that we played, some dreams that we had about the future. What did we want to do when we grew up? Start­ed to jump into this notion of how do we trans­late child­hood play, board games, video games, sports, what­ev­er the thing is into how we work, how we work today as adults, and how we take some of that dri­ve and that com­pe­ti­tion and that will to win and bring it into the work­place and bring it into our adult lives and what we spend 8, 9, 10 hours a day doing now. So here we are back — how we work, Jor­dan Peace, Jason Mur­ray. And we’re going to jump right into this top­ic. So Jason, I guess the ques­tion we want to ask to kick things off is are there exam­ples that you’ve seen in the work­place, in your own per­son­al work­place, in the work­place of your peers or peo­ple that have told you about cer­tain things that they’ve done that have brought play into work? And then I think from there we just explore what are the out­comes of that? Yeah, what comes to mind when you think about this ques­tion of bring­ing play into work?

Jason (02:18):

Well, there’s a cou­ple things that come to mind. One thing that comes to mind imme­di­ate­ly is I think there’s a cheap ver­sion of play at work that we prob­a­bly want to avoid, which is, let’s do piz­za par­ties. Let’s impose fun with air quotes here onto the work that maybe itself isn’t actu­al­ly fun, but we’re just going to try and dress it up as fun and kind of rah rah. And maybe it just isn’t, it’s you’re in a bad job. You work at a bad com­pa­ny, there’s just not any way to real­ly recov­er that.

Jor­dan (02:59):

No amount of piz­za is going to solve the problem.

Jason (03:01):

Yeah, exact­ly. Right. In fact, too much piz­za is not a good thing.

Jor­dan (03:06):

It’s going to add to the problem.

Jason (03:06):

It’s going to add to the prob­lem. So that comes to mind right away where it can’t be arti­fi­cial, I guess is what I’m say­ing. And then on the flip side of that is real­ly try­ing to draw out, well, what is it with­in play itself? And maybe we’ll go back a lit­tle bit to some of the analo­gies of what it felt like when we were kids, but what is it with­in play itself that we can maybe draw out as prin­ci­ples or val­ues that we could then say, well, these things that are true about play, that makes play fun and mean­ing­ful and feel valu­able. Can we take those then and apply them to how we think about our work? How we design our work, both as indi­vid­u­als, like how I go about my work day to day. And then also for orga­ni­za­tions, how we think about set­ting up the work or set­ting up teams. And so I guess as you think about it, maybe from your child­hood or maybe with your own kids, because we both have kids that we play with, are there maybe val­ues that come to mind or sort of prin­ci­ples that come to mind that you think are sort of ori­ent­ing or uni­fy­ing prin­ci­ples around the play?

Jor­dan (04:23):

Yeah, I was think­ing about when you were talk­ing about play with my kids, and we play in all sorts of ways. It might be a board game, it might be a video game, but it might be some­thing we just made up on the spot. We got a tram­po­line for Christ­mas. Since then we’ve come up, I mean, I’m not exag­ger­at­ing with 11 or 12 dif­fer­ent games that we’ve invent­ed on the tram­po­line. Just dif­fer­ent things that you can play based on where you stand or where you jump or who falls down or who gets opened, the crack the egg type of stuff. And there’s a bunch of kick balls on the tram­po­line and just bas­ket­ball hoops and there’s all sorts of stuff. And one thing that I notice about kids that I don’t see from adults so much in a work con­text is they just jump in.

(05:11):

They don’t think ahead of time, is this a game that I am best suit­ed for? And am I like­ly to be the win­ner? They go, that sounds fun. I’m in. And then they lose. And then some­times they cry. Some­times they cry over los­ing and they cel­e­brate over win­ning. And maybe they cel­e­brate a lit­tle bit too big over win­ning, which makes the oth­er one cry or what­ev­er. There’s issues once the game is played and some­body wins and some­body los­es and that’s hard. But what I see from adults is so much worse than cry­ing over los­ing. It’s an unwill­ing­ness to play the game because I might lose. Right? That’s the dif­fer­ence in the work con­text. And I think that what we’ve built in so many cor­po­ra­tions is this par­a­digm where I’m just not going to play. If there’s a chance I’m going to lose because if I lose and peo­ple know that I lost and the loss gets pinned on me, then that might mean that I’m not able to advance. I’m not able to be seen in the light that I want to see. I’m not able to get the pro­mo­tion. What­ev­er the case may be. And so we just don’t play. And actu­al­ly until lit­er­al­ly this moment in this con­ver­sa­tion, I don’t think I con­nect­ed the dots as to why it was so impor­tant to me when we were writ­ing the values.

Jason (06:30):

I was just going to bring that up.

Jor­dan (06:31):

We were writ­ing the val­ues for Fringe and the val­ues, and one of the descrip­tions of the val­ues about act­ing with courage is we will lose and learn from it. We’ll fail bold­ly, right? And these ideas are just, and I can tell when we hire new peo­ple and I read these things to them and I share these things with them, they’re just like, are you sure you mean that? I’ve nev­er been allowed to lose before. I’ve nev­er been allowed to fail before. That’s always been seen as a bad thing. Right? Let’s fig­ure out how not to lose next time is the most pos­i­tive reac­tion that they could pos­si­bly receive from their los­ing as opposed to praise for you gave it all you had, you had a great idea, you put your­self out there, you took a risk, it did­n’t work. But good for you.

(07:20):

That reac­tion is so free­ing. And that’s what I tell my kids. Yeah, that’s what I tell ​‘em. You gave it all you had. You hus­tled, you trie,d your broth­er that’s two or three years old­er than you. He’s big­ger. Yeah, he’s stronger. He’s faster. That’s not your fault, right? You did great. You played great. And it’s not so much focus on the win­ning. The focus was win­ning in the game, but it was okay to lose. And it’s just inter­est­ing that that’s just not a thing in almost any orga­ni­za­tion. There’s just no room for play­ing the game if there’s any chance that we’re going to lose.

Jason (08:02):

Well, what I like about that is you would­n’t encour­age reck­less­ness from your chil­dren, but you would encour­age try­ing new things, right? And so I think that’s a delin­eation that we’re mak­ing. Cause I could imag­ine some­one hav­ing an objec­tion say­ing, well, it does­n’t make sense just to go fail bold­ly at any­thin­gAnd that’s not what you’re saying.

Jor­dan (08:25):

The goal isn’t to fail.

Jason (08:26):

Right. Well, and just go to the exam­ple of the game on the tram­po­line. It’s like we have some sense of, well, what the para­me­ters of the game may be, even if we don’t know the total­i­ty of it or how it’s going to go or how good I’m going to be at it. But it’s like I under­stand some­thing about it and I’m will­ing to try, under­stand­ing that there’s kind of a win-loss thing that might hap­pen here. And I think it’s inter­est­ing what you brought up talk­ing to can­di­dates and the hir­ing process and things like that. And we talked about sports and the last episode is kind of a good anal­o­gy. And I feel like that fits here because what sports teach you as a game is that you will win and you will lose. And so the whole idea, I’ve kind of resist­ed with my own kids that, oh, every­body wins. There’s a par­tic­i­pa­tion tro­phy. I frankly hate that because it’s not how life goes. You don’t get a par­tic­i­pa­tion tro­phy in life. I mean, life just smacks you down some­times. And so you lose. Yeah. And some­times it’s not even your own fault, they just go get your teeth kicked in by some­times crap­py stuff.

Jor­dan (09:32):

Some­times the oth­er kid’s just big­ger or stronger or a bet­ter shooter.

