Nora Burns, founder and chief curiosity officer of The Leadership Experts, shares findings from her Undercover Candidate research, some of which she describes as horrifying! Listen in to hear this dynamic HR executive turned consultant talk about the cost of culture in advance of her keynote presentation at the 2024 DMEC FMLA/ADA Employer Compliance Conference March 25-28. 

Resources noted:

• Redefining Culture and Its Costs: Undercover Project Perspectives, a Q&A with Nora Burns 
• 2024 DMEC FMLA/ADA Employer Compliance Conference March 25-28 in Dallas, Texas
• The Leadership Experts
• DMEC

DMEC: Welcome to Absence Management Perspectives, a DMEC Podcast. The Disability Management Employer Coalition, or DMEC as we're known by most people, provides focused education, knowledge, and networking opportunities for absence and disability management professionals. DMEC has become a leading voice in the industry and represents more than 19,000 professionals from organizations of all sizes across the United States and Canada. This podcast series will focus on industry perspectives and provide the opportunity to delve more deeply into issues that affect DMEC members and the community as a whole. We're thrilled to have you with us and hope you'll visit us at www.dmec.org to get a full picture of what we have to offer, from webinars and publications to conferences, certifications, and much more. Let's get started and meet the people behind the processes.

Nora Burns: Hi. Yeah, I'm glad to the echoes and this really comes out of my research doing the undercover project as the undercover candidate and the undercover employee, which we will talk about in this episode. But the echoes really tie to four key elements that all of the stories, all of the lessons tie back to the first. The e stands for the experience, the experience of the candidate, of the employee as they're working in the organization. But their experience, the c is communication, and what a huge element communication is to your overall workplace culture, and it is an area that you, as a communications director, I'm sure appreciate. But the idea of employees need more and more information way more than what we think needs to be provided, and there's lots of opportunities and stories that tie to that in our research and that will be shared in the keynote. The h in the echo ties to the humanness and returning to the human element of work. We've gotten to a point where we tend to sometimes treat employees as widgets and as pieces in a puzzle and cogs in a wheel, and that doesn't help anybody. And it definitely doesn't foster a strong workplace culture and lots of stories tied to that. And then the “o” is to own it. It does not matter where you are in an organization structure, that you need to own your role in each of these components, that it is not only leadership's responsibility, although that's where the heavy lifting needs to take place. It is an ownership across the organization of making sure that those other three elements are going well and taking your own responsibility, not saying, oh, well, that's HR's responsibility, or that's Bob's responsibility or whatever it is. So that's where the echo comes in. And when we fix those four elements, we graduate to a new level of workplace culture.

Heather Grimshaw: I love all those different components. And yes, I agree 100% with the communications piece, of course, selfishly so. Looking at your keynote presentation overview, I was struck by a reference to how titles can, and I'm using air quotes here, define and claim people and lead them to feel, again, air quotes disconnected from their roots. Would you be willing to share an example of how an employer can adjust its approach to prevent this type of a disconnect?

Nora Burns: Yeah, this is really kind of the core and the heart of what I was doing as the undercover employee going back to the front line. I went back and worked frontline positions that I haven't been in those roles since I was in my early twenty? S and reconnecting to kind of the core of the organization, the customer facing role of the organization, and realizing how quickly we can get disconnected from really what our core business is. So I think that your titles can define and claim you in a couple of ways. One, I think they shield you from saying the whole not my job thing, which happens all the way up and down an organization's chain of command and from the first tier of an organizational chart to the top tier of the organizational chart. And I think it comes back to what the values of your organization are and to say, if our core value is to provide superior service, it does not matter if I'm the senior director of Yada Yada. If I've got a customer who's there who needs my attention, then that needs to happen. And finding ways to kind of break free of chains that say this is who you are and you're disconnected, you're more important or less important than what that role is. And we do it in both directions. We do it from saying just cutting off an employee on the front line, from sharing a really brilliant idea because they can't possibly know, even though there's so much brilliance there, to saying the person on the top tier of the organizational chart can't make any commentary about the customer experience because that's not where they work. So we just have to kind of break free and open up those communication chains.

