Are you ready to rethink talent management for a happier, more effective workplace?

In this episode of the Happier at Work podcast, Aoife O’Brien is joined by Sophie Taylor, a global talent leader with a background in psychology and HR, currently at PAR Technologies. Sophie shares her dynamic journey across industries, from healthcare to manufacturing, and reveals how her experiences have shaped her holistic, people-focused approach to talent acquisition, talent management, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Together, they explore the ever-changing landscape of workplace culture, the importance of future-ready skills, and the practical realities of supporting both leaders and individuals to thrive and grow.

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

• The value of combining psychology with HR practices to build strong, supportive workplace relationships.
• Why recognising and assessing talent is a foundational skill for any leader, not just HR professionals.
• The importance of asking intentional, behaviour-based interview questions to uncover real potential.
• The benefits of hiring for diverse and non-traditional backgrounds to foster innovation and fresh perspectives.

Related Topics Covered:

Career Fluidity, Future Workforce needs, DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion)

 Connect with Aoife O’Brien | Host of Happier at Work®:

• Website 
• LinkedIn 
• YouTube 

Connect with Sophie Taylor | Talent Strategist at PAR Technologies:

• LinkedIn

Related Episodes You’ll Love:

Episode 195: Workplace Culture Dynamics: Creating A Positive Work Environment with Caroline Collins

https://happieratwork.ie/195-workplace-culture-dynamics-creating-a-positive-work-environment-with-caroline-collins/ 

About Happier at Work®

Happier at Work® is the podcast for business leaders who want to create meaningful, human-centric workplaces. Hosted by Aoife O’Brien, the show explores leadership, career clarity, imposter syndrome, workplace culture, and employee engagement — helping you and your team thrive.

If you enjoy podcasts like WorkLife with Adam Grant, The Happiness Lab, or Squiggly Careers, you’ll love Happier at Work®.

Join Aoife O’Brien for weekly insights on leadership, workplace culture, career clarity, imposter syndrome, and creating work that works for you.

Website: https://happieratwork.ie LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aoifemobrien/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HappierAtWorkHQ

Mentioned in this episode:

Thriving Talent book

Book

Are you a leader who's working with amazing people on your team, but you're not necessarily sure how to manage that talent that you have in a strategic way? So thinking about it from their perspective, where can I place them? How can I grow them? How can I have those conversations if they're not living up to expectations?

So my guest today on the Happier Work Podcast, the award-winning podcast about career and culture related issues for people first leaders like you, who is listening today. I'm your host, Aoife O'Brien. I'm the career and culture strategist for people First leaders in global organizations. And today I'm sharing the mic

leaders and organizations can feel they're really getting the best and the most out of their people. I know you're really gonna enjoy today's episode, and I'd love to know what's one thing you'll do differently as a result of listening today, and if you're so inclined, I would love to hear a rating, review or share it with a friend who you think might benefit from today's episode.

Sophie, you're so welcome to the Happier at Work podcast. I know we had talked about this last year and we're finally getting a chance to sit down and record this episode together. As I mentioned, there's been a few changes on the podcast recently, but I'm still really excited to have this conversation with you. Do you want to let people know a little bit about your career history and how you got into doing what you're doing today?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's super important to share that. My background originally was in psychology and so I utilize psychology a a lot in kind of how I manage my relationships in work and how I determine to get the most value out of building rapport with leaders and getting buy in. So my my college degree was in psychology, went on to get my master's in HR and kind of that combination of psychology and business just really like meshes with my natural skill set and personality and then from there just really grew my career starting in talent acquis. And I got some really good advice from a leader early on in my career that if you can assess talent and assess it well, it will be a strong skill set that you will rely on for the rest of your career. Whether you're working in HR or you're just managing people and hiring teams, managing teams, etc. Being having that talent assessment skill is important.

So I really started there and then wanted to move into the HR business partner space and kind of move to a few different organizations and industries to gain that experience. I really wanted to have that seat at the table having those interesting and dynamic and difficult discussions with leaders and being able to offer insight through that kind of psychology lens of human beings and businesses and culture to drive better outcomes for the business and for the employees. So I bounced around 4 through health services and health insurance industry. I actually went into CPG myself. I worked for a manufacturing company that manufactured tabletop goods and that was my first experience working with unionized environment and with labor relations which was a huge kind of like eye opening experience. I'm sure a lot of HR folks would would say that too. Then kind of found my way back into insurance. Realized that was not kind of scratching the itch if you will.

