Quiet Quitting: Another Gift Brought to You by Corporate America

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week in light of reports that half of the US Workforce has quote unquote quietly quit their jobs Shan busy Paul DS and William vanderbloom and talk about the latest rage is quiet quitting something new is it just a media creation have Shawn Paul and William experienced it in their own businesses and who's to blame Plus the three owners explain how they hire for engagement and how they've changed their hiring processes in response to the pandemic and the labor shortage for example Paul explains why in this Brave New World he continues to flip conventional wisdom on its head instead of hiring slow and firing fast he's been hiring fast and firing slow and he says it's working even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations owners know they're not alone in facing challenges same thing with our daily newsletter the 21 hats Morning Report which Inc magazine recently named the best newsletter for business owners and which you can subscribe to at 21h hats.com where you can also find transcripts of our podcast episodes and lots of other articles and interviews joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Shan busy CEO of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy ha down who is CEO of Paul Down's cabinet makers which is Base outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables and William Vander blman who is CEO of Vander bluman Search Group a houston-based recruiting firm that works with churches and other faith-based organizations and please take a listen to my quick chat with Rob Levan co-founder of our sponsor work better now the episode is titled quiet quitting another gift brought to you by Corporate America [Music] welcome Sean Paul and William it's great to have you here I want to start today with a topic that it seems just won't go away um it kind of started with the great resignation which turned into the labor shortage which is now morphed into what's becoming known as quiet quitting as you probably know it's it's not really about quitting it's about employees who say they're not engaged with work and they're now doing the bare minimum to to try to date by uh hence the term quiet quitting the Wall Street Journal just ran a story uh quoting a Gallup survey that found that fully half of the workforce has quietly quit by their own testimony and only a third of the people in the survey said they are actually engaged at work is this real is it overblown is it just in corporate settings and not so much in our world any thoughts from any of you just because people are talking about something doesn't necessarily mean it's real true things that make a good headline get a lot of Play Always picking on the media I would be curious to know more about the size of the survey who they surveyed how many people they reached out to didn't answer uh which is a form of quiet quitting itself I guess well it was Gallup so I I I believe it was a scientific survey but but I take your point uh that doesn't mean it's half the US Workforce is not paying any attention when they work that seems well that here's the tricky thing with this the definition is really important quiet quitting can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people but it doesn't necessarily mean you're not paying attention it means you're doing the bare minimum you're not going above and beyond Lauren I wonder if this is a change at all I remember like when the internet was first a thing and you're surfing the web and there was Microsoft Windows I forget what the extension was you could move your cursor up and the right and a face spreadsheet would show up and and the extension was called hide my boss is coming that's ancient history but I just wonder you know it feels like um at least with our clients the pandemic and all the ripples that are still happening from it just sort of revealed realities and accelerated realities that were already present and and you know when we wrote culture winds four years ago now all the research we showed said somewhere between 40 and 50% of Americans hate their job not just are showing up or sort of like it but hate their job and if that's the case and if you go through two years of let's work from home and I can be in shorts the accountability factors is down even farther I wonder if that just reveals a dynamic that was already there I think it's going to be heavily influenced by the configuration of work too that I don't observe any quiet quitting happening in my operation because we're all here we can see each other work we can see the work being done it's a manufacturing environment it would be very very difficult for someone to quietly quit Paul doesn't that depend on the definition of quietly quitting I mean is it is it not possible that you've had employees who just didn't go the extra mile who did the bare minimum I that could happen in a factory setting have you observed that at all that could happen in a in a factory setting we're not really a factory we're a workshop and I think that it's a different kind of environment yeah like if it was just an assembly line with people lined up and stamping the the thing out or you know like I Love Lucy that kind of assembly line I think people can easily do the bare minimum because there's there's not much there's not much to be gained by doing any more than that but in any kind of environment where a team is working together physically together and it's not a toxic environment and