For this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast, my guest was Nicole Davies, vice president of talent optimization at Valet Living. Our discussion covered her department’s highly successful deployment of Quantum Workplace, which 3Sixty Insights details in a recently published case study.
If you’ve ever lived in a multifamily home, condominium complex or apartment building, it’s possible that you’ve benefitted from Valet Living. United States-based and close to 28 years old, Valet Living operates in more than 40 states and employs approximately 10,000; about 8,500 are part-time staff. Together, these employees carry out amenity services such as package delivery, waste removal, and dog walking to the 1.8 million homes in residential communities with which the company partners.
Driving Nicole’s decision to propose deploying Quantum Workplace at Valet Living was her employer’s lack of modern technology — or any technology at all, really — for tracking employees’ performance. The process was annual and highly manual. As we have discussed at length lately, here at 3Sixty Insights, this is no way at all in this day and age to track employee performance, let alone promote better performance, boost employee engagement or inspire staff to stay.
Annual and manual performance management has pretty much always been antithetical to all these goals, in fact. Luckily, modern technology for talent management makes it possible to leave these old ways behind and helps organizations align the employee experience to a high-tech customer experience. Valet Living already had advanced software, long in place, designed to track associates’ progress day-to-day in completing client-facing work, and Nicole wanted to bring the company’s employer brand into alignment with this aspect of the consumer brand.
“We pride ourselves on being a tech-enabled service,” she shared during the podcast. Valet Living’s associates are “out there on site. They’re using very fancy technology we’ve developed to let us know where they are on the property. But then, on the people side of things, we were very low tech. We really had no great way for them to be able to have engaging conversations with their leaders, or for them to even really know what was happening within the company.”
When Nicole joined Valet Living, she and the rest of leadership there made the decision to partner with Quantum Workplace. Doing so left them “one-stop shopping so to speak, where folks could go if they wanted to learn about how they’re doing — going from a performance perspective all the way through to opportunities to continue to grow and develop from a succession planning perspective.”
Positive employee engagement increased considerably right away and continues to climb. Given that daily work life for associates does not naturally lead to much interaction between them and their managers, this boon to employee engagement at Valet Living is especially notable. Employee retention is much higher, too, and with the deployment of Quantum Workplace has come a significant boost in internal hiring for managerial roles and attendant drop in labor expenditure related to external recruiting.
Our case study dives into these details. If you’re looking for an example of how to boost employee engagement under challenging conditions, and if you need inspiration for HR transformation, then you owe it to yourself to watch this episode. The use of Quantum Workplace has helped Nicole elevate HR’s strategic standing at Valet Living. Highly knowledgeable when it comes to talent management, she’s a natural guest for a podcast and has an exceptionally compelling story to share.
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Transcript:
Brent Skinner 00:00
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome to this the latest episode of the HRTechChat video podcast. And with us today, we have Nicole Davies, who is vice president of talent optimization at Oh, Valet Living. That’s right, Oh, mine will leave that in, we’ll leave that in vice president of talent optimization at Valet Living, which is incredibly interesting organization. And we’re going to talk a little bit today around her use of the solution. Quantum workplace is really fascinating. We’ve had a conversation previously about this offline, Nicole, and I’m just really excited for this episode. So if you’d like to just kind of give our audience a little bit of background on who you are, and again, thank you in the organization as well. And thank you again for joining us,
Nicole Davies 00:49
of course, hi Brent happy to be here. As you share it, I’m Nicole Davies, I’m the VP of talent optimization. And that is all encompassing of, you know, things associated with employee experience, or as we call it associated experience. So learning and learning and development, we’ve got talent management, we’ve got performance management, we’ve got succession planning, all the good stuff, all the fun and exciting pieces of Human Resources land in my area. And I do work for Valet Living, which is a company you may or may not have had experience with we are in 40 states. But we support mostly folks who live in apartment buildings, so the multifamily housing industry, and we do all the stuff people don’t necessarily have time for or want to do for themselves. So it may be everything from handling their trash, or their recycling to package delivery, to walking your dog cleaning your apartment, all those wonderful things that are going to give you time back in your day. And we do that with a workforce of almost 9000 People of which 8000 of them are part time associates. So very heavy part time employee population a valet living.