For me it was kind of boring and I had an opportunity from the CPG company. My previous chro had moved to the current company I am now which is Restaurant Tech. It's PAR Technologies and I've been here for four years and I started out building the talent management function from scratch. So my role did not previously exist at this organization. It was just kind of a TA team and some HRBPs. In the last four years my team has grown in the talent management space to four people. And then more recently I also brought the talent acquisition group into my scope as the global talent leader. So managing teams across multiple geographies and the talent landscape as a whole included in that.

I also technically manage our DEI strategy as well as corporate internal communications globally. Both of those as well as feed nicely into TA and talent management because there's a lot of work around inclusive, inclusive leadership practices, training and education around those topics and then just general communication to bring the broader community together within par, especially who are remote and across multiple geographies as well. So it's been a fun journey. I think the biggest thing that I've learned, especially in the last four years with par is that as an HR practitioner working in multiple industries, I very much have learned the hard way that I cannot apply the things that worked best potentially in other companies that are in other industries, different sizes with a different population. And so I've definitely had a lot of like fail and fail fast situations where I've had to pivot and then figure it out from there. And so I think that has actually now become one of my biggest strengths is being able to come in and recognize and be self aware that my pre existing knowledge or experience may not be the right fit for the situation that I'm trying to solve for with the business. And it kind of humbles me and I like to take that to go in and ask more questions and do a lot of research with my peer group to understand what's happening outside the market and then match that with the maturity level of the organization I'm working for. I think that's the biggest thing that I would want people to take away from this is that the maturity level will evolve and change over time.

And so therefore your programs and initiatives are going to evolve and change as well.

I'd love to come back to that in a second, but something that struck me in what you said in your, in introducing yourself was this idea that the importance of the skill of talent acquisition and recognizing good talents. So I'd love to kind of pick at that, dive into that in a little bit more detail. What would you say that you've learned in that? Because I've never heard it explained that way, but it makes so much sense that that is such a valuable skill to have. No matter what your role in an organization, being able to recognize good talent, seeing who would be A good fit where like can you share some of the kind of tips that you've learned or any of the lessons that you've had in that kind of role?

Yeah. So in a, in a true TA and applied context, I would say that really comes out in being thoughtful and intentional with the questions that you're asking during interviews, like in that formal kind of recruitment process. And I have really found if you're not asking those true behavioral interviewing questions and then following up with well, hey, like you mentioned this comment, say more about that, like what was the result or what was the impact or how did the leaders react to that work that you did? That really helps me dig in and see the true value that that individual potentially could bring versus asking more surface questions that might not get there. The other thing is, as I built my own talent management team, I've specifically hired individuals within my team and I've said this to them and they know this, who have non traditional backgrounds to what I would typically hire. And I do it on purpose. And the reason why I do that is I want them to come in with a fresh perspective that's going to make me think differently and make our organization think differently. And so far I have two team members who've been with W.E. for three years now and they're continuing to grow and do tremendous work and win awards actually for the work that they're doing and get a lot of buy in from our executive officers.

Granted I've had to align that with also spending a lot more one on one time with some of them in the beginning to give them the basic framework of talent management. But to me that additional kind of upfront time investment is then paying, its paying its way out in spades over time. So I would encourage people to think of like non traditional folks that are going to bring a different perspective than what you typically look for. I also would say that we struggle to focus on the skills that we not only need for right now, but can somebody build and develop those skills two years, three years, four years from now? I find that happens a lot that I talk with hiring managers is they're like I need this person today. But then they're not thinking about well, could that person potentially be a people leader? Are they interested in being a people leader? Are you having those questions, asking those questions from the beginning to think about the bench development within your team? So I ask that in, in interviews with people, I say, what are your career aspirations? I want to understand like do you, do you always want to be that solid individual Contributor and be that subject matter expert in your space. Do you want to grow to be a manager, et cetera? I'm thinking three or four steps ahead, and I don't think a lot of our managers are thinking that way when they're going through the hiring process. So I think that's helped me assess talent for the future and not just today.

