Join Pamela Stroko in listening to this podcast where Pamela interviews Tim Bristow, the COO of ProHabits to hear how campaigns, driven by daily nudges, supported by data, can deliver exceptional business results. ProHabits is a sustainable “how” that can be applied at every level of an organization, and to any set of goals or objectives. And the best thing about ProHabits is that it helps build leadership capability and capacity—your leaders have a great tool that helps them connect with their people and support them is their work and career development.
Our #HRTechChat Series is also available as a podcast on the following platforms:
Apple iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3sixty-insights/id1555291436?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0eZJI1FqM3joDA8uLc05zz
Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/3sixty-insights
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-965220588
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6aDtrRPYoCIrnkeOYZRpAQ/
iHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-3sixty-insights-78293678/
Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zb3VuZGNsb3VkLmNvbS91c2Vycy9zb3VuZGNsb3VkOnVzZXJzOjkyNDY0ODI1OS9zb3VuZHMucnNz
Amazon Music & Audible: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7e7d809b-cb6c-4160-bacf-d0bb90e22f7c
PlayerFM: https://player.fm/series/3sixty-insights
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/3sixtyinsights/
Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/iaopd0r7
blubrry: https://blubrry.com/1460785/
Castbox: https://castbox.fm/channel/id4113025
ivoox: https://www.ivoox.com/en/perfil-3sixty-insights_a8_listener_25914379_1.html
Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/us/show/3029712
Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/3sixty-insights/PC:1000613511
Listen Notes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/3sixty-insights-3sixty-insights-DgeU6AW42hn/
PodBean: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/9nugf-1e0a27/3Sixty-Insights-Podcast
Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/3sixty-insights-1718242
Podcast Addict: https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/3sixty-insights/3319198
Tune In: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business–Economics-Podcasts/3Sixty-Insights-TechChat-p1529087/
Audacy: https://www.audacy.com/podcast/3sixty-insights-hrtechchat-1ccab
See a service missing that you use? Let our team know by emailing research@3SixtyInsights.com.
Transcript:
Pamela Stroko 00:00
Hi, everyone. I’m Pamela Stroko, and I’d like to welcome you all to the #HRTechChat sponsored by the analyst, firm 3Sixty Insights. I’m the director and Principal Analyst at 3Sixty. And I’m so excited to welcome all of you today to hear about how we can change the behaviors of the disconnected workforce. And so we’re going to be talking about how connection is the key to exceptional business performance. And joining me today is Tim Bristow, who is the Chief Operating Officer ProHabits. And what I really like about ProHabits as I looked at it, its solution and how it helps organizations is it is a real solution with measurable results on how we can connect people to the work that they’re doing. connect people to the organization create belonging, improve retention, by using a simple tool, and a simple practice that has powerful results. So Tim, why don’t you start telling us about how ProHabits got started and what you’re trying to do in the workforce today?
Tim Bristow 01:16
Thanks, Pamela. You’re absolutely right. Today’s workforce is extremely disconnected, I think that’s really exacerbated by two factors. One, of course, this shift towards hybrid slash remote, there’s no longer the watercooler, the cohabitation of the workspace, where connection just naturally did come to play and come to happen. And then to there’s a cultural move towards this distrust in institutions, right. And so with that, the individuals who work for these large enterprises, they feel like cogs in a machine, and there’s often such a lack of connection to what do I do day in and day out? And how does that actually connect to and contribute to the value my organization’s bringing, and our ability to achieve our strategic goals? And so as we thought through, how do we address this connection, we came to a realization that we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. And what we did is we tried to learn from marketers.
Pamela Stroko 02:13
And I liked that, because what we know, marketers do is they know how to engage an audience, they know how to engage a marketplace. And tell me more about how the marketing approach helps create better performance at the individual level and at the organization level.
Tim Bristow 02:34
So as I said, we didn’t reinvent didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. And so what we did is we tried to take the same tools, technologies, and really discipline that marketers have in mind, to help to create in their case connections between the consumer and the brands they represent. And in our case between employees and the organizations they work for. And so what we came to is a very simple solution, which is, let’s run employee campaigns, the same way marketers run campaigns externally, let’s run campaigns internally.
Pamela Stroko 03:02
So tell me about, you know, I’ve read a bit about some of the things your customers and clients are working on. But tell me about the campaigns and how they’re working. And, and, and the results that they’re seeing, like, like, tell me what, basically, I want to know what they’re doing and how was working?
