3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat with James La Brash, Founding Managing Director at InFlight

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3Sixty Insights welcomed James La Brash late last week to the latest episode of #HRTechChat. James is founding managing director of InFlight. Truth be told, James and I have had the pleasure of engaging in several conversations, and we finally concluded that we should try to capture in the podcast as many of the great ideas we’ve discussed as possible. As anyone can imagine, there just wasn’t enough time to cover everything, but we did get to a lot of it.

The launching pad for our discussion in the video here is the idea that there just might be some room for human capital management and marketing — the CHRO and CMO — to cooperate, benefiting from mutual data analytics wherever possible. Furthermore, we noted that marketing has a roughly 10-year head start on HCM in the former’s appreciation for measuring its effectiveness, and that CHROs may therefore learn a few things from CMOs in the interest of accelerating HCM’s own foray into measuring its effectiveness. The conversation took off from there. Here’s a sampling of the subject matter James and I have covered since first speaking, much of it captured in the podcast:

  • With good intentions, many in talent acquisition have recognized the similarities (beyond the acronyms) of systems for customer relationship management and candidate relationship management. It’s a good impulse. It’s also good not to follow it to the extreme, as the parallels between customers’ and candidates’ needs are there, but limited.
  • Are the employer and consumer brand separate? Or, are they one and the same? If it’s the latter, is it preferable for HCM and marketing alike to treat them as one or as two. Is the answer, “sometimes”?
  • In some industries, it makes especially good sense for HCM and marketing to partner. Examples are when the typical employee is desk-less or semi-desk-less or otherwise interacts directly with customers day-to-day. These employees become the expression of the brand, so employer and company brand are one and the same
  • We all know that great marketing and a great employee experience contribute mightily to organizational success, in and outside the general ledger, but it’s notoriously difficult or impossible to quantify financially these domains’ overall benefits to the organization. Could it be that it’s because in order to prove that financially quantifiable connection, you have to measure the totality of HCM or marketing, and this just isn’t possible because of the many moving parts within these domains?
  • One way to chip away at this apparent impasse is to introduce leadership to the idea of brand damage — i.e., that it’s potentially expensive and avoidable. This may be a viable bridge to get us to the ideal future, when organizations understand the benefits of positive brand (employer or consumer) as a point of excellence to pursue.

There’s much more. You just have to watch. We again thank James for joining #HRTechChat.

Our #HRTechChat Series is also available as a podcast on the following platforms:

See a service missing that you use? Let our team know by emailing research@3SixtyInsights.com

Transcript

Well welcome everyone to the latest edition of HR tech chat. Is it edition or episode? Well, edition works, I guess. With us today, we have James La Brash, who is founding Managing Director of InFlight. Welcome. Thank you for joining us. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, we were talking the other day, on the back channel,

James La Brash 00:34
just

Brent Skinner 00:35
around what InFlight does. And we started talking about as these conversations go around all sorts of possibilities around HCM and, and then we start talking about marketing too. And, and we thought, you know, this, this might be a really good basis for a discussion on HR tech chat. So here we are, let me just sort of lay the groundwork here for or just kind of give our give our viewers their, their bearings here. What we sort of landed on is this idea that there’s enough in and I’ve, you and I, we’ve both seen this in, in the sort of the meta discussion out there in the in the chatter out there in the space, right, this idea that, you know, there’s some ways for marketing and HCM to really to collaborate or learn from each other in this space. And some of it might revolve around analytics. And let me just give, let me just share another area where I’ve seen this discussion. You know, when we talk about HCM, obviously, we’re talking about HR, all of it, the whole thing, HR, learning, payroll, talent, acquisition, a few other things. I mean, I’ve seen in talent acquisition, the idea that candidate relationship management should be, should be modeled after customer relationship management. We’ve seen this idea out there, but but we were we were thinking about analytics and marketing and all this. So what’s what’s your take on all that?

