15five's Chief Culture Officer on 'The Great Resignation'

Shane Metcalf is the Chief Culture Officer at 15five. We talked about the great resignation now underway in the labor market as well as what you can do about it for your organization.

What is 15five?
15five is a human centered performance management platform that really helped organizations develop successful managers and unlock peak performance. And so we have a variety of solutions, everything from a continuous feedback. So check ins one-on-ones recognition to bowl, setting OKR goal planning to engagement.

We just actually acquired an incredible company called amplify that has, I think, one of the best engagement solutions out there that we've now incorporated into our offerings. And so there's the, that's the technology, that's the software side of the house, but then there's two other aspects that make us pretty unique education.

So we, we know that we can't just give people a tool and expect them to change all their behavior and their mindset. So we have a really robust education offering, both one to many courses, as well as more white glove consulting for manager training and enablement, OKR training, et cetera, et cetera, and then community, because we want to create more community for HR and for managers so that we can be on this journey of upleveling together because you know, the responsibilities and what's being asked of us in HR in 2021 is very different than what was being asked of us in 2011, let alone in 2001 or 1991.

How important is the employee engagement piece?
I think that the, our own understanding of what is an employee engagement really mean has evolved quite a bit. There's a lot of social science out there now that's showing what are the deeper human motivators? What are the drivers of engagement that we maybe weren't including in the biannual engagement surveys of yesterday?

And so part of what we do is we, we mined the academic, social science of human thriving and build that into our products. So we're deeply aligned with what the science says can actually help create highly engaged high-performing teams. And, you know, I mean, people weren't ever measuring things like rest before as a part of their, their engagement surveys.

And that's something we do. We can tell you, Hey, are your employees approaching burnout? Is there, do people feel like they can actually take time off and take a, take a break to recharge?

What can employers discover through feedback?
there's, there's a lot because I think that this whole conversation about the great, the great recession or the great turnover and how do we keep highly, how do we keep our top performers and all of these things that comes down to communication that comes down to first of all, how not taking your people for granted and then engaging in dialogue with them around what do they want and how are things going and what do they need to be successful and what are their ambitions in life?

And if you be in a more continuous conversation with your people around these things, you'll know if they're thinking about leaving, you'll know if you can actually provide them what they really want. And so I think that this great turnover is actually an incredible moment for HR to understand, Hey, look, not all turnover is bad.

Sometimes if somebody in your company is burnt out and we've all just been through a heck of a 18 months. Yeah. Sometimes that's actually really going to be a positive win-win for both you, the company, as well as the individual, because sometimes we just need a fresh start. Sometimes we can't kind of turn the engine over in our current role. Yep. And that's when I would say embrace the turnover as a positive thing, because that person's going to get a fresh start and you'll be able to hire somebody into your company.

That's that you're their fresh start. And so I don't think all turnover is bad. And B if you can really get some, some of these disciplines in place around continuous feedback loops inside of your company, so that you're asking the right questions on a regular basis, and you're having transparent non-anonymous dialogue with employees and managers about critical topics. And then you do anonymous feedback, you get anonymous feedback and that's the engagement surveys.

So that at a global level, as a people leader, you can have that instrument panel. And then you can know where the squeaky wheels are. You know, where do we need to put extra attention? Who are the managers that are struggling to create engage teams? We either need to coach this manager up, or we need to have a difficult conversation with that manager.

How is 15five handling return to the office?
We're making no mandates about people needing to come into the, even the people that are in the hubs, the places where we do have offices, we're not mandating that people need to be in there X number of days, because you know what, the people that want to be in the office, they're going to be in the office. And that's where they're going to do their best work. Yeah.

The people that have really found their flow and have really found, Hey, this works for me to not commute this. I get more time with my family. I can, I could actually get more deep work done, then great. Do your best work at home. You know, w we've a really big key to making hybrid culture work is getting together in person once a year, once or twice a year. And this is something that I really encourage everybody to do. That's experimenting with hybrid approaches is create an annual company retreat, create department retreats. So that's what we do once a year.

We bring everybody together in person for these incredible company retreats. And then every department, once a year gets together with their own department. And yeah, there's a little bit of work involved in there's some money, but this is one of the best things you can do for retention and culture team building.

How can employers retain staff in the job market?
So, okay. So first of all, don't take your people for granted, you know, eh, in the kind of Netflix sports team analogy where we're, we're these world-class teams that are working together to win a championship. We're not families that it's just about unconditional love, but we're working together to actually achieve a certain goal. Don't take your people for granted, make sure that you are listening to them, that you're understanding what are their drivers.

And, you know, one of the best ways to do this that is just easy to do. Very practical is to do what we call, stay interviews. A lot of companies do exit interviews. You know, when somebody is out the door, tell us about your experience here. What could we have done better, yada, yada, yada. And there's good data from that, but infinitely more valuable is identify the people you want to stay in your company and sit down with them.

And it's at bet it's best to do this with a manager, but HR can also perform this and sit down and go through a series of questions around the thing. Hey, like, first of all, Chris, thanks so much for choosing to work here at 50 and five, and we really value you. And we want to know what would, what would have to be true for it to be a no-brainer for you to still be working here a year from today.

And there's other various questions you can dig into, but it's essentially asking people, what would it take for you to stay? And then people can say, well, you know, I have been looking at the market and I could make a lot more money somewhere else for the same role, or I could probably get a better title. And I'm really, I really care about titles.

I'm really ambitious. And I ultimately want to be a CEO or, you know, an executive one day. And I want to make sure that I'm making steady progress towards that. And then you get to have that conversation around is that person demonstrating those competencies and is ready for a promotion, but you get to be in dialogue and actual, you know, on the same page, talking about the truth of what doopy what's the business want and what does the person want? You know, those are those,