Jason (09:36):

Or the cir­cum­stances of your life, or some­times just get dealt a bad hand in cards, which is a game and applies to life and it’s like, hey, you just can’t win all the time. It’s learn­ing through those expe­ri­ences, how to approach life. I think you men­tioned resilien­cy last time. So I mean, there’s a cou­ple things there that I think come out sense of resilien­cy, being will­ing to fail, know­ing that you’re not going to win every time.

Jor­dan (10:05):

We talk, I imag­ine our audi­ence, I mean, we know a lit­tle bit about our audi­ence. There’s a lot of peo­ple that lead peo­ple, a lot of peo­ple that they’re either peo­ple lead­ers direct­ly or they’re exec­u­tives or what­ev­er. And what I would say to them is that this whole con­cept of work as play is not going to work for you. You could take every oth­er piece of advice that we give or ideas that we have or things that we do per­son­al­ly, and you could throw it right in the trash if you’re not going to give your peo­ple the free­dom to fail because they will not play.

Jason (10:41):

Right. It’ll nev­er feel like play.

Jor­dan (10:42):

They’ll pre­tend to play. They’ll act like they’re going to play. They’ll tell you they’re going to play, they won’t play.

Jason (10:47):

Right. Or they’ll play only a game that they think they can win, which won’t be fun.

Jor­dan (10:52):

Which is not the game that’s going to help your busi­ness win. That’s not the game, espe­cial­ly right now in a reces­sion and what we’re going through. You can’t just be sta­tus quo. You can’t just do what’s always worked. You got to be cre­ative. You got to be inno­v­a­tive. Yeah. You got to try new things. And you must, unless you’re just the most bril­liant per­son that ever lived on the face of the earth, you must fail in order to learn, in order to refine, in order to get bet­ter at the new thing that you’re doing that maybe no one else has ever done, or no one else that has ever done. Right. You don’t have the infor­ma­tion, you don’t have best prac­tices, you don’t know for sure. And if you don’t give your peo­ple the free­dom to explore that space and to poten­tial­ly, and I’m not say­ing they will fail, but give them the free­dom to fail. They real­ly can’t win in any sort of way that is sig­nif­i­cant enough to be sat­is­fy­ing to them and real­ly do any­thing for you and for your business.

Jason (11:52):

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there’s some­thing there too. I was just think­ing about — there’s some roles it seems at com­pa­nies where it kind of feels like the only thing that could hap­pen to some­body is for them to lose. The way that their work is set up. I feel like I don’t know. I think about peo­ple who work in maybe cus­tomer ser­vice type roles where it’s just like, man, the ham­mer of the com­pa­ny is just like, well, don’t screw it up. And there’s not, like, unless it’s done with inten­tion­al­i­ty, it would seem maybe that like, well, there’s not a game even to be played where there is win­ning because there’s no aim oth­er than don’t screw it up. And that’s not very -

Jor­dan (12:33):Just don’t make any­body mad. Yeah.

Jason (12:35):

That’s not very fun. It’s not exciting.

Jor­dan (12:36):

Just don’t get any com­plaints out there. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just not, but it’s not true. It’s all about what you rec­og­nize. So I think about our own Fringe, we think about our own com­pa­ny and how often when we have our Fri­day after­noon meet­ings our ​“what’s going on” meet­ings, how often do we take, whether it’s some­thing that Sheri did or some­thing that Cyn­thia did or some­body on our team that’s in cus­tomer ser­vice that we have, obvi­ous­ly the copy from our con­ver­sa­tions that we have with our users and that they just praised some of the peo­ple on our CS team that just said, wow, I got great ser­vice. I was so pleased that the reac­tion time was fast. They solved my prob­lem for me. And yeah, you could look at it as a, well, good, all you real­ly accom­plished was not screw­ing up. You could look at it from that stand­point of it’s los­ing or nothing.

(13:35):

But that’s a win. And one of the things, and we’re not a per­fect com­pa­ny and we don’t do every­thing per­fect­ly, but one of the things that I think that we’ve done well over the course of time is that we’ve tak­en jobs like that where it’s easy to think of the job — HR is anoth­er job in that cat­e­go­ry — where it’s easy to think of the job as los­ing or neu­tral. There is no win­ning, right? But you can find a way to think to find wins, you know, you can define the wins and then cel­e­brate those wins, right? And that just gives so much mean­ing to the job.

Jason (14:10):

Well, and I think that comes back to some­thing we’ve talked about that’s been kind of a thread through­out, which I think is what are you aim­ing for? And so if the com­pa­ny’s aim, say, is pure­ly prof­it dri­ven, well then the only thing that cus­tomer ser­vice is going to do is poten­tial­ly lose you mon­ey. Right? Maybe save mon­ey. But a lot of com­pa­nies that have that kind of mind­set don’t think of it that way.

Jor­dan (14:34):Or all HR is going to do is spend mon­ey on peo­ple and ben­e­fits and this, it’s just spend­ing, it’s just a cost cen­ter. As peo­ple like to refer to it as.

Jason (14:42):

Yeah, exact­ly. I mean, that’s a very great exam­ple. And so if you reframe it where the aim is, say the human expe­ri­ence in those inter­ac­tions and cre­at­ing the most pos­i­tive human expe­ri­ence that you can, well, when you apply that to cus­tomer ser­vice, now all of a sud­den that changes the frame­work that you are fil­ter­ing it through or apply that to HR and peo­ple teams. Again, it changes the frame­work and then all the research that peo­ple have done on that kind of stuff shows that when you do that with­in say cus­tomer ser­vice func­tions, that actu­al­ly deliv­ers bet­ter results for the busi­ness to begin with. And so I think points to the fact that we ought to have a dif­fer­ent way of going about think­ing about design­ing for a human expe­ri­ence ver­sus say just a busi­ness need or busi­ness out­come in and of itself.

Jor­dan (15:25):

Yeah. Yeah, absolute­ly. I think regard­less of what the func­tion is in your orga­ni­za­tion, you’ve got to find a way to point peo­ple towards what win­ning is. I mean, that’s what we’re talk­ing about today. We’re talk­ing about how do you bring ele­ments of play into work. The core ele­ment of play is a clear def­i­n­i­tion of win­ning. You know, you have to know, we talked about it in the last episode. You have to be able to pull out that instruc­tion man­u­al and flip to how to win sec­tion. And it’s the first thing you read is how to win. So you can­not tell any­body in your orga­ni­za­tion, I don’t care if they’re on your legal team or your finance team or your cus­tomer ser­vice team or your HR team, and all the places that we see as play­ing defense. You have to show them. You have to show them what offense looks like.

(16:15):

You have to show them what a win is and define that for them. And sure, play­ing defense is win­ning too, right? Pre­vent­ing things. But we have to cel­e­brate those things. You can’t just go, oh, well, thanks HR, nobody sued us in the last quar­ter and not men­tion that. You have to men­tion that. You have to talk about how what­ev­er it is you’re try­ing to avoid, whether it’s cyber­se­cu­ri­ty or what­ev­er the thing is that’s going on in your com­pa­ny, you have to cel­e­brate the not loss­es and cel­e­brate the wins. And that’s what keeps peo­ple moti­vat­ed. That’s what keeps peo­ple inter­est­ed in feel­ing like I helped the com­pa­ny, I helped us win. If you don’t con­nect peo­ple to their func­tion actu­al­ly helps the com­pa­ny achieve its ulti­mate goal. Right? Then why would they stick around? Why would they take an inter­est? Why would this be some­thing that would seep into the core of their being and what they think about and what they want to achieve in life? If it’s just a job, if it just do these tasks, get a pay­check, go home. So what? They’re going to be much more inter­est­ed in the play in their lives, right? Which may be the sports team they fol­low or what­ev­er, and that’s fine. But if you want them to real­ly be their mind to be set on the work and the com­pa­ny and achiev­ing suc­cess togeth­er, they’ve got to feel those play ele­ments. They got to feel like they’re win­ning. Yeah.