Brent Skinner 02:01
Yeah, yeah, I just I love the concept of valet living. It’s really cool. We didn’t have that last time I lived in multifamily was many, many years ago. Now I think valet living existed or maybe it wasn’t where I was, actively could have used the help of valet living more than once. How long has the organization been around?
Nicole Davies 02:22
We are about 27, about to turn 28 years old, believe it or not. But we actually like to say we’re still in startup mindset. We’re constantly evolving. You know, initially it was simply a trash service, it was a doorstep trash collection, when you know opened your apartment door at night, you just slip that can right outside the door, somebody would sneak by in the evenings, collect that, take it down to the to the dumpster, or compactor and voila, you’d have a fresh can the next morning. Of course, it’s just been evolving from there. So it went from that very basic concept 27, almost 28 years ago to what it is today, which is a full scale amenity service provider for the multifamily housing industry. Wow, that’s
Brent Skinner 03:05
fantastic. So 27 years that actually, I would have fallen inside that, that that timeframe. So that’s as close as we’ll get to my age on this particular podcast.
03:16
Thank you know,
Brent Skinner 03:20
the 8000, you said around 8000 of the 9000 employees are part time associates, these are the folks who actually do the services carry out the services. And I know that you know from our previous conversation, I know that you guys had sort of a of a sort of in low technology kind of situation previously for doing some pretty important things around talent management. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
Nicole Davies 03:50
Yeah. So we you know, one of the things we pride ourselves on is being a tech enabled service, right? So our valets when they’re out there on site. They’re using very fancy technology called AI valet that we’ve developed to let us know where they are on the property. What do they do and where are they which building are they in. So we have this great tech solution that allowed us to know things about them. But then on the people side of things, we were very low tech, we really had no great way for them to be able to have engaging conversations with their leaders, or to even really know what was happening within the company. And so we thought we can’t be a tech enabled service where we’ve got this wonderful, you know, technology that we tout, when we go into these properties, and then not have some great way for our folks to be able to feed back to us on what the experience is like. And so when I came on board in 2017, one of the big moves we made was to partner with quantum workplace, which gave us an opportunity to have that common conversation tool, one place one stop shopping so to speak, where folks could go if they wanted to learn about, you know how they’re doing Going from a performance perspective all the way through to opportunities to continue to grow and develop from a succession planning perspective.
Brent Skinner 05:08
Yeah, yeah. And I want to get to succession planning a little bit, because there’s some really cool stuff happening around there. But one of the things that that sort of springs to mind for me is that this is, you know, this is really a branding thing. Also, for you, even though it’s for the internal employees, it’s, you know, you want your employer brand to align, you want there to be as little cognitive dissonance there between what your employer brand is and what your consumer brand is. And you’re absolutely right, maybe to underscore what you’ve already said, but to have that sort of high tech, sort of modern consumer brand, you don’t want to give your employees the people who are delivering that service, you want them to have a sort of a, a similarly modern experience in their in their employment.
Nicole Davies 05:56
Exactly. I mean, think about, as I say, as I shared, you know, we’re, we service almost 2 million doors a day, so 2 million apartment homes a day across 40 Plus states with 1000 plus people, right, and we, because of that we don’t have 40 states worth of brick and mortar buildings, you know, we don’t have 8000 places where folks can go and say, I work there, you know, they, they go to these different apartments every day. And so the experience was, you know, maybe your manager would come with a, you know, a, you know, Valley living truck that had a little sticker on the side. But their entire experience, before we really broaden the perspective through the partnership with quantum was, I need Bob, Bob’s my manager, Bob rolled up in this truck and asked me to fill out some paperwork. And I may or may not know anything more really about the valley living story or brand or organization, opportunities beyond what I hear or see in that interaction with Bob. And so we really needed an opportunity for them to more deeply engaged with us. And the technology was the easy way to to get that lift.