there's work to be done and you can see it being done I think it's just much harder to get away with any kind of change in the work output the other team members would notice Sean you're uh you're working remotely your your entire staff is uh and you also have a line of sight into a lot of other businesses what's your thought about it is it real is it overblown what do you think I think it's two things I think it's an example of good branding um somebody's put a name to something that's already existed and it's catchy right it's kind of an alliteration so it's it's kind of capturing the headline but I mean I I think to William's Point we've studied levels of Engagement long before the pandemic and they were always pretty deplorable you know you had something like maybe a third of the workforce was actually actively engaged 20% or so was actively disengaged and then the remaining in the middle were just sort of showing up so that's a I haven't heard the 50% hate their job but that's that kind of lines up with what uh existed before the pandemic and then I think as you showed in the morning report the other day Lauren you you had an all-time high level of Engagement in the summer of 2020 which I thought was really interesting and now we have like an all-time low level of Engagement so what you know kind of what's changed in that time is remote work you know I think to Paul's point when people can see each other working and are accountable to each other it's really difficult to be that person who's checked out but when you're not seeing each other I mean I'm just hearing anecdotal story after anecdotal story of people who get a new job they get a laptop they do the job but aren't really doing the job I just think that that lack of accountability to one another through physical presence makes it easier for that to to happen totally agree Sean I I would say you know alltime engagement of Summer of 2020 I was engaged in work in summer 2020 cuz I wanted to go upstairs to the office in my house and get away from all the children that were downstairs for a while yeah I'll engage engage me in anything other than being trapped in here and I wouldn't even some of my friends in New York in a 900 foot apartment or whatever left yes please put me to work I you know but but I think uh you really hit on something the virtual piece sounds so good but it just doesn't work I mean people were made to be together my wife and I were at a Labor Day parade this week and uh just noticed how people loved being in a crowd and being with each other we were not made to be alone and when we're left to alone and we're left unaccountable I think you just see the worst of Us come out we we've had a significant number of clients who have discovered over the last 2 years that fairly large percentages of their Workforce like 15 to 25% of their Workforce are working from home and have also taken other full-time remote employment and are working multiple full-time jobs from home at the bare minimum to just get more paycheck and and that sounds awful but I'm afraid that's kind of where I think Sean you've hit on it accountability will lead to productivity I overheard a conversation the other day uh between Millennials and one of them was talking about his outrage with his employer he works remotely the employer has suffered a number of uh losses uh employees who've left and has asked this employee to to do a little more work the boss guessed it would be about an hour more a day and this employee is outraged with his employer because they didn't offer any more pay to go with this extra work although he acknowledged he's not working anything close to 40 hours a week because he's working remotely and doesn't think it's going to take him any extra time to do the additional work it's just the principle of the thing that has him outraged Lauren not to dominate the mic but even before the pandemic you we wrote this book we asked we were winning all these workplace best places to work you know things and best office dog best office space most engaged blah blah blah so you know we kept getting pestered to write a book and I didn't want to uh write a book about our story we found that nearly every book on culture is about that company's story so we said well let's study 150 places that are winning similar Awards and see what's in common and what we found is all of them have said no matter how they're approaching workplace culture all of them have said the ball game for the next decade this is before the pandemic the ball game for the next decade is engagement and retention the people that win that given the new generation that's showing up to work given the the flightiness of people with work given remote work engagement and retention is the ball game and I think I think the pandemic has accentuated that yeah and and then you've got the other Force at play too which is you know the media gets the vast majority of its stories from Corporate America and Corporate America for especially the last 40 years has been an increasingly transactional workplace so you know the business wants to get a certain set of results it's driving its employees to get those results you know using more and more kind of I would say sort of inhumane processes right and so this in some ways is a little bit of a rebellion against that that corporate mindset and then the unfortunate part I I think this is the real tragedy for everybody listening to this show who probably isn't in Corporate America is that small businesses kind of get swept up in that right you you get