Jason (17:46):

Well, I think what’s nice about that, that can kind of exist at all lev­els of rela­tion­ship, if you will. So for me as an indi­vid­ual, I can design or gam­i­fy my work even. And we talked a lit­tle bit in the last episode about flow. I’ve been read­ing a book by the author who orig­i­nat­ed, or the psy­chol­o­gist who orig­i­nat­ed the con­cept and has done all the research around flow. And he found that even work­ers in man­u­fac­tur­ing plants doing what you might con­sid­er to be very mun­dane and repet­i­tive tasks could actu­al­ly expe­ri­ence flow. And some of the ways in which they did that is they would gam­i­fy their expe­ri­ences. Some­body you had a job that might have been very mun­dane and repet­i­tive. There is a par­tic­u­lar guy he talked about who he had to replace a par­tic­u­lar screw on a piece of equip­ment that was com­ing down a man­u­fac­tur­ing line, but he just turned it into a game where it was like, well, how fast can I get it this?

(18:49):

And how effi­cient can I make it? And so on and so forth. And so that lit­tle game in and of itself brought some sem­blance of pur­pose to the work itself that gave it a lit­tle bit more mean­ing. And that’s real­ly small kind of micro­cosm. But then you can start to extrap­o­late that to oth­er things to say, well, at a team lev­el, how are we doing this as a team? What are we agree­ing upon togeth­er? Is the game that we’re play­ing to uni­fy the task or the pur­pose that we’re work­ing towards? And then as a com­pa­ny, and then you could even take that to as a fam­i­ly, as a com­mu­ni­ty, as a soci­ety, it kind of works at all lev­els there.

Jor­dan (19:24):

Yeah, it reminds me of in col­lege, and I come home from col­lege and I used to work for my uncle’s brick com­pa­ny here in Rich­mond and just worked as a labor­er. I did­n’t have any par­tic­u­lar skills. I did­n’t know how to lay brick or stone or block or any­thing like that, but I could mix mor­tar and car­ry bricks, climb a scaf­fold and what­ev­er. And I remem­ber so many times where the day would start, with just brick lay­er A and brick lay­er B, and they’re lay­ing two sides of a wall. But over the course of the day, they’re sit­ting back, they’re look­ing and how high that guy’s got­ten on the wall ver­sus that guy’s got­ten on the wall, you’re sit­ting there at your lunch break, they’re check­ing, and now they start talk­ing about it. Peo­ple start talk­ing about it. By the end of the day, it is a full out competition.

(20:18):

There’s cheer­ing, there’s peo­ple tak­ing bets, it’s become a thing. The play gave the mun­dane work of just lay bricks from the floor to the ceil­ing became some­thing incred­i­bly fun, right? And you would pick teams, and I might help this guy a lit­tle bit more and I’d mix his mor­tar and make sure it was nice and nice con­sis­ten­cy a lit­tle bit more than that guy, because I had a bet on this guy, what­ev­er the case may be. And we turn any­thing into a game if we can help it, because it gives it more mean­ing, what­ev­er the thing is, it makes it more fun. It’s com­mu­nal, it brings oth­ers into it. There’s cheer­ing involved. It’s just, you know what I mean? It does­n’t mat­ter what the thing is. And I feel like some­times in this cor­po­rate white col­lar kind of but­toned up weird soft­ware com­pa­ny expe­ri­ence is like, we just for­get to do that.

(21:21):

We for­get to have fun with that. Yeah. We for­get to see that the work that we’re doing could be so enhanced by hav­ing fun with it and bring­ing that game ele­ment into it. And as lead­ers, hon­est­ly, we just need to do a bet­ter job of it. We just need to bring that to the table in an authen­tic way, not in a just, ah, we’re going to have this cheesy com­pe­ti­tion because we want to moti­vate every­body to work, moti­vate every­body to work hard­er so that the exec­u­tives make more mon­ey. I feel like that’s kind of the fear. That’s kind of the issue. And that’s the thought that peo­ple have is like, ah, anoth­er cheesy com­pe­ti­tion. But if it’s an innate part of your cul­ture that you gam­i­fy the work expe­ri­ence and you play and you win togeth­er, and sure you com­pete against each oth­er some­times, but a lot of times it’s coop­er­a­tive at the same time.

Jason (22:15):

But it just sort of happens.

Jor­dan (22:16):

Yeah. It just, but if it’s part of your cul­ture, it hap­pens and it’s okay that it hap­pens and it becomes real­ly fun.

Jason (22:22):

Well, and it has to be some­thing that it feels like it has to be some­thing. Any­ways, that’s kind of bot­tom up. Some­thing about the sto­ry you shared about the guys lay­ing bricks and stuff like that. Could you imag­ine that same sce­nario if the boss in the cor­po­rate office came out and was like, Hey, what we’re going to do today is have a brick­lay­ing com­pe­ti­tion and I’m going to need you guys to work real hard and you’re going to compete.

Jor­dan (22:45):

The eyes roll back immediately.

Jason (22:46):

Just be like, what­ev­er. We’re going to build the short­est walls you’ve ever seen.

Jor­dan (22:50):

Right, exact­ly.

Jason (22:51):

But because it just kind of hap­pened organ­i­cal­ly. I mean, who knows, maybe those guys went home and were like, Hey man, this is the best day of work I had in a years. Who knows, right? So I think that that’s cool. Some­thing else that came to mind as you’re talk­ing about that was the sense of learn­ing, being a part of the expe­ri­ence of play. And so when we’re learn­ing a new game, or even, you know, you talk­ing about the guys lay­ing bricks just brought my dad to mind because he was kind of a blue col­lar work­er, a line­man for a lot of his career after he let the mil­i­tary in. One of the things that always struck me about him and his work was he was always learn­ing some­thing new. He went from just being a guy walk­ing around the street, read­ing the meters to becom­ing a line­man and learn­ing all this stuff about how the grid works and repair­ing trans­form­ers and climb­ing the poles and all that kind of stuff.

(23:49):

And when he’d come over for din­ner, we’d ask him, how’s work going? Or what­ev­er. And he’d tell me all kinds of stuff I did­n’t under­stand about how the poles worked and how you need to con­nect this and that, and why the pow­er went out over there in that neigh­bor­hood and all kinds of stuff. And it was just real­ly inter­est­ing to him and I think was part of what actu­al­ly made the work enjoy­able was that kind of aspect of learn­ing that comes into it. And I think I find that to be true for myself. I’m most engaged and find things to be most enjoy­able when I’m learn­ing, when there’s some, a new expe­ri­ence that’s part of what’s tak­ing place.

Jor­dan (24:26):

I think that’s so true. And when — I noticed when we are in a peri­od of some sort of stress or some sort of immi­nent thing that we’ve got to achieve or avoid or what­ev­er, we get so much more cre­ative. And that’s what games do. Games cre­ate a, not dis­tress, but a cer­tain amount of stress on you to think, how do I win? How do I do this in a cer­tain amount of time?

Jason (24:54):

It dri­ves cre­ativ­i­ty, prob­lem solving.