Brent Skinner 07:03
That’s a good that’s a great point, you want those employees to have a like a like a multifaceted suit, you don’t want them to have just one node, where they’re where that’s almost all their engagement with a company you want it to be. You want to kind of like maybe sort of wrap around you want to have sort of wraparound experience for them. Absolutely. That’s, yeah, that’s a huge deal. Now. Now, when you when you decided to, to work with quantum workplace, maybe could you share a little bit more around? You know, you did give a really great talk top line there, but maybe share a little bit more around why you chose quantum workplaces? And, you know, what, what was it your, what were some of the and maybe some of the immediate effects, positive effects that you saw after deploying and maybe what what implementation was like?
Nicole Davies 07:55
So I think our friends at Quantum would probably say the main kind of lost leader that gets folks to give them a call and consider their their technology is that, you know, world class employee engagement survey, we call ours associate engagement survey. So that was certainly something that we thought, gosh, we have complete room to improve in that area. But why I came to quantum was because we wanted a tool to be able to have consistent regular feed forward to thinking about the future performance related conversations. And what we had prior to that was, you know, a pretty cumbersome annual review process. Probably lots of folks that are listening have had that same experience, where you have to recall what happened in February when you’re writing the review in December, anything in between and what we what we found is, most of the time, not only was it a painful experience for our managers and the associates, we had a lot of surprise, people didn’t realize that they had been missing expectations, or maybe had a bobble in the business that they didn’t know about. And they they would see it at year end and be totally caught off guard and felt like Gosh, what up? What an unfortunate situation because if we’d been able to make a micro correction in the moment, we could have probably solved a lot of heartache for the associate in the manager. And so that was what brought us to quantum they have a wonderful one on one tool. And the way that that one on one tool works for us, Brent is that we every every first of the month, so just today, our team on the talent optimization side, lunch is a performance based discussion between a manager and associate. We pick topics that range from wellbeing to professional development, what’s happening over the next 30 days in the business getting aligned with the goals of the company, and both the associate in the manager weigh in. So they weigh in in written form. They add their thoughts around the questions that we’ve queued up and then they have a conversation to say what did you think here’s my thoughts. Am I on track? Is this aligned with or you know, a little bit different? And then what you think. And it gives that manager and that associate one an opportunity to build a deeper relationship, you know, and trust is the foundation of success, as we know, between manager and associate and retention from a retention perspective, and it makes sure that we stay on track, or when there’s never that potential for folks to say, I don’t know what’s expected of me, or I don’t know what I should be doing with my time or, you know, I feel like my manager never tells me when he or she thinks about my performance, we eliminate all of that noise by really having them have those directed monthly conversations. So quantum had me at hello with the so to speak on patience. And then once we had great success with that, we just built upon that to use some of the other tools in their in their technology. CADRE there.
Brent Skinner 10:47
Oh, that’s fantastic. You know, not to overstate it but you know, that if you if you have an antiquated or let’s not say antiquated because a lot of people still do, you know, the annual performance review, and that’s it, you know, but it’s, it’s sort of it’s an anachronism today, you know, it was it was developed over 70 years ago, for in the during a time when, when it was, you know, as people were sort of just figuring out, okay, how are we going to measure people’s performance, oh, based on sort of, predicated on a preconceived notion of what the managerial manager employee relationship should be, are they the full extent of it, and, and it creates sort of a, you know, in, what’s the word inefficient, or an unproductive or maybe ineffective, ineffective sort of top down, sort of, you know, taskmaster sort of relationship there that doesn’t really capture much of, it catches only a narrow slice of the manager employee relationship. So, you know, it can perpetuate maybe a dysfunctional relationship between managers, employees, it doesn’t have to be there. One of the things that was really interesting about what you said is, to me, giving quantum workplace gives you the opportunity or the ability, the opportunity, and enables you to, to do course, corrections, you know, micro corrections, in the moment, we hear about real time, we keep hearing about real time. And I mean, to me, this is this is emblematic, of that, you know, being able to make those adjustments in the flow of work, be regarding that manager employee relationship to keep things on track. And, and then, of course, minimizing the, the occurrence of situations that need micro corrections, right. Those are some of the things that I’m hearing and, and you mentioned, the world class, employee engagement survey, which I’ve already, it’s escaping me what you call it at your organization that sounds like quantum workplace gives you the opportunity sort of rebranded for yourselves internally. And I do know that there was a lot, there was a lot of improvement year over year from the last year that was pre quantum workplace, to the first year of quantum workplace being no pun intended in place. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, because there were some interesting numbers there. I know.