employee who've been you know pretty abused through Corporate America for many years if they come into a small business right they've got their guard up right they they just expect that that workplace is going to be crappy like they've experienced before it I've really struggled honestly even pre pandemic I really struggled to hire people who came out of the corporate space um because they they just have a different they've just had a different level of conditioning and I I think a lot of this is that Rebellion against that treatment by Corporate America well when you read about I think there was a series of stories in the times a couple weeks ago about the monitoring software that some corporations deploy I was going to ask about that if you treat your people like like garbage they're not going to be feeling loyal and yeah this whole trend of monitoring everybody's every second I think is is really really a huge mistake by whoever does it it would be interesting to sitting on a conversation where someone persuades a boss that this is a good idea when anybody with an ounce of Human Experience knows it isn't that it is not the way to get the most out of people I think we all agree with you on that Paul but you do understand where this comes from uh people are trying to figure out how to manage remote workers I don't know I don't I don't know I mean I I feel like yeah I think they're just trying to squeeze every penny they can out of their people and they they don't treat them don't you think human I I agree but don't you think there's a legitimate concern if you're managing people who are working from home you don't really know what they're doing I don't think that's Ma I maybe you call that management but but really what it is is non-leadership right well what's the right way to address it Sean if you're not sure what your emplo remote employees are doing what should you do you got to engage them right you've got to like treat them like humans you've got to actually I mean this is the problem is that much of the system is antithetical to a positive way of leader of leading um I I just I don't know what the answer is in Corporate America that's why like I don't want to work there you know or work with it I mean I would think that part of part of managing any Workforce is you got to tell them what the goal is and then you got to give them some flexibility to accomplish yeah and the what the description of these software packages were that they're measuring things like keystrokes and if you stop typing you get a downgrade and uh well wait a minute that's not how I work I mean I had an analogous experience a couple years ago when my car my auto insurance company offered me you know like hey if you drive we put this thing in your car monitor how you drive and uh you'll save money and it turned out that the the device could not distinguish between jamming on your brakes and a approaching a stop sign on a steep hill where you weren't even touching the brake and the car just stopped and so it was constantly going off in all kinds of situations that did not correspond to bad driving and I was like this thing you know I turned it back in I'm an excellent driver I don't have accidents I don't get tickets and but it was dinging me all the time because whoever had r in the initial algorithm had decided that things that were easy to measure were the actual uh measurement of output and that's just not the way human beings work so we have certain team members who work part-time from home and part-time in the office and I don't go out of my way to figure out what they're doing at home it's just did you get the work done that's it I don't care how you do it and and uh if you as long as you're not pissing off your teammates and and the work is of accept quality then do it however you want well that gets it the the the quiet quitting question a little bit if you think you've assigned them work that should take 20 hours uh but they get it done in much less than that do you care no no God bless them yeah and I mean that's that's how I work honestly I'm a burst worker I I sit around and stare at nothing for hours and hours and hours and then I get a lot done in 10 minutes and that's worked for me so far that's how I've always worked I call it burst working like that's mental work physical work I can just plow through it and work all day but uh working be you know in front of a computer screen I spent a lot of time doing nothing just waiting for a burst of energy and then I get a lot done and you can look at whatever I've accomplished in 40 years and make your decision about whether I was productive or not but works for me so I don't want I I would not try to force my employees to conform to some theory about what work looks like let's see what they do William do you have anybody working remotely yes we do well I say remotely our Consultants our client facing people are on the road most of the week so I guess you could call that remote work sure you know I they were doing that long before the pandemic though I mean traveling salesman you call them remote I don't know you know if when you say remote work do you mean do I have people who are not based in Houston and never come to Houston and never come into this office we have a couple long before the pandemic long before the pandemic I I was trying to figure out had a really talented guy in Sacramento who wanted to work for us it's nowhere near us his kids lived on the same street as him all his grandkids lived there there no way he's going to move to see us