Jor­dan (24:56):

Solv­ing. And you learn a lot faster as a result of that because when you’re think­ing cre­ative­ly and you’re think­ing in a lit­tle bit of a sense of des­per­a­tion of just like, how do I do this and how do I get it done and quick­ly and how do I win? Or what­ev­er. You’re not — all that stuff about, I want to keep my head down and not be the tall pop­py and not be seen, and not — all that goes out the win­dow. And you’re just think­ing more like a kid. You’re think­ing more of just like, how do we do it? Let’s get cre­ative. Let’s find a solu­tion, let’s go. As opposed to just like, I don’t know if we do that, then my man­ager’s going to think this and blah, blah, blah. You know what I mean? It’s just like, there’s a lot more will­ing­ness to take risk when there’s a clear pic­ture of what win­ning is like and what los­ing is like, and let’s go.

Jason (25:45):

I mean, the thing that’s kind of wild is psy­chol­o­gists that study child devel­op­ment, things like that, play — kids lit­er­al­ly can­not thrive if they don’t play. There’s all kinds of bad things that hap­pen to kids if they go through life with­out hav­ing play, play­mates, that abil­i­ty to go through the learn­ing explo­ration. So I mean, in that research, what they find is it’s actu­al­ly the learn­ing that takes place. It’s the crit­i­cal think­ing, the prob­lem solv­ing, all those kinds of things. And then for some rea­son we shift away from that as adults. But seem­ing­ly, those expe­ri­ences still feel good to us to have that chal­lenge, to have that prob­lem solv­ing, to be faced with using some kind of crit­i­cal think­ing. So yeah, it’s just odd to me that as adults, that some­how kind of goes by the wayside.

Jor­dan (26:42):

I think we’re just scared. Yeah, I hon­est­ly think that’s what it’s about. It’s just this fear of los­ing. And I mean, I would love to hear from our lis­ten­ers on this. I’d love to hear just some, we, we’ve talked philo­soph­i­cal­ly, right, about how to bring play into work, and I think part of what we’ve shared is cel­e­brat­ing the loss­es, cel­e­brat­ing the peo­ple, hav­ing the audac­i­ty to just try and be cre­ative and go for it. But I think some of the real­ly prac­ti­cal ideas might come from our audi­ence. So I, I’d love it if peo­ple would reach out. I think Linked­In’s prob­a­bly the best way to do that, assum­ing that you’ve got an account to just say, Hey, here, here’s a way we play at work. Here’s a way that we’ve tak­en, we’ve gam­i­fied, we had this com­pe­ti­tion, or we did this dif­fer­ent thing to help us think dif­fer­ent­ly, or what­ev­er the case may be.

(27:36):

I think it’d be real­ly inter­est­ing to hear about that, and maybe we could bring some of that to bear next time we record an episode. But we are about at time, which snuck up on me again, so I’m going to have to recuse myself from the rest of the half hour here because I total­ly for­got to use the word until right now. You almost got me on that one. I was lost in the con­ver­sa­tion. But Jason, tell us what the word of the day is for next week, and hope­ful­ly I won’t get it at the 11th hour as I did this time.

Jason(28:08):

All right, next week we’re going to have immac­u­late I.

Jor­dan:

Okay. All right. I feel like I’m going to be able to work that in more nat­u­ral­ly than recuse — very legal.

Jason:

Since I knew you were going to almost for­get this one. I just want­ed to lay you up with one a lit­tle easier.

Jor­dan:

Just got it all fig­ured out. So this has been how peo­ple work. Again, your host, Jor­dan Peace, Jason Mur­ray. Thank you so much for lis­ten­ing this week and we’ll catch you next week. Bye-bye.

‍

We must see work as play.

In this episode of How Peo­ple Work, Jor­dan and Jason explore the ways to think dif­fer­ent­ly about work, incor­po­rat­ing hap­pi­ness and play. The hosts start by talk­ing about their child­hood aspi­ra­tions and how most kids want to play games as their career.

The con­ver­sa­tion between Jason and Jor­dan revolves around the com­plex­i­ty of life as one grows old­er and the need for rules to guide one’s actions. They dis­cuss how chil­dren have a script to fol­low, and bound­aries are well defined. How­ev­er, as one grows old­er, the rules become less defined, and one may not know what is expect­ed of them. There are unwrit­ten rules in work cul­ture that are con­fus­ing, and peo­ple may not know how to nav­i­gate them. They sug­gest that it is essen­tial to have a mutu­al aim and agreed-upon rules to play by, which makes the game of work fun.

Key ideas and highlights

• When asked what they want to be when they grow up, most kids answers involve some form of play. Why do we lose that?
• There are unwrit­ten rules at work that are con­fus­ing; good lead­ers write out the ​“How to Win” section.
• Hav­ing a clear mis­sion, vision, val­ues, or rule book gives peo­ple peace and clarity.

Word of the day

Scrupu­lous — 24:59 ✅

Timestamps

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:51 Why we need to think dif­fer­ent­ly about the notion of work
• 3:37 What did you want to be when you grew up?
• 4:15 Play­ing a game as a career was every kid’s dream
• 11:38 Why the fond­est mem­o­ries of life are mem­o­ries of play­ing games
• 13:15 Games as a micro­cosm of how soci­ety works
• 15:51 Why we don’t like liv­ing in a world with­out rules
• 19:55 Good lead­ers write down the unwrit­ten rules and make them clear
• 21:14 There must be a way to win work
• 25:56 Why it’s hard­er to see wins at work

Lis­ten on Apple Pod­casts | Spo­ti­fy | YouTube

Learn more about how you can meet the every­day needs of your employ­ees with with Fringe.

Con­nect with Jor­dan and Jason on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Jor­dan (00:05):

How many hours and years of our lives do we spend on work? For near­ly all of us, we spend 30 plus years and one third of our days in our voca­tion, more time per­haps, than we spend at rest or at play. But this isn’t a prob­lem. Why? Because work is good. Work needs to be inte­grat­ed deeply into our lives and must be in line with our most impor­tant goals and val­ues. And if it is, we have a far more com­plete and ful­fill­ing life expe­ri­ence. Wel­come to the How Peo­ple Work pod­cast, where we explore the inter­sec­tion of how humans think and act and how they apply them­selves to their work. When you under­stand both of these things, you’ll be equipped to be insight­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, and com­pelling lead­ers. All right. Wel­come back to How Peo­ple Work. I’m Jor­dan Peace. This is Jason Mur­ray join­ing me as usu­al, your co- host today. Thanks for lis­ten­ing in. Today, we’re going to talk about — shock­er. We’re going to talk about work again, but we’re going to talk about work as play. We’re going to talk about a pos­i­tive vision of work and how work can be enjoy­able, how work can be fun.

Jason (01:14):

Going to try to, anyways.

Jor­dan (01:14):

I say, we’re going to try to fig­ure this out. This is not a top­ic that we’ve writ­ten blogs about, writ­ten books about, fig­ured all the way out alto­geth­er, but it’s some­thing that we’re inter­est­ed in and some­thing that we see as kind of key to fig­ur­ing out how to see work as a good thing, which is an argu­ment that we’ve made before. And how do we go about enjoy­ing that? How do we go about see­ing work as play in the same way that we as fathers see our chil­dren play? And that play turns into work, and that work turns into play, and they kind of oscil­late back and forth. So wel­come back to the pod­cast. I think we prob­a­bly want to kick off, Jason, if you want to give us a lit­tle recap of last week and sort of tran­si­tion us into this week and this idea, this top­ic that we’re going to talk about.