James La Brash 02:09
How long have you have? So the thing that the thing that I’ve noticed happening in the last the last few years, and it’s accelerating, is the I guess it started with a kind of on the TA side with, with the development and kind of the emergence of employer brand, as a concept. And some organizations, I think, by default, ta owns employer brand. Some organizations though, started to realize that, well, maybe you because marketing owns the, the outward, the outward facing image. And you mean, when you’re reaching out to candidates, that is outward facing? And so should marketing have at least a seat at the table, when it comes to employ your brand? Or, you know, are they are they doing their thing for the Academy in isolation, and in ta is then taking maybe some of their design and visual cues, but otherwise owning completely new employer brand without the further marketing involvement. And so that conversation, I think, what’s happened has been happening at a lot of a lot of organizations, including some of our customers, and there’s just some, some interesting, some interesting things to to learn into infer there. And so it’s progressed, I think, now as we’re talking about employer brand, being not just for the purposes of attracting new talent, but kind of for strengthening, strengthening your ties with with current employees, you know, retention and all of those other goals, what, what then should the relationship be between ta marketing HCM and it because at the end of the day, at least a lot of the visual aspects of employer brand need to get implemented somewhere and the systems that that folks use day in day out. So, kind of that that really the interesting Trinity, right that’s forming between marketing it and HCM is one that your was really not present just a few years ago, but which is I think, you by, by the accused that we’re seeing gaining some steam.

Brent Skinner 05:02
That’s interesting. Could you get into that a little bit more? around? How does that because I’ve heard, I’ve heard the same thing, this idea that, that HCM marketing and it are beginning to sort of align, and to in terms of, in the ways that you mentioned. So I want to throw a couple other ideas out there too. One is, we hear about employer brand, and then we talk about the company brand, or the consumer brand, or whatever the brand of the thing that the company is, is is selling, right? Are is there more than one brand? are we really talking? Are we sort of artificially creating partitions? Here? Are is are these just two expressions of of the of the same brand? Like, is brand, just brand? Does it? Is it? Is it all? Is it the entire thing? That’s a I don’t know the answer to this.

James La Brash 06:09
I don’t either. And the and, you know, I would say I’m dangerously unqualified to speak in to speak on the subject. But I think inherently, we can inherently we can agree that, that it all starts, it all starts somewhere, right? It’s in this concept of you. And it’s been expressed in different ways. You know, your culture or creed or whatever. But it’s the none of it is, Hey, what are you all about? And I think that, yeah, there are different expressions of that, depending on what, you know, what you’re trying to communicate. But those are the those are the headwaters, right. What are you all about? What are you all about in terms of the product that you make? What do you care about? And that gets, that gets reflected then individually for the, you know, in the stories that you’re trying to tell? Are you trying to tell that story as it relates to your product? Or are you trying to tell that story as it relates to what it’s like to work there? But it’s all it all has kind of a common root?

Brent Skinner 07:24
Is it? Is it being communicated centrally from a central location? Are we equipping our employees to be expressions of the brand?

James La Brash 07:38
Well, I think that’s where that’s where that that collaboration has between HCM. And marketing has so much potential. Right? Because you don’t want those things you don’t want those things working in opposition. And certainly, there’s efficiency to begin by, by telling the different expressions of the same story, as opposed to trying to tell two different stories within one organization. So yeah, that’s the I think that’s the really exciting point, the exciting part, rather, is, is to have those groups working together. So that, you know, what’s being communicated to the outside world is the same is really the same things being communicated inside.

Brent Skinner 08:27
And that’s really, that’s interesting, because that’s a that’s almost a an efficiency play. For brand.

James La Brash 08:36
Is Yeah, yeah. Without question, you know, because the, if you’re, yeah, if you’re working across purposes, of course, or even just working in in silos, somewhere, there’s either going to be distortion of distortion of the message, or you could have probably done it more efficiently if, if working together. So I think that’s, that’s the really exciting part of this.

Brent Skinner 09:02
Yeah.