right so I sought out some counsil from a a bane consultant who I have leaned into for a long time um happens to be my sister-in-law and uh she she said you know at the time she said my advice to clients and I I think this is pretty uniform is you should leave room in your Workforce for about 10% of your people to be remote if they're that good but most people need accountability now this guy in Sac been awesome I think his travel budget was lower than anybody from Houston I think he might have fedexed himself somewhere time instead of flying but uh he he was amazing but he had an uncanny discipline to get up go down to his office at 8:00 in the morning close the door not talk to not get distracted by kids not get distracted and come out when he was done being productive whether that's through bursts or long chunks and and that's a long-winded answer Lauren to your question but yeah we've always left room for what I consider to be the exception to the rule and that is the exceedingly disciplined person but you know my wife said to me the other day she said you know it's so funny when everybody talks about remote work and you get so much more done why then are are gym memberships back up why are people not just working out at home we bought all the gym equipment why why do we still go to groups to get stuff done it's a great question I will note there are businesses that are very happy with this Brave New World I mean Karen Clark call actually is an owner who speaks very highly of uh the way things are are working they have kind of a hybrid situation correct me if I'm wrong summing up here it sounds like none of you are terribly concerned about this oh I'm I'm really concerned about I mean I think that the problem is is that these things when they enter the Zeitgeist um and they flow from the corporate America into small business it just creates headaches for us right I mean that's that's really what it boils down to and and I think that the issue isn't the longtime employee who you've built trust with in person I think it's it's new hires that have never been into an office who've never built a connection and and it's not to say that they can't work out I mean we have some folks that we hired right before and in the pandemic that are working out great but I've I've definitely seen this phenomenon and it tends to see it tends to be with folks who've been hired remotely and again I I've got clients that do the almost entirely remote thing or quasi remote but I just for us at least um I I just don't I don't think it's a positive the remote piece I'm not worried about it because we we can't do our work remote so yeah and to the extent that Corporate America is is rejecting perfectly good human beings for insane reasons that's a people that I can hire so I'm not you know to the extent that Corporate America destroys itself and and starts to fail then that would affect my my sales I guess some somehow but uh I bet it would but on in the short term being able to hire people and being able to offer them an environment that is human friendly uh to me is just an advantage I'm able to hire out of other companies and get the best people Sean when I asked that question I was thinking um that I was asking are any of you concerned about quiet quitting you know the issue of employees being engaged or not and I think you may have answered the question uh are any of you concerned about the the issues related to remote workers obviously there's some overlap there are you concerned about whether these young employees in general are engaged yeah I I just think that uh if you look through history almost all of the great things that get created get created in groups they get created in collaboration even when you have quote unquote you know genius artists you know most often if you look at their experience they've got a studio with assistants or they go to a salon and like meet up with other artists and and so I think that you know this idea of collaboration and coming together is is sort of under is being undervalued to some degree and then I'm seeing career counselors people who are supposedly advisers for people's career development give advice to Young employees to say you know essentially don't go the extra mile do exactly what the framework of the job calls for because that's what you're being paid to do don't do any extra and I'm like man I don't know you know maybe I'm old school I'm oldfashioned but I I just think that if you're giving young people that advice it's it's really awful that's in all the stories about quiet quitting I mean that's the nub of the issue I think well let's uh let's flip it on the other side though how often does a big company go the extra mile for an individual employee so I think that if you're in a situation where there's some reasonable expectation of reciprocity from the company that that's terrible advice if you're in a situation where the company is a cold-hearted robot of pain that just delivers a paycheck work and and nothing much else then I don't think that's inappropriate but the the market mechanism will shake that out over some period of time those companies that treat their workers poorly will get poorly performing workers and others will go other places so yeah I mean is a good career advice probably not but uh is it appropriate advice for some situations I would say it probably is I would uh Echo a whole lot of what's been said and I will be completely stealing Sha's Insight that the great works in history were done in groups but I I think Lauren am I concerned