In this episode of the SALTovation podcast, Meredith Smith and Judy Vorndran continue their conversation with Alex Oxford, Founder of TaxValet. Alex discusses how businesses have begun to shift their traditional cold and concrete environment to one with more emotional intelligence. He shares why he believes this shift has allowed for more of an emotionally safe environment for people to work in and how creating a culture with more emotional intelligence, allows for better communication and collaboration between teams, ultimately leading to more success for companies.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• The value of creating emotionally safe and open work environments 
• Assigning tasks to team members based on individual strengths
• Using data to help your client make the best decisions

What You Will Learn:

• 1:47 Creating a Safe and Accepting Work Environment at Tax Ballet
• 9:37 Sales Tax Registration and Employee Engagement Platforms
• 12:41 Exploring the Emotional Side of Business

Quotables:

• “Every single person is unique in their own way, even the people who aren't that unique, because sometimes tax accountants, are just kind of tax accountants. And that's okay. Creating an environment where it's okay to show up and be who you are, and you will be loved, accepted, cherished just as you are is important.” -Alex Oxford [02:27]
• “If our core purpose is to transform negative emotions and it's something positive for our clients, partners, and employees, if we have too many clients, then we're not going to be able to deliver on that promise for new clients coming in the door. And we're not going to be able to deliver it for our employees because they're going to be overworked and stressed out.” -Alex Oxford [07:08]
• “We're able to do surveys for different departments. But when we talk about data, I think it's really easy for a lot of business owners and data junkies like myself to just think about the quantitative. But a lot of it is the qualitative information gathering.” -Alex Oxford [11:19] 

“One of the things that I'm the most excited about is being able to proactively identify issues with our clients that need to be escalated higher up in the chain of command before the client realizes it needs to be escalated and before the employee realizes it needs to be escalated and then being able to look at these issues and pinpoint what the root cause is.” -Alex Oxford [12:21]

Mentioned in this episode:

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