Yeah, I think that's such a valuable point as well, that oftentimes, and I've been in this situation myself, you have a gap to fill or you soon will have a gap to fill. So you want basically what we would say, bums on seats. You want to get people in to the organization. You're not really thinking about the future or how that role might develop. What you said about future skills, are there any specific skills you're seeing at the moment? And the reason I'm asking that was. Well, a. Obviously, AI is going to have a huge impact on a lot of organizations. But also when I talk about skills, I tend to focus on strengths and the underlying strengths that we all have that lend themselves to specific types of skills.

So if you are strong in a particular area. So I'm quite methodical and analytical. And while I don't have a skill of coding, that would be a skill that might come quite easily to me because of the strengths that I have. So I suppose for me it's maybe a slightly different way of thinking about it. But what do you see then as those gaps or as. As those evolving need for skills like this is something that has come up a couple of times on the podcast. I'm always curious to hear what people's perspectives are.

Yeah, that's a great question. So you definitely hit the nail on the head with the first comment about AI and technology. So I am always asking a question, typically around comfort level with new technology, interest to explore new technology, not being afraid to test things out. If I interview with somebody who is like, yeah, you know, I like what I like, or new technology scares me, or, you know, it's hard for me to adjust to new things that potentially could be a red flag because I know that at least in my current organization, things are moving and changing constantly. And if we don't have somebody who can pivot and be agile from that perspective, they might struggle within the organization. So the second piece of that is kind of that agility and ability to pivot, that if something's not working, we change and we evolve. The third pillar kind of of that would be general curiosity. I want somebody who is gonna come in And I don't know if that, if you could define that as a skill or a personality attribute.

But people who want to know more, they ask interesting questions. Like another thing that I always am paying attention to is at the end of an interview or discussion, what the person asks of me, like, are they the kind of stereotypical, like what's the culture like? Or you know, blah, blah, are they, are they asking more kind of philosophical questions around like where do you see your team going in three to five years? Or what do you think the focus is going to of AI and talent management or something of that nature? It shows me a level of curiosity that I want to maintain within my team. Again, that's thinking this person might be able to continue to meet needs three years from now because they're curious. And then this might be a little odd, but I found that this is super important is I also am curious to know what people's, I guess, proclivity is to stress management. And the reason why I want to understand that is a lot of times in any HR role we are, our internal client groups can sometimes and most of the time have their own stresses and their own sense of urgency. And a lot of times you find that the HR professionals that are more likely to burn out or want to leave the organization struggle to differentiate between others, urgency becoming their own urgency and how and when to manage that. And I do a lot. I spend a lot of time with my team.

When they bring things to me and we're kind of problem solving or brainstorming, I ask the question of do you actually own that? Is that something that you can influence? If it's not, let's refocus on what you can control and then put your energy towards that. And so, and I think that, that I, I feel like I was this way like 10, 15 years ago and after having two kids and just kind of like evolving in my life, I've, I've developed a different perspective. But especially in the HR world, I think that that is some. Is a sign or an indicator of somebody being able to have longevity at an organization and kind of not get spun up and spun out over things that come up day to day with the business.

Yeah, yeah. I mean there's so much that resonates with what you've just said and this idea of the circle of control versus, you know, the circle of influence versus I have zero control over this completely. And therefore I shouldn't get stressed about it or try to manage it whatsoever. Interestingly, as we're recording this, this Evening. I'm running a webinar on expectations and clarifying expectations and the expectations we have of ourselves versus the expectations others have of us versus the expectations we have of other people and making sure that we are aligned on expectations, on what happens when it all goes wrong. And I think it's a very valuable point in relation to what you're talking about. You know, when we get spun up in stress because someone else's urgency has become our urgency. And I used to have this saying with a colleague when I worked in Australia, where it's like, not my circus, not my monkeys.

Like a lack of. What do we used to say? A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine. So obviously people have different ways of working and if someone has left something to the last minute or is asking you something at the last minute that they could and should have asked you previously, it doesn't necessarily become an emergency.