Heather Grimshaw: I'm so intrigued by this primary research that you've done as the undercover candidate and understand your presentation is going to include some of the data that revealed interesting findings about employee recruitment and retention. And one of the things that you notice or note in your presentation description is what works for employers. Would you give us a sneak peek by sharing one takeaway?

Heather Grimshaw: That's such a good point. And I love the comparison to dating. I think that's brilliant. So many. Yeah, it's a really good point. And I think that most people, if not everyone, can understand what that feels like to show up early, as you noted. So that's really helpful. Thank you for that. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about this research, which I think is fascinating and obviously very telling. Can you share a little bit more about what led you to conduct the research as well as when it was conducted? Because it does sound like maybe it's ongoing. Is that fair?

Nora Burns: It is ongoing. Yeah. I didn't anticipate that. I didn't anticipate it actually becoming a 250 plus job interview practice and project. My initial intent when I was sitting around that conference room talking to a client about redesigning their hiring process, the initial idea came to me that I would just go do a handful of interviews, maybe six interviews, just to be on the other side of the table so that it would help my consulting practice and I decided on Colorado Springs. I'm based in Denver, Colorado, so I thought, well, Colorado Springs is far enough away that it's less likely that an HR executive walking through the lobby would recognize me, but it's still close enough that I can drive down for an interview without it being too big of an ask. I targeted Colorado Springs for the first half dozen interviews, and I was, quite frankly, horrified by what I experienced. And I really thought I was going to convince myself that we didn't need to do as much hiring training as I had been doing in the past and providing hiring tools about ask this, not that kind of a thing. I thought, surely people have figured some of those things out. But I was asked questions in those first six interviews that were, if they made a hiring decision on the information provided, would have been illegal. Definitely that bordered on unethical. And most of them were just lazy, quite frankly. I had a group interview, I don't mean a panel interview or a team interview, where multiple members of the organization are present to interview one candidate. I mean, there were six or seven of us that were candidates in the room being interviewed at one time. And it was for a receptionist position. This was not for a sales position, which might, you might be able to make that argument. I didn't want to take the time to interview each person individually, so it was super awkward. And the bigger challenge here is that this was actually a healthcare provider. This was a healthcare provider. And so not only did I leave there having a horrible feeling as a candidate, I realized I would never go there, I would never be a patient of theirs because I thought you're looking for shortcuts, and I don't want to be a shortcut. And we see that in a lot of practices where if you're interviewing in hospitality or in retail, you're interviewing potential customers. And so you can lose both a candidate and a customer at the same time. But it's also true in corporations. That's where it started. And then I'm a data junkie. And so I realized I needed a bigger sample size. And so I talked with my business coach, and I talked with a couple of HR pros and some ethicists around what would be the rules that I would put in play for this project, and committed to doing 100 interviews, decided it had to be across multiple states so that we didn't have a bias around one particular area of the country. And I flew myself to every interview. I didn't take as much as a cup of coffee, like if we met at a coffee shop. Also, please stop interviewing people at coffee shops unless you're hiring for a coffee shop. But I would buy my own coffee. I would put it myself up at the hotel. Right. I didn't want any financial loss to the organization kind of a thing. So we set up some rules like that. And then along the way, I made sure to drop lines that suggested I was not a sure thing. Right? Like, “I don't know if I'm really going to move to Nebraska or I'm still considering if I'm going to relocate to Atlanta or I'm talking to three other companies, or the interview that I had yesterday.” Right? So making sure that they knew that I was to not hang your hope on me as a candidate. Right. So that I could withdraw myself and that they would still have strong candidates. So there were some things like that, some barriers and some boundaries that I gave myself around this. But it is ongoing. I actually have two interviews scheduled next week. And then now organizations will hire us to come in and go through the hiring process. And without anybody in the HR team knowing, c suite usually hires us. And without HR knowing, without the hiring managers knowing. We have a couple of rules around that in that nobody gets fired unless it's egregious conduct. Right. If somebody hits on our candidate or tries to sell them drugs or something like that, that has not yet happened. I'm putting yet in there. If it's egregious conduct, that's one thing. But if it's simply bad hiring or bad interview questions or anything like that, that's all trained, that you can all be trained. And so that's one of the rules when we come in and we do an audit, unless egregious behavior happens, this is for development and not for disposal of employees.