Nicole Davies 13:25
It said, so you know, prior to the partnership with quantum workplace, we were using pretty much a homegrown tool, right, trying to figure out what are those right questions to ask to really get at manager effectiveness, communication, efficiency, you know, the trust and leadership and what quantum did for us through using their tool, which is, you know, the best places to work series of questions. So we’re getting not only, you know, great questions, but we’re getting to validate them against their book of business to say, how are folks like us doing with these things? Are we on track? Are we off track? You know, at a 80% manager effectiveness score? Where does that where’s that stack up compared to some of our peers? And that was data that we didn’t have visibility to before. But you’re right, we, you know, in my area, of course, of course, my heart always sings around those manager effectiveness questions, because they, they do ask things like, I feel like my manager has my best interests in mind. I feel like my manager helps me with my growth and development. I feel like my manager, you know, is clear and setting performance expectations for me questions like that, that really helped to get to the heart of the value of those monthly, very specific performance based conversations. And we’ve seen year over year improvement from you know, from the time that we started our partnership with quantum but a significant improvement between your at the end of year one coming into here too. So, you know, it was it was, you know, 810 point jumps in some cases on some questions and our law last set of data were just today we are yesterday, we launched our associate engagement survey for this year. So I’ll have to report back on how we do it, you know, how we’re doing for 2022. But for 2021, we had, you know, upper lower 80s to mid 80s percentage effectiveness scores are, you know, happiness scores, whatever you want to call them, associates feeling like they’re, they’re seen and valued and heard by their managers. And so I think that’s pretty darn good. It is very dispersed 40, you know, very part time population. Yeah.
Brent Skinner 15:35
Now, you those are great numbers, you mentioned something you said something around succession planning, and how I know that, see if I can recall, just top line that, that some of the positions that that, that you need filled on a regular basis at Valley living, you were maybe going outside externally bringing people in, and it wasn’t this and it was tough. Trying to remember here was tough to sort of really pick the right people in the world, you’ve been finding that the you’ve been able to, to sort of strengthen your internal pipeline for those types of roles. What are those types of roles? What does that look like? Maybe you could share an example of when sort of the light went off in your head said, Oh, I can be doing this with quantum workplace as well?
Nicole Davies 16:30
Yes, of course. So you are right, we have about a 350 person full time manager, district manager position. And many of those district managers are overseeing those valets that are, you know, out there doing the package delivery, the pet walking the recycling collection. And in the past, we never really created intentional conversation around a partnership. You know, a lot of those, a lot of those district managers saw those service valets, as somebody that comes to work, you know, Monday through Thursday for three hours a night, and that’s the relationship we have with them. But when we created these intentional conversations that focused around what are your career aspirations, and is there a bigger role that you may have were wants to consider with valet living, it gave our DMS two opportunities, one a chance to really promote and help folks to understand that the company is bigger than that two or three hour a night job that they were doing, and to give that associate a chance to say like, Hey, how do I get how do I get in deeper? You know, is there more. And so we ended up really finding a wonderful pipeline to your to your point of talent, through being able to have those conversations, and so many of our service Valley’s raising their hand saying, Yes, I’d like to be considered, if there’s an opening in my area, please let me know, let me have an opportunity to apply. And we’ve seen, you know, gosh, I want to see the number and I could be getting it wrong by a percentage point or two, you know, but 37 or so 40, almost percent of our folks, where we’re coming from those internal part time service Valley positions into that full time district manager role. And if we think about that, from a recruiting cost perspective, it’s an incredible one time saver, but to, you know, money saver, because we’re not having to spend all the dollars to have those recruiters out there, you know, trying to advertise for and find those individuals.