Right.

You know, it doesn't suddenly burst up into becoming this emergency for you, I suppose.

Absolutely.

So coming back to, I suppose what we talked about earlier and this idea that when you go from an organization to a different organization, whether it's a different industry or a different size or a different maturity level, and you have all of this tacit knowledge about the industry that you're working in or the type of role that you're doing, but it doesn't necessarily apply. Talk to me a little bit more about how you've seen that kind of play out. I'm really interested in this idea that you've tried stuff and failed and then realized I had to learn stuff again and that it's okay that that happens and it's a natural part and we shouldn't beat ourselves up, but it's a learning experience.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the best way to answer this or talk about this is to talk through an example. And I'm very open and I hope that other folks that are leaders in the inclusion belonging DEI space can relate to this. So when I joined my current organization about four years ago, there was no kind of formal pre existing DEI program or focus in any capacity. And so we were starting from scratch. I also knew and worked in the DEI space pretty, pretty much focused more on the talent acquisition side of it. So recruitment related to diverse hires and inclusive hiring practices.

And so I then needed to like shift my focus to inside the organization and kind of figure that out and understand that. So what I did is I, I worked with my boss and I said, you know, I recognize that I am still learning in this space, I think it would be valuable to partner with a consultant and somebody who does this for a living to like, learn from them and get best practices and try and put our best foot forward for the, for the organization. Our consultant that we partnered with was fantastic. However, the approach was like oil and water with our executive leadership team. And we were supposed to have a two to three hour session with our executives with this external partner facilitating for us on inclusive leadership. And we did not even get 30 minutes in before pretty much the entire executive team was jumping down our throats and saying, this is great, this is great, but we just want numbers and metrics. Like, what are the numbers that you want us to hit and how can we get there? And we literally ended the session after about 45 minutes and then just said, okay, we're gonna go back to the drawing board and like, try and figure this out. Like, hold please.

Essentially, that was probably one of my biggest failures I've had in my entire career and was like, fell flat on my face in front of the entire.

Team at the time. Yeah, yeah, at the time. It must have been horrific. I can.

Yeah, yeah, like. And I don't think, I don't think the team at the time recognized how much that impacted me or how much like that was like such an intense experience. It was. And so myself and my colleague who were working on the DEI strategy, like, kind of went back to lick our wounds and we were just like, what do we do now? You know, and then we did a lot of brainstorming and discussion and we, we recognized that the organization at the time did not have the maturity to dive into that level of training and education. It just wasn't going to happen. And we were just going to continue to squ peg round hole if we keep trying to push that. Even though this, this kind of approach with our facilitator was pretty standard across the board with a lot of other companies, it did not work here. And so what we did is we went back to the drawing board, we said, okay, let's meet our leaders where they're at and try and align to this kind of metrics driven approach, but do it with, through the lens that we have as experts in this space.

So we did develop those KPIs and metrics globally for the organization. We started leaning much more into our internal data to better understand like what our population looks like and then use that and then, and then industry benchmarks to use that to say we're low here, we're high here, we're not doing well in these areas. And then we also focused more on implementing internal surveys around employee sentiment, around inclusion and belonging. That could help drive more of a conversation of like what's real life and what's actually happening and coming from our own employees. And from there over time we were able to build a lot more trust with the business, get more time with them. The other thing that we noticed is those conversations around those topics can be highly sensitive for folks and especially now in our current world, are highly politicized.

Yes.

And doing that in a large group, with a group that was not particularly well versed in this space and in a group setting was like a disaster. So what we also did is we individualized it. So we said, okay, we're now we're going to follow up with each of these ELT members one on one and we're going to pull data for their specific orgs compared to the industry and go and talk to them together in a smaller group. And over time we started doing that every six months and having discussions and we started to see a change in kind of the dynamic where it was less combative and more oh, okay, I can take a nugget here and I can take a nugget there. And this is what I'm gonna, you know, utilize to kind of help my business or help my leaders be more inclusive. And then that also allowed us to give them more nuggets of practical application that they could put into place rather than speaking in this kind of 30,000 foot view that was kind of abstract and difficult for. And especially when you're in tech companies with people who highly analytical Those that kind of 30, 000 foot view, people just gloss over and stop paying attention. Yeah, so that's an example of like a major learning that I've had where I was like, okay, this is the stand, this is the gold standard.