Brent Skinner 09:03
Could you get into just delve into a little bit more around it? Is it his role? just elaborate, what does it his role in this? How does

James La Brash 09:15
a really good question so I think the it is where really, it’s where the rubber meets the road in terms of making sure that the, the visual and other experience aspects of the brand, make it to the make it to the end consumers of that brand, be they have to be the outside external or internal. And so, there is I think there’s you referred to it earlier, there’s a temptation to to look at, you know, CRM, CRM systems, isn’t it? sample that marketing is used and say, Hey, those are working, you know, these are working great for marketing and that technology is, you know, 10 years, 10 years, arguably, maybe five, but certainly a little bit past where were candidate centric CRM technologies are at, why don’t we want to use that that’s a, that’s a temptation. And in a lot of cases, it’s, it’s valid. I think there’s maybe, maybe too much in our industry have a, let’s say, a, NO to temptation, but, but a desire to put candidates in the same box as products and say, you know, that’s selling it, whether you’re talented talent acquisition is just a different form of selling. So, you know, why don’t we use the same tools and the same approaches, right, if we’re trying to entice somebody to take a take a position with us, it’s sort of the same as, as, as you’re buying some of our products or services, when really, you know, it’s its own animal. And so definitely does in in a lot of cases require specialized treatment. But the, I think there’s a lot of lessons that can be learned from, from the experiences that that marketing and e commerce have gone through to bring, you know, to put their best foot forward, digitally, you know, prior to this becoming such a, such a huge requirement for TA and HCM to do and so the, I think, as it is involved, because really, a lot of a lot of your brand, both external and internal, is kind of about, you know, we think of it in terms of digital real estate, right, because it’s, your digital real estate says a lot about you as an organization, and you’re just like, just like your physical real estate used to communicate, you know, for decades, right, you tell a lot about an organization, if they have a skyscraper downtown, versus, you know, then the other in a strip mall somewhere, you can infer a lot about that, about that organization. And so similarly, you know, if you don’t know, a particular organization, well, you can infer a ton about that organization’s values, be aware, they, what they care about, based on the digital real estate that they’re presenting to the, to the world, and so are your outward and inward facing systems, do they look more like you know, a well polished skyscraper or a strip mall. And so I think it’s it his role is really in making sure that that that brand is communicated through the through employee and candidate and, and consumer tools, and, you know, to the best of their ability.

Brent Skinner 13:15
So, it is a caretaker of the digital real estate that that that communicates to the outside world and the market externally it internally to the existing employee population, that this is a brand that’s that that cares about itself that are you know, that yeah, that you know, it’s, it’s the equivalent of having, you know, a well manicured lawn versus something that’s just, you know, unruly like I did last year, at the beginning of the grass season, where one week it was it just wasn’t growing then and waited one week there was one strong rainfall and all of a sudden I looked like an abandoned house. It was crazy when my landscaper guys who were backed up so it looks like that for a while because my riding lawnmower got killed by mice the summer before anyone else. Sorry for that tangent but I wish I’d had an IT team to tend to buy my digital real estate there metaphorically speaking. You know, going back to the CRM thing I know there was a tangent but it’s so interesting to me. You’re right. You know when you’re when you’re prospected because a CRM obviously that’s where sales folks will keep you know, keep track where that’s where you track what’s happening with the sales process well while there are there are exceptions. For the most part, every prospect is a potential. Every prospect you want. You want to win every prospect you want everyone to become a new customer. But with candidate outreach Right, you know, at the end of the day, you don’t want all those job seekers, you’re selecting them. Right. So, so maybe you know that that. So that’s one idea. That’s one big difference. And there’s also a number of idiosyncrasies to the process that are that are different, right? And so maybe you could have, if you had a situation where you wanted to that were you were a recruiter prospecting exclusively, high value, passive talent, right? So, you know, for almost with, you know, with 99% certainty that if they said, yes, you would definitely hire them. Right, then maybe you would want something that’s very much like a see, like, customer relationship management system. for that. That’s, that’s just I’m hypothesizing there kind of go. But and then, so just to kind of paint the picture about what we’re talking about, right, then you would want to have marketing’s input on that as well. And you wouldn’t, and he would want it involved to make sure that that whatever that that digital environment, is that that that that perspective, high value passive talent, potential employees seeing is, is, you know, top notch.