Tim Bristow 03:24
Absolutely. Maybe one thing I want to highlight about campaigns and sort of how we think about structuring them is they’re designed to do two things, one to connect input to output. So that campaigns to the actual results and objectives that matter to the business, and to create signal through noise. So we can think about the structure of a campaign, we have an objective, what are we trying to achieve as an organization, then we have an audience who within that organization, which employees actually contribute towards that objective. Three is the content that’s delivered to those audiences in service to that objective. And we’re really for us what we think differentiates a lot of what we do, from what we see in the market. And I would say a more traditional approach to communicating and engaging with employees is what we call a call to action, again, something that exists very clearly in the marketing and advertising world. And for us, it moves beyond internally, it moves beyond just this concept of, I’m aware as an employee, I’m aware that something’s happening or okay, that there’s going to be a change to there’s a very clear, concise, in our case, small action that I can take, whether it’s day in and day out once a week, at whatever point I received this message that can help me contribute towards this goal, right. It helped me work as an individual and as a team towards the outcomes that we’re actually trying to achieve as a larger organization.
Pamela Stroko 04:42
So give me an example of in and I think one I read about that I was very curious about is how these campaigns are helping improve safety performance in organizations and that could include everything from reducing workman’s compensation costs to reducing incidents in a workplace? Tell me how it’s impacting safety in a positive way?
Tim Bristow 05:09
Absolutely. I mean, at the end of the day, we all whether we work with our hands or work in front of computers, we all want to get home safe. And ask any professional in the safety space, the safety field, the number one driver of incidences or injuries is human behavior. So again, creating a connection to try to connect what the individual does and their experience to the larger outcome. That is the organization safety metrics to their workers comp, to all of the associated costs with safety, as well as the general value for the individuals experience and individual life. What we want to do is we want to help individuals do the right things. So we have launched campaigns with some of our clients that are targeted at their Omicron ground hands on workers to help create a connection because the mothership, the like enterprise organization, doesn’t have that daily connection with them, we use our campaigns to help them stay safe to be mindful, and to maximize the chance that they do the right things so as to avoid in this case and unsafe outcome.
Pamela Stroko 06:14
That’s amazing. And, you know, I think that’s something that every organization is dealing with, like you said, it doesn’t matter. You know, what role you have, everybody wants to create a safe experience. Now, I have to tell you, I was at a meeting, oh, a couple months ago, maybe not even but was with the Center for sales leadership at DePaul University. And we got to talking about quotas. And there isn’t a sales manager, I know, that is happy with quota attainment for their entire team. In fact, in my experience, over the years and actually working in sales enablement, what I learned is, is that sometimes as little as 20% of the workforce in sales is actually delivering on their quota. And I was talking to some of the professors there. And what they said was, is that it’s all about connection and coaching. And oftentimes, manager sales managers don’t have the time to connect and coach with everyone. And so what you see is so it may start out doing pretty well during onboarding, and then is there’s less connection and less coaching, you see the quota performance decline. And I was exciting to hear that pro habits has an approach to how you can increase quota performance. And I think every sales person I’ve ever met, or sales manager I’ve ever met want to know that solution. So tell us please.
Tim Bristow 07:51
Yeah, absolutely. And I think sales is a perfect example where when we think of success for a salesperson and sales individual, it’s this picture, this image, that’s a good salesperson, that’s what a good salesperson does. And it’s not it’s not a single image, it’s a mosaic, a good salesperson does a lot of really little things, right. And those small things compound, and build towards successful sale, fast conversion towards continued growth and development and building of trusted in real relationships. And so when we think about running employee campaigns, to support sales, folks, really what we want to do is help those sales individuals and of course, their managers, supervisors, and the team as a whole, really to do those small things and do those, right, right and do those in a way that for us another benefit is, we’re not talking about a training that takes you out of the market, or workshop or something where you’re inspired. And you’ve learned all these new concepts and techniques, and then you go back to your day to day grind, and there’s no better term for it, right. And with that, we want to help people move from I’ve learned this knowledge I’ve been inspired to, I can take this individual action. And I can do this one small thing right today, whether it’s to make the heart call, or to smile and dial, or to reach out to your manager for success. And I think you bring up a good point as a sales manager and supporting your team. I think we all want to be good managers, right? And it’s, it’s hard for us and we can all fall down in that activity to try to support the teams around us because we all have our own pressures lives moving fast. We have a life outside of work, right? And so we don’t always show up as our best selves. And when we think about the use of employee campaigns, they can do two things to support the sales manager. One, they can help that individual sales manager actually show up as the best versions of themselves because they’ve been primed. They’ve been nudged, they’ve received a communication, just a call to action to actually do the right thing to show up for their team to check in. And because everyone has so much on their plate, what we can do is we can actually use these nudges to supplement and augment some of that development and growth that often relies on a manager and move it on directly to the employee. And we have studies show that whether an individual contributor receives a message directly from their manager, or if they receive a nudge from a system like ours or somewhere else, they take the coaching, it isn’t doesn’t matter if it’s coming from the individual or that teacher, the coaching point from a system, they take the coaching. And so what we can do is we’re managers can sometimes fall short or create a gap between the development of their people, we can help to augment that in a way that doesn’t take them out of the market, and contributes towards acting, living, and breathing, building that mosaic of what is a successful salesperson. And then my last point on this is eventually, you don’t need nudges, because you’ve developed a salesperson, you don’t need these campaigns, because you’ve developed a salesperson that’s acted time and time again and done those right things. And they’ve developed those habits, and they will be carry those with them throughout the career.