Brent Skinner 18:30
Yeah, there’s a lot of screaming frog in my throat, there’s a lot of a lot of potentially avoidable cost around talent acquisition, when you get better at internal hiring, right? You get more precise with your external hiring, you end up you end up engaging in external hiring only when you only when it’s really necessary. That happens that you get to know your internal organization better, which just can’t happen without the right sort of technology in place. And the you know, the sort of the attendant HR transformation, which I think we’re seeing with your department, which is really exciting, right?
Nicole Davies 19:09
I want to just double click on that, because I will tell you, the days have passed, you know, I’m going to show my age a little with HR, you know, we would have to manage succession by a spreadsheet, you know, were willing to go to what city or town What roles do they want to have? Right? And it was often disconnected from the performance tools. So there was no easy way to say Brent wants more and he’s willing to go places. But is he capable? Does he you know, does he have a development plan in place? What are his performance reviews looking like? And so when quantum just finally, you know, was able to kind of sync them all together, we now go to one place in the past, I was working from eight different sets of data trying to be able to tell our leaders when they said, Hey, we have an opening in Tampa who’s ready I’m like, give me an hour. Oh, wow, you know, we can proactively go in. And we do that with every manager in our company, we say identify your high performers. And they go through the process of letting us know, you know, hey, we’ve got, you know, we’ve got this person sitting in Houston and this person sitting in Dallas and then we actively collect data on them. So we find out what are their career aspirations, where do they want to go, we’ve got that then in a tile in quantum workplace where we can see their last performance reviews, we can see development plans, we can see those thoughts around succession planning from the managers perspective. And it just allows us to be so much more dynamic. So that when we do have those needs developer, we know there’s an opportunity coming, or a senior leader says, Tell me, and this is what’s really cool. Now Brandon, I get super excited about it, I’ll have a senior leader call and say, you know, tell me about my talent, what’s happening in the organization, how many folks do I have that are looking for and want to do more within the organization. And so they’re becoming much more proactive about identifying and recognizing and, and in trying to actively track those folks along a career path where in the past, it was just too darn difficult to enable them with that data to be able to make those make those type types of leadership decisions,
Brent Skinner 21:12
you become more of a much more of a strategic partner to leadership?
Nicole Davies 21:18
Absolutely, yeah. And I trusted advisor on those things, because we are digging deep, and we’re actively looking at, you know, for every one of our associates that’s been identified as high potential, what are the developmental needs? What does the next 60 days look like? What does the next six months look like for this person. And if it’s, you know, coursework that we can then bring in our learning team to, to deploy or to design to support the needs of those folks, we can be very specific, you know, and being able to tailor a plan that’s going to help those folks be ready when the opportunity comes.
Brent Skinner 21:51
Yeah. Now, that to me is super interesting. And, you know, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I just want to bring it up. Because, you know, a lot of the time, many times we’ve seen it, it’s not just with talent management, or you know, identifying high performers, that’s one instance of it. But there’s, you often see, even in maybe Global Payroll, for instance, we’ve spoken with folks where they say, you know, often what happens is that leadership will come, come to them wanting some sort of piece of information that they want, they want, or they’re needed by a certain time. And they say, well, that’s going to take 25 hours to get that data. And then you see reached this, this confluence of events or this, this fork in the road where leadership understands or realizes, hey, wait a minute, we need to get something better in place so that we can get this information more quickly. And I know, that’s not how it came about, necessarily at Valley living to implement quantum workplace, but just for the people viewing this, you know, that that sometimes could be this scenario that plays out where you can look at that as not as a, not as a as a loss for your department as a as the HR department, but as an opportunity to, to maybe pitch to your leadership, hey, you know, we wanted to be able to get this to you sooner, and we could if we had ABC in place instead of XYZ. So that’s, you know, I just, I hear your story around all the the Excel spreadsheets and all this. I mean, people are still using Express Excel spreadsheets. Somebody said that Excel spreadsheets, or that they’re the Keith Richards of HR departments or something like that. Or they said the cockroaches, I said, Keith Richards anyway, you get the point, like they’re just down there, they’ll always be there. It’s, you know, maybe some point 1000 years from now, they’ll be gone.