Heather Grimshaw: That's fantastic. Yeah. And I do love the yet. So one of my questions for you was when you had reached the cut off or that deciding moment when you knew you had enough fodder for your consulting work. Since this is ongoing, have you identified any kind of a cut off when you think you would stop that undercover type work? Or do you envision this forever ongoing?

Nora Burns: I have no idea. I won't put an end date on it. It continues to be of interest. It continues to show new trends in the workplace, especially on the candidate side, where we do the bulk of the work, just because it's a much bigger lift to go through into the organization, go through their orientation process and all of that. And that's usually like step two. We need to start with a hiring process. So most of the auditing work and the consultancy work we do still is first on hiring and then we go into onboarding. But I cannot imagine when it will end. I think that there is a real need for it. It is a unique take on human resources and workplace culture. I was shocked that nobody else was doing it before I started the research, and I think it gives us a window into what the real life experience is. There is a huge disconnect between kind of what we say corporate wise we're going to do and then what actually happens on the frontline. And we need to bridge that and help people have the resources to do what we're asking them to do. And you don't know that until you've gone through the process.

Heather Grimshaw: I think that's such a great point. Not only that disconnect, but also as you're noting that undercover work both on the hiring side as well as the onboarding side, and I can only imagine that listeners are going to have sweaty palms thinking, oh, my gosh, wait a minute. I'm looking forward to learning more about this in your presentation. And my last question for you is, were there any findings from your initial undercover project research, since this is ongoing, that surprised you?

Heather Grimshaw: I appreciate you sharing that delight. I think the reference to the sexual harassment is shocking, and maybe it shouldn't be shocking, but it is shocking. And I'm glad I was on mute because I gasped when you shared that. And I think I'm glad to know that you're doing what you're doing to raise awareness about these issues and protect people as well as organizations and to elevate awareness of it.

Nora Burns: Yeah, there's definitely a greater need for awareness, and you can't see me. Those of you listening to this podcast, you can't see me, but all of these happened to a middle-aged woman. So often people are like, oh, it's only the really beautiful and the young who are on the receiving end of any of that. And that's just, I will not curse on your podcast, but it is that curse word. The truth is harassment and discrimination issues are about power. It's not about other things. It's about power and being able to demonstrate power and authority over someone. And in each of the cases that I went through, I can see that. I know I have the intellectual and the analytical information to be able to see that path, but it doesn't change how it feels to the receiving employee. And the harder part is how poorly organizations handled the complaints. Right? Like, in one case, I quit over it because it was very egregious. And as I was telling them why I was quitting, I said, do you want me to document this? Because you can take me out of an HR role, but I'm still an HR pro, right? So I'm standing there as this employee on the front line quitting over harassment, and I'm prompting them to say, do you want me to report this? I'm literally standing next to the we have zero tolerance policy sign while I'm doing this. And the person says, oh, no, I'll take care of it. And I just think, oh, that's not going to get taken care of. Yeah, now I've got, unfortunately, story after story about that. But that was absolutely shocking. And a reminder that doing online click through harassment prevention policy. Like click, click, read the PDF sign here is not sufficient in order to change a culture that has already become ensnared with harassment language and activity.

Nora Burns: Sneak peek and sign up. If you haven't registered yet, why not get in there? I'm not like coming in and going out the same hour, right? Like I'm going to be around. So sign-up register, be there for the keynote. Come and talk to me afterwards. Let's invigorate some of those workplace cultures. Let's make things better.

Heather Grimshaw: I love that. We will include the link to the conference. Nora's presentation is on March 25, and we will also include the URL to the Q and A that Nora has agreed to do with us in that note section of this episode as well. So thank you again, Nora.

Nora Burns: You're welcome.