This is typical. Like this is not rocket science. We're just starting, you know, starting with education. Okay, this is not going to work here. We need to re, rework this and start over. And now we've evolved into a pretty consistent cycle with the team of doing these annual surveys, reporting them out to the executive team, sharing them back with the employees, using that information to then inform our strategy. And employees know what to expect now. They know that we're going to be doing them, they know what the data is going to be used for.

You're building a bit of transparency. And then we are also doing quarterly programming on various topics to drive education around how to be an inclusive employee. And manager and tidbits from that, and that seems to be working the most for us. Would others outside who are DEI experts say that this is the best way to do it? Probably not. But is this what's working for us right now and adding value? Yes, and I'm completely comfortable with that.

Yeah, I think. I mean, there's a few things I want to bring up there. The first one is the. The last topic that you just mentioned. I think sometimes we become so obsessed with what other people are doing or what the best practice is without really figuring out what works for us. Like, what are our employees saying and what's working when we implement it and what's not working. But the other thing I wanted to reflect back to you, Sophie, is that the application of what you're talking about is so much bigger than just, oh, this was a learning, or this is coming from an industry to another. It's a real lesson in change and how to implement change and how to recognize when something's not working, not get disheartened and see it as a failure, but rather, what is the learning? What can we do differently? And how can we start embedding this exactly, as you said, from where the leaders are at right now? So where are they now? And what's the journey that we need to bring them on to get them to where we think that they should be when it comes to DE and I specifically in this case.

But I think anything in anyone else's case, you know, if you're coming up against some resistance in relation to a project, in relation to something that you want to implement at work, I think taking that type of approach is really understanding where they are, what the resistance is, and bringing them on that journey and doing it at your own pace in a way that works for your organization, I think makes. Makes all the difference.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's. That was a huge one. There were definitely tears and some upset after that. But I think the bigger part is how you recover and pick yourself back up and keep going.

Yeah. Because I can. I can only imagine, you know, and I've been on that side, you know, as an external person coming in and. And the senior leaders were not expecting that whatsoever. And it's just. It's really disheartening as an external person and I'm sure, like, embarrassing and disheartening as an internal person as well, that it's just like, oh, where. Where are we going now? What. What do we do next? Any.

Any other sort of big lessons that you feel that you've Had. And I suppose I'm thinking more from a talent management perspective and how do we work more effectively with leaders to make sure that. I think if you think of it like this, that oftentimes lead leaders are not trained in how to hire people, but they're oftentimes the hiring manager. They need to work with someone else on that. But like what kind of things can we do to help leaders to better manage talent, whether it's from a hiring perspective or a retention perspective.

Yeah. So one example I would give is a. We do a. We have what we call a talent roadmap for the year. And so over the course of 12 months we clearly define this with our employees. That it starts with goal setting and then moves into. We do 360s at mid year and then we do a talent review for, for our like senior director level and above and then obviously an annual performance review. And specifically about the talent review, this, this was more of a new experience for our organization when I came in four years ago.

So the most common kind of like resource, if you will, that a lot of people reference for Talent review is 9 box. In in my opinion, I think everyone's familiar with that. Right. It's, it's classic but it's also doesn't work for everybody. And I think it's, it's, you know, it's over 30 years old at this point. I think it's not bad, but I don't think it's necessarily the best option for every organization. And so I think for talent management there's an opportunity to provide simple, I'll say that again, simple but effective tools or resources that allow the leaders to have fruitful and valuable discussions about their talent and their potential. So what I did is we tried using the 9 box like when I was first here and I saw that, that you know, people were seeing the numbers of the boxes and thinking of them linear, linearly instead of recognizing that you could be in the middle and be a box 5 or a box 6 and still be a really solid performer.