Jason (02:08):

Sure. Well, in the last episode, we were talk­ing about hap­pi­ness, and we’ve spent a cou­ple episodes talk­ing about that from a few dif­fer­ent van­tage points, but specif­i­cal­ly last week, kind of the ben­e­fits of hap­pi­ness to our work and all the research around how that impacts pos­i­tive­ly the indi­vid­u­al’s expe­ri­ence of work, the ben­e­fits to the orga­ni­za­tion in terms of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, per­for­mance, et cetera, et cetera. And I think this top­ic in par­tic­u­lar is inter­est­ing. And I’ll say we’re talk­ing about this right before the episode. We haven’t fig­ured this all out our­selves. And so I think through this con­ver­sa­tion, explor­ing some of the ways that we can sort of think dif­fer­ent­ly about the notion of work. And so hap­pi­ness being some­thing that seems to be catch­ing on a lit­tle bit more. Peo­ple are pay­ing atten­tion to it and think­ing about it as it per­tains to work. And so play sim­i­lar­ly maybe isn’t- work as play, maybe isn’t thought of as terms that go togeth­er very often or very well. But I think there’s rel­e­van­cy there, espe­cial­ly as we think about, well, how do we kind of rebuild a par­a­digm for work that’s more pos­i­tive and gives us some­thing to aspire to, I sup­pose. So I thought it would be fun to start with a ques­tion around what did you want to be when you grew up? So I actu­al­ly know a lot of stuff about you, but I don’t think I know the answer to this question.

Jor­dan (03:41):

So I want­ed to be some com­bi­na­tion of John Smoltz and Chip­per Jones. Okay. So any Braves fans, Atlanta Braves fans lis­ten­ing and would imme­di­ate­ly know those names. Many base­ball fans would prob­a­bly know those as well, because they’re two Hall of Famers.

Jason (03:56):

So third base and pitcher.

Jor­dan (03:58):

Yeah, third, well, he was a short­stop before he was third base man.

Jason (04:00):

That’s true. Before they moved him over.

Jor­dan (04:01):

Spent some time in left field when he still had the ath­leti­cism to do that, but yeah. Yeah, Chip­per and Smoltz. Smoltz prob­a­bly be being my num­ber one top ath­lete that I’ve ever watched. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was unsur­pris­ing­ly, right, the idea of play­ing a game for work, play­ing a game for a career, being on that stage and wear­ing that uni­form and hav­ing team­mates and pur­su­ing a cham­pi­onship, and just the pomp and cir­cum­stance around that as a child. And watch­ing these guys for me, lit­er­al­ly dai­ly, I mean, we had the game one every day, right from April until Sep­tem­ber or Octo­ber if they were in the play­offs, which they often were when I was a kid. It just seemed like, what else would you do with your life? Why would you do any­thing else besides play baseball?

Jason (05:01):Yeah, the boys of Summer.

Jor­dan (05:03):Yeah exact­ly. Exact­ly. So that was my, what about you, Jason?

Jason (05:06):So that was it. Base­ball. Base­ball, yeah. Yeah. Very singular.

Jor­dan (05:10):How about that?

Jason (05:10):Great. What was it about John Smoltz in particular?

Jor­dan (05:15):

Man, I feel like I could always get a good read on John Smoltz, like even as a kid. Yeah. I feel like I could read his emo­tion and he seemed kind of what I feel like now. He seemed a guy that he had the tal­ent and he had -

Jason (05:34):An all star with a lot of money.

Jor­dan (05:36):

No, no, no, no, no. Not that piece. Not that piece. No I’m talk­ing about a young John Smoltz, right. But he had the tal­ent, he had the abil­i­ty, and he had the aggres­sion. He’s like, I’m going to do this. I’m going to dom­i­nate these guys. I’m going to strike peo­ple out. I’m going to make ​‘em ground in dou­ble plays, et cetera. But I always sensed a lit­tle fear behind his eyes. I always sensed a lit­tle, you’re not quite sure you can do this, are you, John? And I don’t know. I don’t know John Smoltz per­son­al­ly. Yeah. I have no idea if he felt that. That was always my read on him. And I’ve always felt the same way. I’ve always felt a nat­ur­al sense of con­fi­dence that, sure, I can go out and do this, but when I actu­al­ly get out there on the field or I get out there to record a pod­cast, behind my eyes is a lit­tle bit of just like, ah, can I really?

Jason (06:26):

That feels like a good trait, and that seems insight­ful to me. Because I mean, do you real­ly trust some­body that has seem­ing­ly a hun­dred per­cent pure con­fi­dence? Yeah, because I don’t, I feel like some­body that appears that way is just BS. Does­n’t every­one have a lit­tle fear behind them, even if they’re real­ly good?

Jor­dan (06:48):I hope they do. Yeah. I think when there’s noth­ing there and there’s just com­plete blind con­fi­dence, the word sociopath comes to mind. Do you really?

Jason (07:01):

It’s clin­i­cal.

Jor­dan (07:01):

Yeah, right. It’s a lit­tle wor­ri­some. But any­way, I could­n’t have described any of that as a sev­en year old boy watch­ing John Smoltz in the play­offs in the ear­ly nineties. But yeah, I always was a huge fan of his.

Jason (07:17):

Yeah. So for me, I had three main ones grow­ing up. Grow­ing up a mil­i­tary kid around Marines in par­tic­u­lar. My dad was a Marine. I always want­ed to be a fight­er pilot. And so some of that was going to air shows and stuff when I was a kid. So I saw the Blue Angels a whole bunch of times. I just loved that stuff. I thought it was super cool. And then Top Gun obvi­ous­ly was big when we were kids. And so all of that was just like, man, being a fight­er pilot would be so cool. And I always feel a lit­tle bad that maybe I should’ve been one, because I have great eyesight.

Jor­dan (08:00):You have a ridicu­lous eyesight.

Jason (08:02):So many peo­ple are disqualified.

Jor­dan (08:03):People lis­ten­ing to the pod­cast, don’t under­stand what it’s like to be on a Zoom call with you when you’re shar­ing your screen and you are using eight point font.

Jason (08:11):

Every­one can see this, right?

Jor­dan (08:12):No one else on the call can read what you could read. You’re like, you guys see­ing this ok? And we’re like, well, tech­ni­cal­ly we can see your screen, but I can’t read a damn thing. Just

Jason (08:22):I just assume most peo­ple can see. So then paleontologist -

Jor­dan (08:29):

Okay.

Jason (08:30):But that was main­ly because the Juras­sic Park

Jor­dan (08:32):Jurassic Park, I was going to say, I was like, I’m, it’s in here.

Jason (08:35):Of course, I mean, it was maybe not so much of the dead dinosaurs, but what if we could make live ones? That would be cool.

Jor­dan (08:43):And then you were going to find the Dino DNA. Yes.

Jason (08:45):Yes, and that’s going to be me in the Amber.

Jor­dan (08:48):

Yeah, right, of course.

Jason (08:48):I knew how to do all that stuff when I was very young. And -

Jor­dan (08:53):That is such a mil­len­ni­al, mil­len­ni­al goal right there. That’s ridiculous.

Jason (08:56):Have you watched all the Juras­sic Parks? All of ​‘em? Even the most recent one?

Jor­dan (09:02):

I might be able to still play the theme song on the piano, because I learned that when I was like eight years old.

Jason (09:07):

That’s impres­sive. Yeah, I could not do that. I watched the most recent ones too. It was good. All of ​‘em. Yeah. And then marine biol­o­gist, main­ly because of sharks.

Jor­dan (09:18):

Ok, not because of the Sein­feld episode.