about quiet quitting I'm concerned about engagement and that's separate apart from the pandemic we've got just a ton of research and data that shows engagement will be the competitive Advantage for companies going forward who can hang on to their people a little longer and have them engaged a little higher will keep them from having to hire companies like mine to find new Talent right so I'm very concerned about that am I concerned about the current state of quiet quitting I think there going to be some short-term impacts but I think it will write itself as long as we're we remain like a capitalist Society frankly we've if this is going to sound like a kogin but we've had in the last two years we've had a pretty big bulk of that time where people just haven't had to go to work and where we've gotten and I'm one of them we've gotten a whole lot of help from our government to get through a really tough time but I think a a shadowside consequence of all that is if I don't run for a year I can't run like I used to a year ago and it's going to take a while for people to start to uh learn to get back to a work ethic and and employers sooner or later will quit just saying I'll let you work from whever you want I'll let you do whatever you want just get the bare minimum done I think that capitalism will write itself with enough time we're coming out of a once maybe once ever situation and I I think it's too early to make long-term predictions about quiet quitting based on where we are I'm very curious William about whether you think that the trend in churches or other values-driven institutions in any way mirrors this broader Trend that's just happening in in capitalist corporations because theoretically there's a whole different set of motivations at play yeah no I I think you're right and our uh our clients whether it's a school or a nonprofit or a church or a values-based business they they do have the edge of you know you're here for a cause not just a paycheck now having said that that's the most trendy thing to do in every company right now United Airlines good is leading the way it's just every company you can imagine is saying well we're values based we're driven by the and trying to lead with something more than just time money and transactions but in general Paul I'd say we have a slight Advantage but human nature is human nature so you're saying that there's some that there's like a little war going on inside every worker about whether to actually do the job or not think there's a war inside I mean let's go back to Animal House where John Belushi's got an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other like I think there's a war going on inside all of us whether to get up and do work or lay around and do nothing yeah but the the the discussion the Angel and the devil were having if you recall were in a very different context same Angel same devil different context I I just think there's uh uh the last two years has given us a unique opportunity to be a little lethargic about what was Nor we've all gotten out of the rut that we were in for however long before the pandemic maybe that's a good thing maybe it's a bad thing but but it's going to take a while to redevelop some muscles that have atrophied let's take a quick break to hear from our [Music] sponsor I'm here with Rob Levan co-founder of work better now which provides top remote Talent from Latin America and the Caribbean Rob have you found that the labor shortage has uh prompted more interest in your service it's a great question Lauren demand really started picking up in about late 2020 as businesses became more comfortable with remote work and the pace really hasn't led up one bit what has changed is what businesses are looking for up to about a year ago owners were looking for assistance as they needed to stop doing administrative work so they can focus on Big Picture items like increasing Revenue recently though half of our hires have been for roles such as project and account management marketing bookkeeping and customer service for many companies the recruiting process can take months uh these days and that can leave your important roles unfilled how quickly can wbn help you know what's really cool about this is our clients can have a matched assistant who is perfect for your needs within about 2 weeks and there are no contracts what does using wbn cost for $1,900 a month you get a full-time dedicated work better now assistant and if you mention 21 hats when you have your consult you get 15 $50 off the first 3 months and that's for each assistant that you hire where can we learn more workb better now.com thanks Rob and we're back William I'm curious what what have you learned about hiring for engagement well I think what I'm learning about hiring for engagement starts with the employer why would I want to come work here tell me tell me the job and the employers that have a very clear handle their their purpose why they're doing what they're doing and their culture how we're going to behave why we're doing what we're trying to get done have a distinct advantage over those who are just kind of Clueless you know engagement has also changed to include geography to some extent oh you know we've got a fabulous client in New York city that has a much much more difficult they called me yesterday and said you know we used you for our head person uh four years ago and it was amazing now we got a number two position we really thought we could get it done on our own but we're realizing it's harder to recruit to the city