James La Brash 16:19
Yeah, you without question? Right. And there’s, that’s where that’s another, that’s another realm really where you, we have, we have now the ability to draw from the lessons learned in, in digital engagement. Right, there was sort of, I would say, pioneered really, or at least really further developed in the world of in the world of e commerce, right? We know, we know what the playbook is for you for compelling a user to perform a certain task, right? It’s why it’s why you see one click ordering. And you know, that, that road, that road towards that goal on the e commerce side is paved. Right, and there’s no in the nothing that nothing that we see when we’re you shopping, or in the process of checking out at Amazon, nothing we see is there by mistake. You know, it’s all been, it’s all been really carefully fine tuned, you know, over years and years and, and your millions of transactions to achieve that goal. Right, and really pave that road. And so we can use then those same tactics that are now be really well understood for, for tasks that face candidates, particularly in in those hard to fill situations, if we can establish, you know, they pave a road for very hard to fill positions, then absolutely, we should do so. And like I said, the playbook, the playbook is pretty well known at this point. And we can also we can further extend that that logic into the organization so that it’s not, you know, so it’s not a bait and switch situation where our candidate facing digital real estate is is glorious, but then as soon as that person is hired, you know, there are there are weeds growing everywhere.

Brent Skinner 18:35
Right,

Brent Skinner 18:36
right. Right, you want there needs to be sort of a way to put it differently. The organization needs to consider the employer brand from a holistic standpoint and be authentic in, in that expression of that employer brand needs to be well hold on. It needs to be needs to be there needs to be consistency,

James La Brash 19:04
consistent. Yeah, consistency, I think is a really important part of it. If you don’t want to create that impression that, you know, hey, hey, new hire you we’re just sold a bill of goods. But the but I think and I think the certainly the intent, that’s never the intent. Right? It’s just a question of, you know, where do you Where do you focus limited resources, and especially in in realms where there’s such scarce talent, of course, that’s going to be the first focus but the more and more organizations are realizing that that say that internal facing systems require, you know, some degree of upkeep as well. And yeah, having input from, from marketing, I think can drive some efficiencies that make that that possible for lower cost and then doing it a sign up.

Brent Skinner 20:07
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It. let’s get into marketing a little bit more. Because one of the things that we talked about previously was just in there’s, there’s a loose analogy here to you know that the CRM systems are a little, maybe five to 10 years ahead of the candidate relationship management systems in terms of their sophistication. And, and so leaving that aside that there’s a loose analogy with this idea that marketing’s in terms of bleeding edge, right. So marketing has been what I would say is five to 10 years ahead of HCM in terms of understanding and understanding analytics and using them and paying attention to them to quantify in as many ways possible, their impact on organizational goals. Right. And, and so let’s talk about that a little bit. Because we I recall that we got into some interesting things around value, what’s the value of marketing? What’s evaluates him?

Brent Skinner 21:13
these sorts of things? I can tell you, you already have a few thoughts there.

James La Brash 21:19
Yeah. Well, the I think you’re part of what we were, we were speaking about last time was, was really the that difficulty in, in measuring or quantifying the impact of employer brand, right? How do you how do you do that? And, and, and the conversation led to Well, hey, that’s, you know, that’s a problem that that’s a problem that marketing has had for DSS since its inception, right, when you’re doing when you were, when you’re carrying out specific marketing activities, you can measure things like the leads that a particular campaign has, has generated. But how do you how do you measure the impact of your of your brand? And so that’s a problem. That’s a problem that’s fairly new to, to HR, but one that is not new to marketing. So I think there might be some really interesting conversations that that happen within each organization as to how, how that might be measured, and therefore, you know, where’s the best allocation of resources?