And you don't need to be at the very top of the box nine or you know that, that corner box. And it was just confusing people. Like I can't like to explain it. And then people would argue over what the boxes were called and all of this stuff. And it, it completely took away from trying to have that fruitful discussion that is going to have a positive impact on our succession planning and development of our employees. So I said we're scrapping the nine box and I'm Finding a different solution. So I worked actually with, we use Lattice as our talent management tool. And at the time Lattice has a really cool, I guess, group or division that at the time was called advisory services, where you could go to them and say, hey, I'm having a, a challenge to do a talent review.

9 box doesn't work for me. I want to build something else. Can you brainstorm with me and help me figure this out? So what I did is I then I essentially created a four box, but I turned it on its side and made it a diamond. So at the top you've got your top talent. So those are your essentially your ready now folks. The two boxes that are next to each other in the diamond were your future potential and your valued contributors. And then the bottom one, what box was continue to evaluate. And this was a game changer for our organization because it actually, when we facilitated the talent review, people resonated.

They stopped arguing about what does top talent mean? And what is like we should call it this and we should call it that. And we like we focused. 95% of the conversation was actually on the people that were being, you know.

Discussed in the names of the boxes.

Yes. And then also pairing that with very simple like questions to ask in preparation for those talent review discussions. So for example, as people are preparing to select where people sit in their potential boxes, like if that person quit today, like how would that impact your team? If you could hire that person again, would you? And why does this person make your life harder, your work life harder or make your work life easier? Like very simple, almost kind of basic elementary questions to get the brain thinking about, like the potential that this person can bring. And as a result, we've had like really successful talent review discussions. And then we track year over year where those people based on their box placement have ended up over time. And then we report that out to the board. So I actually just pulled the data this past year that we retained 100% of our top talent folks that were in that box, which We've now done two years in a row. 90 something percent of our future potential, 85% of our value contributors.

But then the continue to evaluate was about 55% turnover. Which also shows that we are taking action and working with the folks that potentially aren't performing as they need to be and addressing it as an organization. So coming out of that, my guidance would be if you're struggling with kind of using old tools or legacy tools that are just not working for you, consider creating something completely new and keep it simple, simple, simple, simple. If you want to bolt onto it later or add to it later, go for it. But I think you're going to find more value out of simplistic resources and tools than trying to throw a million things at people and expecting them to read all of your attachments and read all of your job aids and read all of these things. I can tell you right now it's not going to happen.

I think it's such, such a valuable point. But I love the question. You said that they're simple, but they're probably the questions that we don't ask ourselves that maybe we're afraid to ask. Like, is someone actually making my work life harder? Well, yes, they are, but maybe you're afraid to have that conversation and you were going to put them in a place where they're like, oh yeah, they're actually a solid performer when actually they're. They're not. I did have a question around considering someone levels or someone. Someone's. What's the word I'm trying to find considering where someone is.

Like, have they just started in a role, for example, and therefore how fair is it to judge them against other people who are already in that role versus, you know, whether they've newly been newly promoted versus whether they've been in the role for a long time and they're looking to get promoted. And I'd love then, after we talk about that, to come back to this 55% turnover in the bottom box.

Yeah. So in the continue to evaluate, which a lot of times you see as well with people who use 9Box, there might be like a separate list that's outside that is called like too new to evaluate or too new to rate kind of a thing. So our continue to evaluate box is not, is not like you're get. If someone ends up in that box, you're not guaranteed to be like put on a pip or pushed out. There are many folks that are sitting in that box because they're new, enrolled, recently hired, you know, haven't, haven't had a chance to truly give them the time and space to see their performance. And so the expectation is, is that the anybody who's in that continue to evaluate box is not there for more than one year. So if you come back again to the talent review and that person is looking like they're going to end up in that box again, all eyes are going to be looking at that leader and that manager and saying, what are you doing to. What are you doing or not doing to manage this person's? Talent and potentially it be are they in the wrong role? Like, are they super great and adding a lot of value to the team, but their skills aren't being fully utilized and they need to, they need to be evaluated to potentially be in a different position or on a different team or, you know, in a different department.

And so it's, it's not this kind of scary thing of like the bottom corner box that a lot of people are afraid of in the nine box. This is more of a. Of do you need more time or do you need to have a career discussion with this person to figure out and better understand where their best fit within the organization?