Nicole Davies 23:47
Yeah, one other piece. I know, I’m totally nerding out with you right now on on the succession planning, but it is it’s so impactful. Because, you know, in previous iterations of our conversations around identifying high potential talent, most of our senior leaders only have certain line of sight, right, it has to stop at a certain point they can’t know. You know, in the case of our Chief Operating Officer, it’s really hard for him to know, you know, 400 direct reports or 400, full time associates 8000 part time, folks, right? So how can you possibly have line of sight into knowing each of their stories? And so often those conversations we were talking about? Who do we want to identify for our leadership development programs? Who do we want to invest in in terms of that, you know, additional development dollars that we may have, you know, to be able to help them be ready. Oftentimes, it was the people that were just right, you know, one level direct report down from them, or maybe a skip level and it never really got beyond that. But now we’re able to get out there and say, Who are those district managers that have, you know, just an amazing runway ahead of them and we can bring those names to to our chief operating off Certain say you don’t know about Tammy, but let me tell you about her. She’s amazing. can invest those dollars more strategically at a deeper level across the whole enterprise versus just that, you know, kind of next step down from our senior leadership?
Brent Skinner 25:12
Oh, I absolutely agree. I mean, that’s such a great point. And it goes back to what we were saying earlier around, you know, expanding the, the employees sort of connection to the company beyond their just their manager, you know, so you have that wraparound sort of experience. And there’s, there are many nodes now as opposed as opposed to mainly just one. And so you have a better sort of 360 degree view of the workplace and understanding of who’s who, and who has potential. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, is there anything around quantum workplace that that that you’re using, that we haven’t covered right now.
Nicole Davies 25:54
So quantum workplaces, you know, it has multiple modules, if you want to call them that, you know, that that folks can choose to add or remove, and the only one that we have not partnered with them on is a recognition tool, but I know it is a robust option, we had already just had a partner in place that was working for us around recognition. But you know, as far as we’re concerned, we are we are deep, we are fully in on on surveys, we’re full in on one on one conversations and succession planning tool, you know, they give us some really interesting flight analytics. So potential for folks to leave us, you know, who might be at risk in the organization. It’s not saying like Brent, at risk, go talk to Brent. But we can see just based on some of those manager effectiveness scores, where we might have gaps, so we can go in and be very specific to, you know, overlay training and support and guidance around that team in that manager if we think there could be risk there. So you know, what I love about it, as I said a little bit ago, so apologies for being redundant, it’s just having everything in one place to be able to really have a comprehensive look at our, at our associates, from, you know, HCM or talent and performance perspective is just really cool. Yeah, I
Brent Skinner 27:08
remember from our previous conversation, that you’re just you’re really enamored with that particular aspect of the solution. And I think I recall you saying that, that, that may not be the reason that people go to quantum workplace, but it’s probably the reason they, you know, maybe the one of the reasons, main reasons they stay with quantum workplace.
Nicole Davies 27:32
It’s and it’s interesting, because, you know, Valley living has always prided itself on kind of having our own branding. So you know, we have our Valley rewards program, it’s a different vendor, partner vote, we wait labeled at Valley rewards, we have our, our LMS is an outside vendor, but we call it valet, you are Valley University, quantum workplace is in the nomenclature of valet living now. So people will say, Have you done your quantum this month, or make sure that managers on top of their quantum so you know, to us, that’s actually, you know, they recognize they see quantum as the as, as the thing that happens, not just the tool we use, but you know, kind of the process itself is labeled as quantum or quantum, which I just think is super fun. And, you know, different compared to how everything else is, is organized within Valley livings world. So they’re definitely part of the fabric of our organization now, to their credit, because they have great tools and make it easy for us to deploy them. And for folks to use them.