Brent Skinner 22:42
Yeah, and I’m not sure where I love to be the fly on the wall. And some of those conversations, yeah, like, it really is. Because I’m just sort of grasping at thin air here, you know, in terms of what exactly would it be but, but, but it is true that that marketing must like HCM? Well, if we think about marketing, and so marketing’s ultimate goal, beyond, beyond, you know, beyond the its transcendent goal beyond providing actionable quality leads to sales, right, which, which, which is the highly quantifiable, highly quantifiable aspect of on the organization, the effective the success of sales, right. But beyond that, it has sort of a transcendent goal of, of creating a strong, compelling brand for the organization, that’s, that’s marketing, sort of, you know, third eye goal, if you will, right. Yeah, that’s right. And then HCM it’s, you know, has actually, you know, an almost perfectly aligned goal of, of in terms of a transcendent goal of creating a really strong compelling employer brand. And that gets us back to this question of, you know, is it even does an organization really have more than one brand is it all just the same thing is just aspects of it a be going back to HCM? Right, they also have this, this sort of cost set, they have a cost reduction, productivity efficiencies type of goal that they you know, they need to be really tight with Fw FM and the payroll system has to be good. So that so that they can be so that they can keep those costs as low as possible, right. So, each domain of the organization has two sort of totally different goals right? To what they do. And where was I going with this? Okay, so part of it so the so the less like, sort of the book boring stuff for each of them. In a way, it’s kind of the boring stuff, for lack of a better word, you know that the more straightforward, less creative stuff, right is where they is where the organization is where they affect the general ledger in the organization. And then there’s also all this other stuff that they absolutely have to do. But it’s, it’s very difficult or impossible to quantify it financially. And this, this is where we landed last time. Was this this idea? Where so? How do you? How do you show leadership in your organization? Like how do you make leadership, all stakeholders and leadership understand and appreciate what you’re doing in HCM more marketing for that matter?

25:53
When

Brent Skinner 25:54
when only half of what you’re doing is something that shows up? On the bottom, like in the general ledger for them?

James La Brash 26:02
Oh, that’s a that’s a great question branch. And I wish I had the answer. I think the there are, there are a lot of folks that there are a lot of folks that will turn to turn to surveys, right? pulse surveys, and this sort of thing. Again, this is this is the challenge of figuring out what’s the impact of and measuring? what’s the what’s the impact of your, of your branding activity. Is, is you and it’s a real, it’s a real problem. And so, if you want to be able to demonstrate that these activities are, are working in some regard, then then yeah, you’re going to turn to something that is, you know, the things that things that maybe marketing has used for consumer brand, your tests, basically asking 1000 people at the mall, you know, what they what they think of Pepsi, or whatever. And that’s a lot of, in a lot of a lot of cases that sort of the best we can do to measure, you know, how, you know how well we’re doing with certain aspects, especially of our of our branding activities, but I don’t think I don’t think there’s any perfect fit, right? Because there are, there are so many, so many individual contributors to the premise of the of the premise of brand. And you know, how you feel about it about something, there are so many different inputs and so isolating, trying to isolate, you know, hey, did activity, did activity x have a positive or negative impact on overall brand? It’s very, very hard to isolate.

Brent Skinner 28:02
And it’s interesting, I was in the car with my wife’s youngest son. And, and we, we were talking for some reason, we started talking about Coke and Pepsi. And he says, he was just being facetious. But he says, He says, Pepsi is trash. And I said, What are you talking about? I said, I love Pepsi. I like them both. He said, No. And I remembered that we did a taste test a while back office, and I used to work. Just as for fun, we did the taste test. Do

James La Brash 28:31
you did the Pepsi challenge?