Pamela Stroko 10:56
Or maybe you want to do different campaigns. I mean, you want to extend those campaigns. You know, one of the things you mentioned at the beginning, and I don’t want to lose sight of this, you talked about, you know, we have hybrid teams, and we have remote teams, and we have mixed teams where they’re, you know, in office like three days a week now, and they’re they have their own version of hybrid. And then we have teams where they’re in person, and people are quite unhappy about being back in person. And I want to understand, I think pro habits can build stronger teams and more connection, collaboration and really peer support. How have you seen that in the market?
Tim Bristow 11:41
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it takes place on two levels. We’ll start with something we’re doing with one of our clients, which is supporting their onboarding program, right. This client has employees who are on site, some are hybrid, some who are fully remote. And so what we’ve done is we’ve used our campaigns to help them create really a unified and centralized approach to onboarding. And so what we’re doing is we’re running campaigns that are oriented at creating connection between the individual the new hires when they first start, and moving through sort of that organization’s onboarding philosophy for the first six months, as they continue to develop, perform, grow and connect to those in the organization, right. But we know that the new hire experience it’s a two plus way street, right, it’s at least a two way street. And so at the same time, as we’re running those campaigns to help those new hires do the right things, we get up to speed and start to create value at a much faster rate than those who are not in campaigns. We’re also running campaigns with their managers to actually create what we call a virtuous cycle or virtuous experience. So that as a new hire, if you’re being nudged, to create connection, and to reach out to ask your manager who you should connect with within the organization or within your team. Maybe the day before we’re going to write we’re going to be campaign will send a message to your manager, asking them who’s really important to you, and really important to your career at the organization, who do you think would be great to introduce to others so that when that employee asks, they have a good experience, right, we’re continuing to build those experiential blocks that create connection between the individual in their role the individual and their team members, and the individual in the organization and their contributions to it.
Pamela Stroko 13:21
You know, I love how you bring this back to the manager. And I know when we first started getting into what is remote work look like. There was kind of a consensus in the organizations that managers didn’t have a lot of experience with having to lead such diverse teams in person remote hybrid, and that that took a certain set of behaviors that not everyone had. And as I look through the pro habits, success stories, what I loved was that you are changing manager behavior for the better leadership behavior for the better. I mean, I love and you know, I’ve told you this when I first read about it, you know, I love the JetBlue story, were changing leadership behaviors actually changed team performance. And that team performance had a material impact on the business because they were able to turn planes around faster at the hubs, and they were able to have better customer experiences. So tell me about a night and that’s just one story. I know that there are other stories. So tell me about the manager and how you impact the manager in unique ways. So they impact the team in unique ways.