Jason (09:19):

And my son got that from me because he does­n’t know what a marine biol­o­gist is, but he says he wants to be a shark scientist.

Jor­dan (09:26):

Shark Sci­en­tist. That’s perfect.

Jason (09:27):He just wants to see sharks.

Jor­dan (09:29):

He just calls it what it is. Yeah, shark sci­en­tist. That’s great.

Jason (09:33):

So yeah, it’s awesome.

Jor­dan (09:36):

That was perfect.

Jason (09:37):

What do you think it is about, mean? Obvi­ous­ly we became none of those things.

Jor­dan (09:44):

Nope. Swing and a miss.

Jason (09:45):

But there’s some­thing fun to rem­i­nisce on that, and you kind of dream about it. But I do think there are prob­a­bly clear mem­o­ries that many of us have from child­hood that per­tain to maybe moments of just pure enjoy­ment when we were doing things. And I’m curi­ous if there’s stuff that comes to mind for you where you can recall things or games or activ­i­ties or what­ev­er that, you know, you just got immersed in that kind of brought you that sense of joy and happiness.

Jor­dan (10:21):It’s always games for me. It’s always games. Some­times sports, but some­times just games. Games that fit in a box and you pull ​‘em out and play.

Jason (10:33):

I know you’re a big board game guy.

Jor­dan (10:34):

A big board game nerd. I always get on you for nerd­ing out on some­thing. This is the area where I’m real­ly with you on the nerd side of the house, so to speak. I think some of my fond­est mem­o­ries of my entire life are sit­ting down, or lay­ing down rather, on the pier at the Chick­a­hominy Riv­er here in the east­ern part of Vir­ginia, with my mom, and play­ing Scrab­ble. Play­ing Scrab­ble. That was our thing. It was the bat­tle of the wits. And I remem­ber since, I bet it was a lit­tle bit old­er than when kids learned to read, so maybe sev­en, eight years old, some­thing like that, where I knew some words. I knew how to spell some things. And we start­ed play­ing Scrab­ble then. And every time we went down to this River­house, which house is a gen­er­ous word for this lit­tle cab­in that was passed down through the gen­er­a­tions, but we sat on that pier and we played, and time stood still.

(11:38):

I mean, it could have thun­der­stormed, it could have been a hur­ri­cane. I would not have noticed. We just were in it and we were play­ing this game, and I was try­ing to get the right spots so I could get the triple word score and make sure I got that X on the triple let­ter score. And so strate­gic about it and just play­ing with her and I mean, those are some of my fond­est mem­o­ries of my entire life. And it was­n’t base­ball, it was­n’t the World Series, but it did­n’t need to be. It did­n’t need to be because to me, being able to have the rela­tion­al aspect of being with her and play­ing with her, but also just the com­pe­ti­tion aspect of, I’m going to beat this adult at this game because I can fig­ure out a way and maybe she’ll let me win. I’ll nev­er know. But I did occa­sion­al­ly win. And that was just a big thing to me. And it’s hard to describe because you’re like, it’s a board game, why is that impor­tant? But to an eight year old, nine year old, 10 year old kid, there’s some of my fond­est mem­o­ries and there’s some­thing to that. There’s some­thing to study there as to why was that so important.

Jason (12:55):Why do you think, or what, what about those moments or play­ing that game, if you were try­ing to put it into maybe a few words that kind of res­onate to describe it, how would you?

Jor­dan (13:15):

I think games are, they’re just a micro­cosm of how soci­ety works. Some­times. I think we over­step our bounds and we pur­sue this idea of com­plete free­dom. Just com­plete, just do what­ev­er you want, when­ev­er you want, how­ev­er you want with who­ev­er you want.

Jason (13:36): Does­n’t work.

Jor­dan (13:36):

It’s such a mis­take, right? But no game works, just like no, soci­ety works with­out rules, right? You sit down at a chess board and you say, okay, well this is a queen, and that’s a rook, and that’s a knight. And then you just move wher­ev­er the hell you want. Yeah. That’s not a game, right?

Jason (13:51):

Yeah

Jor­dan (13:52):

You need rules. Oth­er­wise, there’s no game to be played. No mutu­al agree­ment on how we’re going to go about doing this. So I think part of it is just the micro­cosm of soci­ety boiled down to some­thing that a child could under­stand of just like here, I take a turn, you take a turn, you form a word. The word has to exist in this cer­tain dic­tio­nary. I mean, we were seri­ous. We had the Scrab­ble dictionary.

Jason (14:19):Oh, yeah. That’s necessary.

Jor­dan (14:20):

We would look it up. I knew all my two let­ter words, I knew all my two let­ter words I had them mem­o­rized, right? So I knew that I could play, I could play Xi. Yeah, that’s a word in Scrab­ble. Yeah, Za, that’s a word in Scrab­ble. So I could play that, and I could play across and also con­nect it to this valu­able word. Learn­ing that and excelling at that just felt like a micro­cosm of grow­ing up. It felt like devel­op­ment. It felt like my intel­li­gence and my intrigue about life was just kind of brought to kind of acti­vat­ed through this sin­gu­lar game. And then of course, the rela­tion­al aspect. I’m sit­ting there with my mom, it was just me and her, and was the whole world dis­ap­peared. And that was obvi­ous­ly a beau­ti­ful aspect of it. And I miss that. And I miss her. And she’s passed away. So the more now, it means even more to me now than it did then to think about those mem­o­ries. But I think life, and now I’m think­ing as an adult, life is real­ly com­plex and hard and hard things hap­pen, and it’s a lot of infor­ma­tion to process. And so when you boil things down to just like, I’m just in this moment, in this game to do one thing, there’s a cer­tain clar­i­ty that exists there that does­n’t exist in the midst of all the chaos that is life.

Jason (15:51): Yeah. Well, there’s a com­plex­i­ty that comes lat­er in life where I think the con­cept you kind of brought up around the rules is actu­al­ly real­ly per­ti­nent. Because I think I feel like I go through life some­times. I’m like, I don’t know what the rules are, right? I don’t know what I’m doing here. What is sup­posed to hap­pen? What are the rules to play by? It’s far less defined than it would seem, which when you’re a kid, you kind of feel like, man, all the adults know what’s going on. It’s like you become an adult and you have kids, and you’re like, I don’t know what the hel­l’s going on.

Jor­dan (16:28):

Oh, I know. And ear­ly on, you feel like you have a lit­tle bit of a script, right? Because when you’re a kid, it’s like, well, you just lis­ten to your par­ents and you obey your par­ents. That’s your job. And those are the para­me­ters. And I think that’s, hon­est­ly, that’s good par­ent­ing kids that actu­al­ly know where the bound­ary lines are. I think those are the for­tu­nate kids in the world that get to know where the bound­ary lines and where can I play? And then, you know, have a script. You go to school, you go to ele­men­tary, you go to mid­dle, you go to high, and then what­ev­er the next thing is for our gen­er­a­tion there, it was a big push for col­lege, may­be’s dif­fer­ent from the next gen­er­a­tion, the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion. But there was a lit­tle bit of a script. And I just remem­ber 21 years old grad­u­at­ing school and feel­ing like I fell off the face of the earth. It was like, what’s the script? What’s next? And every­body was like, you decide. And I’m like, what me? I get to decide what’s next? No one told me this was com­ing. Right. It’s a scary thing.

Jason (17:33):Yeah. And then they hand you a baby next and like, oh, I did­n’t fig­ure out the oth­er stuff yet.