than it was four years ago yeah so I think geography is is something that employers can't entirely control but but it is a factor that comes into play so those are two things right off the top of my head Sean have you thought about what it takes to hire for engagement oh I mean this what we specialize in I mean like like this is the work we do for our clients pre pandemic we were running around you know Workshop after Workshop after Workshop talking about engagement how to create a culture of Engagement how to hire for engagement um you know our our philosophy is that it all starts with your purpose your mission your values what you stand for and that you need to essentially apply the tools of marketing to HR so that your job descriptions really really speak clearly and accurately to the type of culture you're creating and what type of person will succeed in that culture and if you then craft your interview process to look for those values and traits you have just a much greater chance of getting a a culture where everybody's rowing in the same direction I I mean I really credit that work we've done with us having like almost no turnover in this you know supposed great resignation and then the last piece I think to get a culture of Engagement if you can align the customers with the values of the organization then then you're not having friction between what is internal and what is external and and that's I think the hardest part uh in that in that Journey because I I know some businesses where they have this wonderful internal culture but then the clients that they serve you know maybe are really difficult and and that friction can be hard on employees so you get it top to bottom great Sean one one other thought Lauren that comes to mind I think you can interview for engagement I I think you can can you know watch for engagement in the interview process like in the sales cycle on in our company the way we're treated by a potential client is a pretty good indicator of what it's going to like be like to work for that client U so the flip side of that is if you're interviewing people and you want to interview for engagement uh ask questions that give homework uh test to see how much they looked into you before we we hired an intern yesterday and I didn't have anything to do with the hiring but she walked in I got introduced and uh she said oh I've watched all the YouTube videos you guys have put out and it's amazing I'm like well that's a big state she said no I've watched all of them okay well either that's weird or it's engaged but we're gonna go with it so you know you can you look through the lens as you're interviewing is saying is this person in the interview engaged in a way that I'd want them engaged that's a great tip William I mean we I really love people who you know they write a great cover letter you know I Know cover letters are they some contention over their value but I love them uh especially for our work um I I've had employees who've like read our book before they do you know the the interview unsolicited um and those employees are with us today and they're great protracting the hiring process to see if somebody's really in it to win it is really valuable have any of you made significant changes to your hiring process uh based on the turmoil we've all been through the last couple of years I said it before on the program but my my basic hiring Theory right now is try to not draw out the process that if we get someone in for an interview and they look positive we make an offer right there because I think that you can interview for engagement you can hope people will do homework and all that but my feeling is that we're still looking for good workers and that if you play to koi if there's many games they just go somewhere else and I would rather hire someone and get rid of them at my leisure than not have them not have the chance to evaluate them at at some length and I think it's fair to them to pay them while you do that as opposed to hope they're not going to do it so yeah I agree with that is that a change in my procedure yeah I I used to interview a bunch of people and think about it and then choose the one I like the best and now as soon as I like see someone who's adequate or or sort of checks the boxes I hire that person right there and don't worry about the rest of the interviews and uh because otherwise you you you really drastically cut down the number of people who are willing to take a job at least in my world and that's manufacturing it's a bluecolor Workforce in my hiring process I go to a great deal of effort to explain to people why the company is different and better than wherever they've been before and everybody Smiles while they're hearing that but I wonder whether a pretty large percentage of them just don't believe it until they've actually worked here for a while and that's another reason why I try to lock them up if I want them at all I'm going to try to get them hired first and then spend some time to figure out whether they're any good or not the cliche is higher slow and Fire fast you've kind of flipped that on its head I do still go the other direction I'll fire relatively fast if if they're not working out as matter fact I just fired someone this morning who we hired in February and he was okay for a while and then he just started to not show up and had a million excuses and blah blah blah and he hasn't actually been at work since August 22nd and uh I was on vacation for much of that came back talked to my shop manager like hey where is this guy