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think like having that visibility of there's. They're not going to be there for two years in a row, basically. So either you do something, and I love how you bring it back at the responsibility of the leader to do something with that information. Because. Because if I think back to an early time in my career and I was managing someone who I didn't hire and probably wouldn't have hired because I just saw that he had such a different skill set that was beyond what we needed in the role and he would have got really bored in the role and he did. Now someone caught me off guard by saying, and what are you doing to get the best out of him? And I was like, I was kind of taken aback back thinking, is that my responsibility? I didn't know early in my career that that was my responsibility to get the best out of my team. And so I suppose it serves as a reminder to people.

Is one of your core responsibilities as a leader is to develop the people who you're leading and you know, not having them in that needs development,

continue to evaluate. They can't be there for two years in a row. Like, what are you doing? How are you taking responsibility to move them into the box either to a different role, maybe to a different organization if they're not a good fit for the organization, or moving them up to a position where they are in one of the other boxes where they're really performing or they're ready to be promoted?

Yeah. And I would add to that too that what I discussed as we prep for facilitating these sessions with the participants is that where people land in those boxes over time is fluid and is going to change as people's careers change. And so I like to use this kind of visual of a line like with two arrows on either end. That's like a spectrum. And on one end of the spectrum is ambitious, which is, that's your person who's like, when's my next promotion? How do I get more? How do I do more, more? And then on the other side, you have achievement or achieving, which is somebody who's in their role, they're doing a really good job. And that as our lives, especially from a personal perspective, evolve, you're going to move on that spectrum. And so somebody might be a valued contributor one year. And I'll use myself as an example.

I just came back from maternity leave less than a year ago while I was pregnant. And kind of leading up to that, I was very open with my boss. I was like, I'm comfortable where I'm at where I am. Like, I really just want to, like, have a less stress. I want to just be able to focus, like, for this point in time, like, on my family and, like, you know, do my work and do a good job. But, like, I'm not in that kind of ambitious stage at the moment. But I'll come back to that eventually. And being able to like a, have the leaders understand that that just because you put this label on somebody one year does not mean that that's where they're going to be the following year.

And I think this especially true for women, especially women that, you know, are having children or, you know, taking care of loved ones, you know, elderly parents, whatever that might be. You might have a season or a period in your life where, like, you just have other things that are going on and that's more important to you, but then it's going to change again. And so I try to teach leaders to use that spectrum when they're having conversations to help just kind of set the tone with their direct reports and be more open. And then they will probably be more open with their manager in return to be like, yeah, I'm kind of over on this side right now, but let's check in in six months.

Brilliant. Yeah, no, I love that you mentioned something about, like, and I think that that's so. It's so relevant for like, I always assumed that I should always be super ambitious and didn't really appreciate or didn't really understand when people weren't in that ambitious, ambitious phase and always looking to get to that next level. Level. I can see it with a bit more 2020 vision now when I look at other people, when I look at my past career where, you know, it is important to have that time where you're like, I just want to be a solid performer. I have other stuff going on. I don't want to necessarily get to that next level. The other thing I was going to come back to is this idea of tools.

You mentioned some really simple tools. And I think maybe this is what a lot of leaders struggle with, that they don't have necessarily the language to have these conversations with their teams about their careers, about their development. We get so caught up and this is something I get asked about and share with organizations quite a lot in relation to careers. We get so caught up in KPIs and managing performance that we don't necessarily have those conversations about careers and aspirations and where do you see yourself and where do you fit in and what's, where is the skills gap and what are your strengths and how do we get more out of you essentially? So what kinds of things are you using at the moment in relation to tools? Like do you have anything specific that you use? You have some conversation starters that you'd like to share? Something like that?

Yeah, so we did a, we do an annual engagement survey that asks one of the questions is around do you feel like you have the opportunity to progress your career at the organization and give feedback, et cetera. Etc. And historically that has consistently been one of the lower scoring questions that's come back. And so we've constantly been trying to figure out, well, how do we solve this? And what, what keeps coming back is the comments that come in that come in response to that question, in addition to the score that people give is I wish my manager would talk to me about this. I wish my manager would like take the time to discuss these things and be open to these or I don't know how to approach my manager who, who to even talk to about this.