Brent Skinner 28:33
Yeah, we did. And I remember think, well, we had to decide, okay, which was Pepsi in which was coke. And I was absolutely certain that, um, that what I tasted is coke with the coke that I tasted was actually Pepsi. But, and, and it but it was coke. And I went into that whole thing expecting because I like Pepsi.

James La Brash 28:57
Yeah, when you just love the underdog.

Brent Skinner 29:02
But you know, what occurred to me in that that example that you share just now is okay, as a marketing outfit, I go out there, and I survey existing customers and ask them what they think of my brand, right? And then based on that, based on that, you know, you can show you can show the results of that to leadership in the organization. And I would bet that the leader organizational leadership would take that information very seriously and say, well, well, crap. You know, if it’s a bad if it’s bad results, well, while we’re about to lose a bunch of customers, and that’s bad news, and we’re gonna have to find new customers, right? Okay. Well, if I’m HCM, and I do that kind of a survey of my employees and they come back with some bad information, bring that to leadership. One, one argument would say, yeah, leadership should take that very seriously because you have a bunch of employees that are about to leave, right? But then But then you might say, Well, that depends on what’s, you know, what kind of job market? Are we in? Can we get new employees easily? How, how valuable our employees are our employees really to what we’re doing and all these sorts of things. And so it is a very different conversation.

James La Brash 30:20
I, I agree with you, I mean, the, like, the underlying idea is that, you know, not to be to be too, too pessimistic or whatever, but, but brand perception only matters. When, when, when there’s freedom of choice, the Right, right, you can choose, you can choose arbitrarily Coke or Pepsi. And in a market with, you know, sub 5% unemployment, you don’t even lower in, in certain segments, you’re the importance of employer brand, the focus on employer brand is only there, because kind of the underlying the underlying issue is that your, your employees have freedom of choice, they can, they can go elsewhere. But, you know, in scenarios where there’s 10% plus unemployment, then then their natural predisposition to move will be will be a lot less and hence, you know, the, the focus or the the importance on an employer brand will be will be reduced. I mean, that’s, that’s pretty cool. But it’s the reality, it’s, it’s a freedom of choice.

Brent Skinner 31:46
It is. And it’s also, you know, but what’s interesting, it’s defaulting to, to the concrete, sort of the, the general ledger, the accounting view of the organization, which is, which is kind of interesting, and what it is so, in I agree with you 100% there. And so, Prem, I want to preface what I’m about to say by saying that, that I agree with you, so, but what’s interesting is that you look at COVID-19 in the lockdowns, right, and there were there were a lot of layoffs, just cold, hard layoffs, because we had sort of a, you know, almost a caricature expression of, of the accounting view of the organization, because it was real, it was, you know, at some point, it’s like, you know, you literally cannot afford to keep people on, right, it’s not so much that you’re deciding that you decide that you don’t have enough money to keep people on or you can just literally have enough not have enough money to keep people on. But at the same time, concurrently, there was a massive fixation, out of necessity, on improving the, or at least, maintaining the employee experience, because there was a disruption at the same time with people were like suddenly moving into completely different types of work scenarios, logistically speaking. So that to me is interesting. Right. So we had these two completely at odds, things happening at the same time, layoffs on a massive scale, and a huge like an explosion in the in the focus on the employee experience.