oh he hasn't been here for a while he's you know he's got this that the other thing I was like I think this guy's actually a dope addict let's just get rid of him actually was endless from him and at the end of the day not showing up and working and we' have extended every hand we can to him and but I'm done so so he got fired this morning although I will say that we we didn't here I I'm saying firing what we did was we said you need to show up today or you've quit because I don't particularly want to pay unemployment to him forever and he communicated but did not show up so as far as I'm concerned that's a quit are any of you asking different questions than you used to in job interviews I'm being more blunt about when we say you have to beit the office you have to beit the office I would say that up until the last year I've been the biggest proponent of you know long hellos and short goodbyes is the nice way of saying higher slowly and fire quickly but but the dynamic's the same I I think U Paul zondo a little I I am a little bit more in his Corner than I was I do think I've never seen the candidate pool or candidate Market be as fickle as it is now people will change their mind very very quickly and turn on a dime so so if you have a great person you need to act with all deliberate haste but questions that are different how's remote work you know what's your expectation what does engagement look like questions that that get at some of the new dynamics of the last two years we haven't changed anything much other than the speed of a decision and I hired four people this year and three of them have been great and the the weakest candidate the one we hired was the one who just left us and so uh I would say that a 75% success rate is not bad for any hiring Sean do you have any new favorite questions well I guess add on to that we we did change our hiring process a bit and I kind of lament those changes and we're going to not do that anymore how so well one of the things that we did in our hiring process previously was a sample project so we would ask the candidate and we'd pay him for it you know we' ask him to do a presentation on a kind of strategic problem and that and that was such a good filter to see if like somebody was you know how they thought and also how they presented and we cut that out and we've not seen good results from the folks that we cut that out for um so I think the CH the changes we made there are a lot of changes we made and I'm just totally regretting a lot of them as well also me getting me getting out of the hiring process I don't think that was that was very good I think owners have have some sort of a sick sense about this stuff that it's hard for teams to develop that I'm not quite sure how to get around that it's a tricky one you know what questions I'm asking these days I I think that I want to rethink some of the questions that I asked before the pandemic and especially questions around teamwork and demonstrating how they value teams we have a an employee right now who's been with us now she just she's on maternity leave but she's a wonderful wonderful employee hired her right at the beginning of the pandemic and she had worked a remote job for I don't know like eight years before coming to work at Kinesis and what I appreciate about her is she understood the pros and cons of remote work she signed up because she didn't want another remote job and then the pandemic hit she actually knew how to offset some of the downsides of remote work um so she would you know create one-on-one conversations with folks she would go out for long walks with people and and so she really understand the value of a team and how to create teamwork and I I think I need to craft more questions around that idea of of how people celebrate being in teams uh because we we just are we're a team Centric organization and uh I think that the pandemic tends to Foster folks who want to work by themselves and that's not the kind of culture I want to create William correct me if I get this wrong but I recall maybe a year ago you told us that you had had to let some people go when the pandemic first hit and churches shut down um and that when the World opened up again and you started hiring people you put a greater emphasis on diversity and you hired a you were successful in hiring a much more diverse group of people but you found that there was a downside to that which is they didn't know each other and they weren't working in the same place and it was hard to get them into a cohesive team so first do I have that right and second have you been able to address that and kind of solve that issue I think you're mostly right I wouldn't call it a downside as much as an unforeseen challenge your opportunity you know anytime you're engrafting someone new into the workforce it takes work as uh Sean has noted and I would agree it unless you're a totally virtual company and always have been I found that onboarding virtually is an entirely different proposition and takes more work uh than on boarding in person and a lot of the people we hired during the shutdown and during the remote work time uh had never met each other and it didn't dawn on me that you know if if you haven't met each other that's a challenge and I didn't see that coming so that took more work if you intentionally hire for diversity which I am a champion of uh you just need to foresee that no matter what the diversity is it could be age diversity it could be Geographic diversity be racial ethnic you're now bringing people together who have