And so again this kind of goes back to understanding the maturity of the organization and the maturity of your managers. And so in a very mature organization, I would say a lot of those conversations tend to happen more naturally and managers and leaders are more, that's like part of their kind of annual, I guess process and goal is to have those conversations. When you have managers who are not as used to that, you have to give them push to get those done. So for us in Lattice there's a feature that's called updates and this is something that you can pre populate with questions that go in there that actually go to the individual and not the manager first. And we're calling them career updates. And so they're pushed out, the reminders are pushed out to all employees every quarter to go in and respond to that list of questions. And then once those responses come in, they immediately get sent to the manager and the manager can go in and actually respond to those questions. And then the intent is that they would use that insight from those, those responses to talk about it in an upcoming one on one.

And so what we can do is we're actually tracking in the tool how many people are responding so we can track and see like in what orgs and what geographies are people using this or not using it. And then we're going to over time look at how the adoption and usage of that correlates with the engagement survey responses and satisfaction with career development. And so we, we are doing a lot of work on the back end with like internal communications reminders from our, from our hr, hrbps. We use a lot of slack reminders and communications around this and then also in that empowering our employees that they need to own their career discussions like yes, your manager needs to be there and collaborate with you, but if your manager forgets or isn't bringing this up, bring it up with them. You are empowered to do that and say I would like to talk about my career. And so that's. The other piece is that managers have so much going on and so much on their plates. I think you need to try to find a balance with driving ownership and accountability with the individual in addition to the managers being part of that discussion, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. The other question I had, and this ties in slightly with what we've been talking about now, but very much so with the talent management side of things as well, is when it comes to like, I'm kind of thinking from a, from a maybe a personality perspective, there's some people who are really good at demonstrating this is what I've achieved and this is how I'm doing. But there are other people who maybe not so much, I don't want to generalize, but let's say generally speaking it could be extroverts versus introverts or people who believe I'll just put my head down and the work will speak for itself and my manager knows what I'm doing all the time. And I suppose any thoughts around making sure that we have all of the right data from a performance perspective, from what people are actually achieving so that everyone has the same level of visibility regardless of how they're showing up at Work.

Yeah. So I think a lot of that actually comes out. And we do two surveys a year. One is our inclusion and belonging survey and one is our engagement survey. Our inclusion belonging survey asks questions around, do I feel valued at work? Do I feel like my opinion is valued by my manager? You know, do I feel like my manager cares about my psychological safety, things of that nature. And then in the engagement survey as well, there's questions about the direct relationship between the direct report and the manager, and those are anonymous. However, we can look at the data and see it with, if it meets the anonymity threshold, we can see it by like, org leader or manager. And so what we do is we do a very detailed report out for all people leaders for both of those surveys so that if, if, if there's information that's coming back that's indicating that you have a percentage of your population that is feeling undervalued or doesn't feel like their work is being noticed or they're being recognized.

As an example, that's going to be an opportunity of like the HRBP saying, hey, your scores are kind of low in this area. I think it would be best, now that we've come out of the survey, that you share these results with your team and then add a question in your upcoming one on ones with individual about this specifically and give people an opportunity to speak about it. That has, like, really seemed to be our process for now to kind of, identify those gaps that might not be coming up to those who are less extroverted or don't know how to kind of toot their own horn, if you will.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brilliant. Love that.

The question I ask everyone who comes on the podcast is, what does being happier at work mean to you?

So this kind of goes back to my comment earlier about assessing people for stress management. So for me now as a mom and, you know, having a lot of other things going on outside of work. Happier at work to me means being able to not let other people's urgency become my urgency and to protect my own peace in that way. Eight, 10 years ago that was not me. I was you know leaving like work or ending work and sitting there and like ruminating on things that happened and struggling to sleep and you know all these things were like taking up my brain. And so being happier at work for me is being able to say this is not important or this doesn't matter or this can wait until tomorrow and being completely confident in that decision and letting it go and that has taken I think my ability to focus on the things that matter and not focus on the things that don't and has made me a better HR practitioner, leader, team member, etc.

Brilliant. I love that. Thank you so much for your time today. I really, really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you. I appreciate it.