James La Brash 33:40
Yeah, I think the, the, the two things, I think two things at play there. The first, and you know, I appreciate you agreeing with me 100% on the last the last statement about, about the bread being brand being a really about freedom, or underpinned by freedom of choice, maybe there’s, I only agree with myself 90%. The other 10% that that plays in here is one of the situations where the where the analog between either the brand as it affects employees and brand is it affects consumers, where that where that analog breaks down, and that’s in that’s in Higher, higher productivity, right? Because you can’t really you don’t really measure that with a consumer brand and you don’t really attempt to optimize that with a consumer brand or a consumer experience. Whereas employee experience efforts, not only are they there to promote employee retention, it’s also you know, How can we make current employees happier, happier, and therefore more productive? while they’re while they’re still here? And so, the first thing, the first thing, that’s the first factor in that in the huge surge in employee experience is I think that right is that it’s not just about, it’s not just about, you know, retention, it’s also about productivity. And as people have to adapt to new ways of working, yeah, hey, we need to, we need to keep people keep people as productive as possible. And not just new environments, but also new stresses, right? This is unprecedented in terms of the amount of, of stress from all kinds of different vectors, that it’s that is poured on us. And so hey, what can we, you know, how can we, how can we tackle that? Because, you know, that, at the end of the day, we’re all we’re all people, and we care about the people that we work with? And how do we, how do we make things better for them? How do we better understand, you know, who among our among our employee population might be having a rougher go than others? And how do we do that? How do we do that at scale? So that, you know, that we can help those people. So I think there’s, there’s really a kind of a benign motivation to it. And I think the other, the other aspect that’s kind of contributing to maybe that that difference or dichotomy between organizations that are dealing with lots of layoffs, and at the same time, in huge investment in other sectors in employee experience is simply that the, the pandemic is unemployment is never is never ever kind of uniformly distributed across. Right, all skills and vocations. But particularly in the in the pandemic, it’s really polarized. The, the unemployment rates, because you see, you know, some, some professions having you’re having layoffs, and, and, you know, hospitality, hospitality, you know, stands out as one that’s taking just a huge hit. whereas others are a continue to be near zero unemployment. And so it’s kind of figuring out how, how, then, especially if you’re an organization that that might employ groups of people in, you know, in both, or kind of across the across the spectrum? How best you do you meet the needs of each of those types of populations? Yeah, yeah.

Brent Skinner 38:04
I mean, you just hit a bunch of great points. One of them, I want to, like, go back to those. And we’re, we are running, we should probably wrap up soon. Because I think,

James La Brash 38:15
yeah, I just I just noticed, I just noticed that the client was looking, I laughing when you said that you just hit a bunch of great points. And it’s like, I finally hit those with four minutes left to go.

Brent Skinner 38:29
Great points peppered across the whole time. But, but you know, doing it at scale, ensuring, ensuring the employee experiences is top notch at scale. that’s a that’s a technology. That’s a technology thing right there. But going back to it, looking at it, sort of the 50,000 foot view, really this year, we’ve seen essentially, we’ve seen a tacit admission that that happier employees are more productive, and yet, and yet, how do you and yet how do you measure it other than benchmarking before and after, which doesn’t work for an accounting general ledger, like an accounting accountants sheet, but other than benchmarking, marking for from for before and after this really, you can’t show a line that says a happier employee. I don’t know of one where you can actually prove that and actually, you know, sort of extract that down into the balance sheet. And so that’s interesting to me is, but at the same time, we’ve tacitly admitted that, but yes, happier employees are people. employees that feel safer, or feel provided for who feel respected

39:57
will perform better

James La Brash 40:00
Yeah, I think I, you weather the weather you they call the discipline industrial psychology, which is sounds a little bit cold for some reason or organizational behavior? I think there is. Yeah, there are. There were a lot of there are a lot of studies that existed in the past that that, that I think conclusively demonstrated that and, and it makes it one of those things that makes you make sense in our in our hearts and minds. Right. But I think the over this past year, there’s just there’s a wealth of material, you know, to feed PhD theses around the Oh, yeah. Around the world with fodder that that this is that overall, overall, happy, happy and more engaged. workers do better work. And I think it’s just one of one of those things that that we’ve all kind of known intrinsically, but yeah, hopefully this year, we’ll, we’ll see a lot of concrete proof points.

Brent Skinner 41:18
Exactly. What a great place to land a wonderful thing. Thanks so much, James, for joining us for HR tech chat. This has been really illuminating. This is super interesting stuff.

James La Brash 41:31
Oh, my pleasure, Brad. Thank you very much for having me. Absolutely.

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