Brent Skinner 28:32
Yeah, yeah, that’s super, I wouldn’t know, what are your plans for the for the future? Like, oh, well, hold on. I actually, I had another thought I lost it. And it came back just now and I want to share it. Because we talked about this previously, around, you know, time savings versus productivity gains, and what’s entailed what do those productivity gains actually comprise? And I recall, talking with you around this idea that you’ve saved essentially 100% of your time, you know, before state versus current state, right, in terms of all of that administrative tedium, and in that sort of repetitive and, you know, sort of, you know, not so pleasant work, right? To, to follow all this stuff. But it’s, you know, today, you’re not you’re not left with, you know, like downtime, like you’ve been able to really convert that. So, you know, if we were in the parlance of a say, you know, an accounting spreadsheet, we’d say that you know, it resulted in X percentage of productivity gain, which would be, you know, the amount of time you saved, which you said it was about 100%, which is not surprising, I like to call it the paper lithic era, you know, people who move away from that no tech or very little tech to something why or, but in the thinking that, you know, maybe you’re not spending exactly the same amount of time on something more productive. So we might say 70% Of that amount of time, that would translate to productivity gains. And that would be the end of the discussion if we were talking about accounting spreadsheet, right. But, but what we’re really interested in what’s so fascinating about what your our conversation previously is, we really got into, and we got into it today also all of the things that you’re able to do now. So what does that what is that productivity gain actually entail? And you know, so much that you’re doing now? So it’s, you’re able, I think you said you’re able to invest? It’s a time investment now. So toe as opposed to maybe time suck?
Nicole Davies 30:41
That’s right. Yeah. I mean, we, my time now, when I think about these performance conversations is listening to the needs of the business, figuring out what is the conversation that needs to be happening, because it’s the same conversation across the whole business, think of the power of that, right? If we have, we have 400 managers or 800 managers talking to, you know, all of their folks about the same topic every month, the power of that conversation, amazing to shift or change, you know, something that might be happening in the business. So my time is really spent investing in trying to figure out, what’s the conversation that we need to be having to be the business that we want to be tomorrow and the day after that. And so instead of, you know, trying to chase down an administratively burdensome process, all of my time is spent really on the strategic side of planning for and mapping those conversations so that at the end of the year, we’ve got, you know, I like the term that kind of that storybook of performance, we’ve got 12 conversations that reflect 12 different moments in time in the business, that show where we created connection points between the needs and the desires of the business and the associate. And we also collected really important information about the needs and desires of the associate, you know, what is it? What did they want for themselves? What’s what’s top of mind for them? Are there things happening in their world that we need to understand and maybe shift our expectations in the moment to be able to honor what’s happening for them? And it just is a much it’s so much more rich? You know, time spent? So I know, you and I talked about to the managers actually save time? You know, did they save time through this process? Probably not, because they’re doing these conversations every single month. But are they being? Are they creating more efficient associates that are happier, that are going to stay longer that are going to have a more trusting and deep relationship with their manager? Worth it? Right. Perspective?
Brent Skinner 32:38
Oh, this that’s such a great point. We’re creating efficiencies in in the product. Right? Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s a huge point. That’s an awesome point. I love that one. We’re gonna write that down. Yeah. Because, you know, if you’re, if you’re Yeah, you may not be saving time, because you’re doing something that’s higher level, you’ve, you’ve saved yourself, the time doing something that’s a low level, maybe low impact, just because it’s inefficient for you. And you may be spending the same amount of time, something higher level. So it’s an investment and you’re not able to do other things to maybe because you’re still focusing on the same thing, but you are creating efficiencies and the outcome of your of your employees. Yeah, yeah. And effectiveness. I love that. This. This has been such a great conversation. Nicole, thank you so much.
Nicole Davies 33:34
Oh, thank you, Brent. I love I’m just so proud of how far we’ve come you know, of these couple of years and, and no, absolutely couldn’t have happened without quantum so we’re very thankful for quantum workplace in their constant evolution of their tools. And so just very, very excited to be able to share with the world today through the podcast.
Brent Skinner 33:53
Oh, it’s so evident. I mean, yeah, they’ve really helped your group transform. It’s, it’s a it’s just a fantastic story around transforming performance development and all that so, so glad they were able to share it with us. Thank you again so much. Thank you.