Jor­dan (17:39):

Right, exact­ly. That whole, imag­ine you’re drown­ing and some­one hands you a baby. But even before that, just get­ting into a job and now there’s all these dif­fer­ent rules in a job. There’s boss­es and there’s boss­es’ boss­es and there, there’s times you’re sup­posed to be cer­tain places and there’s eti­quette. And you’re not sup­posed to say that to those peo­ple, but you can say it to this group of people.

Jason (18:03):Keep that etiquette.

Jor­dan (18:05):I mean, it just sort of, I’m with you. But there’s a work cul­ture that you don’t almost like kind of rules. They are in the work game. And you don’t know it.

Jason (18:17):Well, they are. They’re unwrit­ten rules.

Jor­dan (18:20):

They’re unwrit­ten, for sure. Yeah. There’s writ­ten and there’s most­ly unwritten.

Jason (18:22):

Well, and I think that’s the thing is if you think about what makes a game fun. Yeah. It actu­al­ly is the rule. It’s the rule. There’s two things. Total­ly right? There’s a mutu­al aim, there’s a pur­pose to the game that we’ve agreed is the ulti­mate pur­pose. It’s like right — score -

Jor­dan (18:41):

It’s the how to win sec­tion of the rules when you open the book.

Jason (18:44):

Which that’s the first place I flip the first place I play a new game. Yeah. How do you win? Okay, that sounds fun. Okay, now how do you play? What are the rules? Right? So you got to have that. There’s an agreed upon aim, and then you’ve got to have a set of rules that every­one’s agreed to play by as well. And when you think about it, when we’re kids, I mean, how freak­ing annoy­ing was it when some­body start­ed break­ing the rules and cheat­ing? You’re just get rid of the cheater, shun the cheater!

Jor­dan (19:14):

Or try to change the rules on you.

Jason (19:16):

You’re like, you can’t change the rules,

Jor­dan (19:17):

And you’ve already played half the game, and you’ve applied the rules that you knew to get ahead, and the rules change. And now you’re behind.

Jason (19:24):

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But I think there’s a take­away there. I mean when we’re think­ing about the work con­text. What is the mutu­al aim? What are we try­ing to do here? What is our pur­pose? What are we aim­ing for col­lec­tive­ly that we’ve agreed upon that we can get togeth­er and play the same game? Because if we’re not aim­ing for the same thing, we’re poten­tial­ly all play­ing dif­fer­ent games.

Jor­dan (19:55):

And I think the more you can take those unwrit­ten rules and write ​‘em down, the more clar­i­ty you’re giv­ing the peo­ple that work for you. In our con­text, we run a com­pa­ny, obvi­ous­ly. Not every­body that’s lis­ten­ing runs a com­pa­ny, but the more you can either do that as a leader or maybe ask for that, or demand that from your lead­ers to take, Hey, all this unwrit­ten sort of nuanced stuff. Let’s be clear about it. Let’s write it down. Let’s call it a mis­sion. Let’s call it a vision, let’s call it val­ues, let’s call it what­ev­er, the rule book. Right? That’s so help­ful. It gives peo­ple peace about like, oh, well, now I know what’s expect­ed of me, what the rules are, what the aim is, the how to win por­tion is writ­ten down. Now I know how to act. I know how to per­form in this con­text, and it helps me see the peo­ple I work with as my team, because now I know what win­ning is. That’s been defined for me. So I can ral­ly these peo­ple togeth­er and we can go win. And that’s what makes a team a team. You. You’re not real­ly a team if it’s just like, well, we just kind of show up to the same Zoom calls three times a week and hang around while some­one talks -

Jason (21:11):

What are we here for? It’a boring

Jor­dan (21:14):

And tells us all the things that they think are impor­tant, it’s kind of bor­ing. It’s pur­pose­less. Yeah. I’m just kind of bid­ing my time, doing my thing, try­ing to keep my head down. I’m not real­ly going after any­thing. And then that’s why work needs to be play. It needs to be a game and needs to have a way to win.

Jason (21:35):

Well, I mean, I know we both like sports and March Mad­ness has been going on, but it’s wild to think about what’s real­ly going on in a bas­ket­ball game or in a base­ball game. I mean, peo­ple go nuts when some­body scores a bas­ket and you’re like, what the heck is that about humans? You put a ball ‑l

Jor­dan (21:58):You put a ball into a met­al ring with the nylon hoop or the nylon net hang­ing from the bot­tom of it. Right? That’s all you did.

Jason (22:05):

Why is it so excit­ing to us?

Jor­dan (22:08):

Because we know all the work that was put in. We know all the strat­e­gy that was put in. We know, and we also iden­ti­fy with a cer­tain team because we have nos­tal­gia, we have mem­o­ries, and we know that we either went to that school or our par­ents or what­ev­er, cheered for that team. And so we asso­ciate with that. But I think it’s because it’s hard. It’s hard to do. And so when you see peo­ple achieve things that are real­ly hard to do, you cheer for that. It’s almost like just the human con­di­tion is just like life’s hard. And when you have a big win, or any one of us has a big win, it’s like, yes!

Jason (22:48):

It’s such a crazy per­fect metaphor though, when you think about it, it’s like they’re lit­er­al­ly aim­ing for a bas­ket. They’re aim­ing some­thing towards a bas­ket, in the same way that we kind of metaphor­i­cal­ly aim towards a goal, what­ev­er it is. Right. And so I, I feel like it kind of indi­cates that there’s some­thing sort of intrin­si­cal­ly in us as human beings. It’s like we aspire to, or we admire peo­ple aim­ing for a high goal that requires some dif­fi­cul­ty. And we see the maybe poten­tial of human beings in that because we admire what it is that they’re doing, but it does­n’t have to live at that lev­el alone. We also can have goals. We can also aim for things and strive to achieve in sim­i­lar fashions.

Jor­dan (23:41):

Yeah, sports, it is just the easy, it’s the eas­i­est place to see the work. You know? See the fit­ness of the ath­lete, for exam­ple. You see that, I mean, you see them run up and down the court, and if you’ve played any bas­ket­ball or if you ever like, yeah, I’m just going to use bas­ket­ball, for exam­ple. But yeah, we’re in our late thir­ties, which is crazy to say out loud, but we’re in our late thir­ties. I know from expe­ri­ence, if I show up on a bas­ket­ball court and I run up and down the court, I know sev­en or eight times I’m wind­ed, I’m wind­ed. These guys are run­ning up down the court hun­dreds of times, some­times at a full sprint, some­times at a jog. And then I’ve got a guard, a guy, and I got to jump and I got to rebound, it flies out of bounds and I got­ta grab the ball.

(24:30):

I got to throw it at some guy’s legs so that it bounces off. And then it’s our ball. There’s, it’s just chaos for 40 min­utes, maybe longer if you’re pro­fes­sion­al. So you know from watch­ing that, and then from your own expe­ri­ence, like, oh my gosh, the work that was put in to get even one’s body in shape enough to do the thing that’s being done is insane. And then the scrupu­lous work that a coach put in to fig­ure out the X and Os and to fig­ure out how to, or we’re going to set a screen and we’re going to run off of that, and then that guy’s going to come off the screen and go towards the bas­ket and we’re going to pass to him at the, all of that. So it’s just clear with sports. So it’s just like, oh, I can see the work that was put in, and I can see what suc­cess looks like because the ball goes through the bas­ket and the game ends since some­body wins and some­body loses.