different points of reference whether that's uh you know we put sugar and our tea in the South and we don't in the North or different movies or different cultural uh backgrounds that when you hire people who are alike they can speak short and very quickly because they've had very similar circumstances I don't think that means you hire people who are alike and not do diversity I just think it means you need to foresee the challenge that when you bring different people together uh you better have a common cause for why you're doing your work and you're also going to have to do some leg work to make sure that people who haven't met and are coming from very different backgrounds uh have ways of relating and learning from and with each other have you got into that point do you think ah some hits and some misses man I mean some good some bad I'm learning as I go I've told you before Lauren I just have a religion degree and a philosophy minor so I you know I'm making this up as I go yeah yeah yeah you have told me that before and I still don't believe it we only have a a few minutes left I'm just tempted to ask each of you basically how's business can you each of you give me a quick snapshot maybe Sean you first yeah it was really good at the beginning of the year um you know I say January through maybe March a lot of interest a lot of activity and then it just kind of fell off a cliff it's hard to say why and how that relates to you know kind of our regional issues you know Oregon Oregon has been very sort of hyper uh let's just without passing any judgment just really focused on the pandemic and so you know new news of hey this is this Varan is spreading fast etc etc it really impacts business activity um and then in the summer which is always a slow time I think everybody was trying to make up for lost time so so everybody was on vacation and you know just checked out just like kind of mentally checked out of their business so you know it kind of remains to be seen you know don't I I'm hoping that you know historically the fall is a good activity time period for us I'm hoping that people are interested in getting back to work but kind of the overarching oh it's a recession and then there's war and we might have a nuclear reactor get blown up and you know blah blah blah blah blah blah blah just kind of that constant drum and negativity I think has an impact on small business owners that that that's our audience that's our customer so uh all that to say I'd say kind of me uh right now and I'm working hard to change that but it's tough Paul how about you uh we're doing fine uh we're up about 15% on on sales last year and on track for our best year ever given my product and and how in general we I would say a reflection of business confidence or at least purchasing confidence that it would be good signs ahead that the recession is not as real as many would like to think cuz nobody ever needs to do buy what I sell they only do it if they feel like it and they feel like they've got resources in their pocket to do it and so I would say all indications are that it's going to be a strong year for us and I haven't seen any slowing down in any way since the beginning of the year that's nice to hear William yeah well our uh business is uh lumpy you know it it comes in clumps so I'm always hesitant to give a year end prediction but I I did just finish looking through the 2third of the year that we just closed our funnel marketing funnel started out giving me a little concern that we weren't going to make the numbers we'd hoped we projected just 5% growth this year it's so unusual in our sector because we're coming out of this time where the bulk of our clients are churches and schools and a lot of them had to shut down and then when they opened up everything's different and so when will things normalize whatever that means so he okay 5% we're 3% ahead of plan so we're 6 7% ahead of growth this year and uh that could go sideways any minute usually if we get through the summer strong then that's a really good sign and uh we had some concern early in the year but but right now things look good and I don't know if that our like what we do is pretty new to the sector that we serve so I don't know that that we've been around long enough to be able to say the way our business is going is a predictor of whether there's a recession or whether people are nervous or whether because we're still sort of people are still figuring out that we're here does that make sense it does all right well I sometimes let these conversations run more than the hour that we uh we assigned but I I've decided that it's time to kind of pull back a little bit and and just do the minimum of of what I need to do to get this podcast out so uh I think we'll stop there my thanks to Shan busy Paul downs and William vanderlan and to our sponsor work better now we'll see you next week wait wait don't leave yet if you have a question or a comment that you'd like the 21 hats owners to address send it to me by replying to your Morning Report or by email at Lauren 21h hats.com that's l r n21 hats.com do it now before you forget and don't be afraid to tell Jay what you really think he can take it and if you got something out of this conversation help us reach more business owners tell a friend subscribe and review us wherever you get your podcasts follow us on Twitter subscribe to the morning report at 21h hats.com this episode was produced by Jess Theron founder of blank word Productions okay now you can leave thanks for listening everyone [Music]