Tim Bristow 14:44
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it goes back to probably same story different chapter than the sales compensation we have right and supporting the sales manager. I think every day everyone wakes up and tries to be the best versions of themselves the best person they can to help achieve their goals individual as a team, and for the larger groups they work they work with. And we don’t all succeed in that every day, right? There’s so much going against us, there’s so many moving pieces. And so what these campaigns can do, and specifically for managers is really two things out of break it down to. One is to help to prime them to prime their mindset to help bring to the forefront what it is to show up well that day, right, whether they’re focused on being more empathetic, whether they’re focused on a very technical hard skill that they’re learning and applying, it just brings it to the forefront so that they have a higher chance of actually doing the right thing, right, and at the end of the day, succeeding on their goals as an individual. And therefore, as a part of the teams that they’re on. Then the second thing, and this is where I’ll nerd out for a second is, you know, with managers and most manager in general development programs, there’s a lot of focus on knowledge and knowledge transfer, right. So I, as an individual have learned something I’ve learned a theory, which is great in theory. But in practice, there’s a very real difference between the what was said or discussed in a workshop in a presentation in what life looks and feels like in my day to day. And so what campaigns can do is they can bring those learnings to augment and supplement those programs, or oftentimes to replace them and say, well, take empathy. As an example, I understand the concept of empathy. That’s great, but you don’t I’m really stressed out today. And I don’t do the right thing, we can actually help those managers and say, well, let’s practice empathy. Hey, today, for your team meeting, pause, take 30 seconds to go around the horn, just ask the team, how they’re doing. Super small step, very clear call to action, not a disruption for the day. That’s what empathy actually looks like. And so now, as a manager, I’ve experienced that. And I imagine I got a pretty good response from my team. So that creates a virtuous experience. So now more likely to next time. And by the way, my team members, they’ve now experienced that manager, do the right thing, which country can contribute to the build and compounding growth of the culture in the organization with creating a mentor mentee relationship, and really creating a new or an improved way of working within the organization? So I mean, that’s one example. And we can take it into infinite permutations in terms of how we can shift the manager experience.
Pamela Stroko 17:21
So that is really a great story. And I think that will help organizations tremendously as they build leadership and manager capabilities. So one of the things I heard you say, and I just want to briefly touch on this and then wrap up, is I think you had told me something to the effect of that pro habits is the only platform that uses campaigns. Is that correct?
Tim Bristow 17:49
You absolutely did. Yeah, I mean, we are very excited about where we’re, where we’re going. And really where the fields going in terms of shifting the paradigm of how organizations engage with it supports and connect to their employees and create connection, not just from the organization to the employer, but create space for the employee to connect back to the organization and to connect with one another. And so as we’ve built this first employee campaign platform, that private employee campaign platform, we’re just really excited about the opportunity to grow in this space. And I think it has so many different use cases, whether it’s supporting and helping employees on their performance goals and development plans. As an example, we’re able to really connect. And that’s an example, I think, probably oriented towards the typical people in HR space. Really, the difference is employees deserve to be treated like customers, employees are the number one drivers of the outcomes the business cares about. Whether it’s a good customer experience, whether it’s something being a project be completed on time, whether it’s shipping deadline being met, or manufacturing deadline, whatever it might be. We need to stop focusing just on the input just on that, well, I had a communications plan and I sent it, we need to actually oriented move towards, well, how can I connect the messages that I send, so they meet employees where they are, and can tie that activity I’m doing to drive towards the outcomes that matter most, then use that to learn about the your people as well, you’ll probably be surprised by what people engage with what they don’t, and how you can then use that to adapt to learn it to better manage your culture and ultimately, your results as a business.
Pamela Stroko 19:32
You know, Tim, one of the things that I’m really excited about is that you’ve taken ProHabits, and you put it out in the market in a way where people can just try it out. And can you tell us about that? Because I think after listening to this, people would be interested in saying well, how does it work and how can I use it? So how could they do that?
Tim Bristow 19:52
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, as you said before, we are the world’s first employee campaign platform. And so with that we recognize there’s another adoption curve, right? This is a new use and application of pre existing technologies. And so we just want to help people move along that curve as quickly as possible to solve for exactly what we’re talking about. How do we create connection in this disconnected workforce, this era, this era of disconnection in the workforce, and so yeah, if you can, for those who would love to try it, go to our website, there is a how we can help section we’ve got a handful of topic areas there. Select one that is the most President most relevant to you. And in that there’s a quick form, you know, first name, last name, email address, we’ll reach out. And the cool thing is this is a low lift technology doesn’t add to the tech stack. So everything we do, we can get you off and running in less than an hour you can have you can have you running a campaign.
Pamela Stroko 20:45
That is amazing. Yes, really fabulous. Unfortunately, we are out of time for today, I want to thank Tim Bristow, for joining us on #HRTechChat. And if you want to learn more about ProHabits, please visit prohabits.com. And I hope you want to learn more about 3Sixty Insights where we post information that can help you build your HCM capability. Again, I’m Pamela Sirocco, this is #HRTechChat and thank you for joining us.
Tim Bristow 21:18
Thanks, Pamela. Thanks, everyone. Bye!