(25:26):

And busi­ness is, it’s hard­er to see all of that, right? Yeah. It’s hard­er to see because most of our chal­lenges in busi­ness, as we’re sit­ting here typ­ing away at our com­put­ers, it’s not a phys­i­cal chal­lenge. We don’t have to be in incred­i­ble shape to do the thing that we do, but we do have to have an incred­i­ble amount of resilience. We do have to be able to bounce back. We do have to be able to lose and learn from the loss and change our tac­tics and try again. We have to have the courage to try new things. We have to have the courage to fail and own that and own up to that and say, Hey, that was me. That was my idea. It did­n’t work. Right? Yeah. There’s dif­fer­ent sort of chal­lenges that we face in busi­ness than what’s faced in sports, but it’s no dif­fer­ent. It’s just less obvi­ous. Right? Yeah. Because it’s still a challenge.

Jason (26:21):

A chal­lenge is a chal­lenge whether small or large. And yeah, it’s real­ly inter­est­ing because this con­cept of flow, I know you and I have talked about that a lit­tle bit before, not on the pod­cast, I don’t think. The most com­mon anal­o­gy when you hear sci­en­tists talk about flow is ath­letes. And so the con­cept of flow is where you become so immersed in an activ­i­ty that basi­cal­ly you lose sense of time and space and you’re just in it. Total­ly. But it requires, so the sci­en­tists that study this stuff and unpacked it, it requires hav­ing a goal. So you actu­al­ly can’t expe­ri­ence this sense of flow if you’re not aim­ing for some­thing. So it requires that, that’s why ath­letes often are kind of ones that expe­ri­ence this, right? Great­ly because they have a very clear goal.

Jor­dan (27:17):

The goal is so obvious.

Jason (27:18):

And there’s a chal­lenge. So that’s anoth­er part of it that’s required, is a sense of chal­lenge. So it’s like some­thing that’s just beyond your abil­i­ty. So it stretch­es you a lit­tle bit, but it’s not so far beyond that you can’t actu­al­ly accom­plish the thing. And so that’s part of it. And then the oth­er part com­ing back to some­thing we were talk­ing about in the con­ver­sa­tion is rules. You have to under­stand how to do the thing right before you, so it can’t be a total mys­tery to you. How am I going to achieve this goal? I have no idea. It has to be some­thing that you actu­al­ly know how to do it, you know the the rules, you know how to play it. And so there’s that sense of, I know the rules, I know how to play it. There’s a chal­lenge and there’s a spe­cif­ic aim that I’m going for.

(28:03):

And it’s crazy. The sort of pos­i­tive ben­e­fits that they found that this flow expe­ri­ence cre­ates. I was actu­al­ly talk­ing to a Chief Peo­ple Offi­cer that we’re friends with recent­ly, and I was just inter­view­ing her about some oth­er stuff. But I was talk­ing about, Hey, what are some things that your com­pa­nies focus on this year sur­round­ing the employ­ee expe­ri­ence is some­thing that I’m think­ing about a lot these days. And one of the things she described very explic­it­ly was try­ing to make space for employ­ees to have more flow expe­ri­ences in their work. And I was like, that’s crazy. I’ve nev­er even heard a com­pa­ny talk about it that explic­it­ly. But they were kind of onto this idea of, well, we have to design the work expe­ri­ence in such a way that peo­ple can feel these things that cre­ate this real­ly good pos­i­tive feed­back loop around kind of expe­ri­enc­ing work as play. And I think, I feel like it’s fair to call that play because I think those flow expe­ri­ences seem­ing­ly arise out of play expe­ri­ences or what we might describe as play.

Jor­dan (29:12):

Yeah. I don’t think there’s much dif­fer­ence. I real­ly don’t. Yeah, sure. Do kids get paid for play­ing games? No. And we get paid for work. Yes. That’s the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between the two. But the same is true. Busi­ness­es exist to make mon­ey. That’s why they exist. Some­one had an idea and they thought, I should build this prod­uct, or I should launch this ser­vice and peo­ple will pay for that ser­vice. And because they pay for that ser­vice or prod­uct, we will make mon­ey. That’s why it start­ed. There was a clear goal in mind and there was a clear path to that goal. And ide­al­ly the busi­ness own­er or the busi­ness founder or what­ev­er knew how to do it or had an idea exact­ly about how to accom­plish the goal. It’s no dif­fer­ent than when one of my kids, whether it’s my sev­en-year-old or my ten-year-old or my five-year-old, they pull out a board game and they’re like, let’s play.

(30:09):

They got the same thing in mind. They’re not think­ing, let’s play. I hope you win, right? Let’s play. I’m going to win. Right? That’s why they’re play­ing. They want to set up, they also spend time with me. So just, I don’t want to ignore that aspect. There is a kind of com­mu­nal aspect to this, but they want to achieve some­thing that — they’re feel­ing as though, Hey, I want to accom­plish some­thing today, so I’m going to blow out this game. I’m going to play with my dad and my mom, or both or what­ev­er, and I’m going to try to beat them. I’m going to try to win. There’s no dif­fer­ence. And we start­ed this com­pa­ny that we start­ed Fringe, and where’s our goal? Hey, we got an idea. Nobody’s doing this, right? We’ll get out there. We’ll own the cat­e­go­ry. We’ll win. And win­ning means dif­fer­ent things. It’s own­ing a cat­e­go­ry, it’s hav­ing a plat­form. It’s mak­ing mon­ey, it’s hir­ing peo­ple. A lot of things that you can dump into the cat­e­go­ry of what does win­ning look like. But in the end, we just want­ed to win. We just want­ed to win at a game. There’s no dif­fer­ence at all.

Jason (31:22):We got beat up by a few games before that.

Jor­dan (31:24):Yeah, exact­ly. Right. Yeah, total­ly. And it depends on your per­son­al­i­ty, but some­times the more you lose a game, the more you want to play it.

Jason (31:34):

So I find the idea of think­ing about our kids pulling out that board game, want­i­ng to play. One, not only do I res­onate with that and how that fuels and expe­ri­ences I had when I was a kid, but that same sense of can we cap­ture some of that feel­ing and dri­ve and kind of bring it into our work con­text where it’s like, yeah, I want to do it for the sake of doing it. I mean there’s a com­mu­nal aspect, like you said. And yeah, it feels like in play there’s a rela­tion­al aspect to all of it at some lev­el. Because you’re not going to just mean, there’s very few things that you play sus­tained by your­self for a long peri­od of time that are as enjoy­able as things that you can play with oth­ers. And so I think it’s just a real­ly cool idea to think about how do we bring that into the way that we approach our work or think about our work.

Jor­dan (32:30):

I think that sounds like the next episode of How Peo­ple Work. Does it? I think it’s what it sounds like to me. So let’s wrap up. Let’s end this episode. Let’s get to the next one next week. But before we fin­ish, you need to give me a word of the week for next week so I can be pre­pared for this.

Jason (32:49):I do. So the word of the week is going to be recuse.

Jor­dan (32:55):

Recuse. All right. I’m like you 90% sure I know what the def­i­n­i­tion of that exact­ly is. I will Google it before we get start­ed on record­ing next week. But thank you so much for lis­ten­ing to how peo­ple work. I feel like we ask our­selves one or two ques­tions this week, and then we talk for half an hour. So some­times that hap­pens that way. Hope you enjoyed lis­ten­ing. If you want to reach out to us, get on LinkedIn, find Jason Mur­ray, find me, Jor­dan Peace, send us a ques­tion. We’ve had some folks do that already, which we real­ly appre­ci­ate. It helps prompt us in terms of ques­tions to ask each oth­er, or even top­ics for unique episodes that we’ve yet to record. So please do reach out if you get a chance to do so. Thank you so much for lis­ten­ing. Bye-bye.

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