Summary:

Join Dr. Jim and guest Vanessa Gilardi as they discuss the importance of rethinking talent strategy and prioritizing employee experience in startups and scale-ups. They explore the need for a long-term view and the power of continuous learning in a rapidly changing work environment. Vanessa shares insights on building a strong onboarding process, maintaining communication and social skills, and the value of active listening. Discover how a shared responsibility for people and culture can lead to a five-star employee experience. Tune in for practical advice on creating a positive and sustainable work environment.

Key Takeaways:

• Being part of a startup doesn't necessitate adherence to the stereotypical '80-hour workweeks' hustle culture; instead, it's crucial to focus on creating a positive employee experience and preparing for sustainable growth.
• Vanessa advocates for a "long view" approach which entails learning agility and being open to constant skills development, which is increasingly relevant in the face of technological advancements such as AI.
• The alignment of candidate and employee experiences is vital; inconsistency between initial promises and actual cultural engagement can lead to employee turnover.
• A successful onboarding process, coupled with sustained leadership engagement at various stages of the employee lifecycle, can enhance retention and strengthen company culture.
• The responsibilities of people and culture should extend beyond HR and be embedded within the ethos of the entire business infrastructure, with proactive and routine communication being a linchpin for ongoing employee satisfaction.

Chapters:

0:00

Redefining Startup Success Beyond Hustle Culture

1:31

International Perspectives on Startups and Scale-Ups

3:21

Embracing Lifelong Learning in Professional Growth

5:59

Redefining Career Success Beyond Traditional Education Paths

11:33

Redefining Startup Culture and Employee Experience

15:04

Executive Cowardice in Company Layoffs

15:44

Cultivating Culture and Strategy Beyond HR Responsibilities

19:51

Bridging the Gap Between Talent Acquisition and Employee Retention

23:44

Cultivating Employee Experience in Startups and Scale-Ups

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Vanessa Gilardi: linkedin.com/in/vanessa-gilardi

Music Credit: Shake it Up - Fesliyanstudios.com - David Renda



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Promoting hustle culture and obsession about the work above all else. Isn't going to give you or your employees a five star experience. If you think 80 hour work weeks are what it's going to take for you to win, you're going to be in for a shock. Startup success requires rethinking your talent strategy and more focus needs to be put on preparation for growth rather than the growth itself.

You need to take a long view. Otherwise, you're just going to be another. One of those companies in a long line of toxic churn factories. That is what we're going to tackle today in this conversation. Our featured guest today is Vanessa Gilardi. She's going to be joining us. And let me tell you a little bit about her story.

She enjoys working with humans and believes in the power of giving and paying it forward. In addition to that, she's got an interesting side project where she. Is building a sustainable living beauty line in her lab, AKA kitchen. She's also a mentor for the women in tech global program. And she's also got a black thumb where she's a six Sigma black belt in killing plants, but she's recovering from that.

So we'll talk about all that stuff. Vanessa, welcome to the show.

[00:01:34] Dr. Jim: I'm looking forward to this conversation.

And I think The the particular thing that I'm interested in is your lens when it comes to startups and scale ups, and especially when you're looking at it from an international perspective because you have feet in multiple geographies. So I think that's going to be an interesting story to to navigate.

That's going to be relevant to this conversation.

And I think that has really carried me to try and test different things and not sit and basically be convinced that, Living a life that is stable is actually fulfilling that has many opportunities. Also, a lot of learning from that. I think sometimes I do stress myself into trying things that are hard and challenging, but learning that I couldn't have had if I didn't have that mindset.

So being ready all the time is actually quite important as a mindset to have. I don't know what I'm going to do in five years or 10 years, but I think I'm, always exploring things that I can do that can challenge me.

I'm curious how that actually shows up in your overall talent strategy from a career art perspective. How does that influence how you lead and how you build organizations and how you coach others to build organizations?

I didn't know what I wanted to do. It was really very hard for me to picture myself in the working place. And I wanted to explore things very differently. So I started to actually work very early on at 16 years old. And, I was very early on in a mature world with a lot of adults that for me were grown up.

And I learned very quickly what I didn't want to do and what I wanted to do in the workplace. And so rather than going through the uni curriculum most people do, I actually learn very early on what I, what my passion was and where I wanted to go. And so I went back to uni after that.

At the time YouTube didn't exist, so I wish it did, you can actually do a curriculum. on, YouTube or any other platform. And you don't need necessarily to go to uni to actually learn new skills, especially, maybe not in certain profession, but in most kind of blue collar profession, that's something you can do. So because of that, and because I think I had to work my way back into, Academia after that, which I loved as well doing. I got to fight myself into finding my place as well. And so I think, fighting for what you want is also very important. So very good skills to have. And I think that allow me to have this mindset that it's very important to not, on your laurel and always be ready to to learn new skills, to adapt and to be agile.

So your capability of learning and going to the journey of growing and adapting with the business is actually a skill, that will remain with you and you can do something with it.

S. Context here. You have, almost three generations in the workforce that have been brainwashed into thinking that, hey, the plan for success is you get through high school, you go to university, and then You know, whatever job that you get and you have stability for the rest of your [00:07:00] career.

And it's so dated and it actually lends itself to a lot of the disillusionment that people in the workforce have because they've been sold this sort of perspective that isn't really relevant anymore. So I think your experience emphasizes a different path. And your other point about there's so many different ways that you can learn.

And be effective in picking up what you need. My perspective is and I have a terminal degree. My perspective is that the 90 percent of jobs in the corporate world. You don't need a college degree to go ahead and execute cause doesn't prepare you for the corporate world. So why are we spending in the U.

S. Contacts sometimes? Over a hundred thousand dollars on a piece of paper that doesn't really equip you for success in the world of work. So that's great stuff. The other thing that I want to pull on from what you said is you said earlier in the conversation that your preference is to not lead the way.

[00:08:15] Vanessa Gilardi: First off, I would completely echo what you said before about the trajectory of university bringing you success. I'm hoping that we transitioning from something different now and that we seeing many example of, Gen Z to put a label into it, but having, Very different carry trajectory than we, we had, and that's great.

And by tsunami, there's been many that we've seen recently there's the 2008, 2009 financial crisis. There's the, tech, layoff that happened in 2022. There's the bear market that's remained for a long time. There's macroeconomic environments that are happening all the time. But I think that's part of life.

If you build those muscles to be ready to learn from many different environments that may be scary, may be challenging, but, equally can be very rewarding and you can learn from that's the skills that's going to continue. I think by not doing that, It's, puts you in a place where you're not going to feel in control, you're not going to feel, a responsibility to others to actually learn and grow.

And I think that's probably in our world right now. a very scary thing. And for me, it's very much more scary than actually putting yourself into the arena and trying, different stuff.

One of the things that a CEO is responsible for is diversifying their revenue streams. So you as an individual in the world of work should be looking at all the talents that you bring to the table, because there's a market for those talents. And you should be looking at, okay, how can I monetize this particular aspect of my skills and capabilities beyond just what my regular paycheck in the corporate world is looking like.

So I think that's great advice and it's pretty practical because then whenever an upheaval happens, like you described, you're not left. With the level of anxiety because it's just one element of your multiple revenue streams that's gone away, or at least taken a hit. You're not committed in a way that creates huge risk for you.

It's it's, the tech bro culture. It's work 80 hours a week. All sorts of stuff that it isn't necessarily positive. I'd like you to tie that together with. What your experience has been in working scale ups and startups and your sort of success factors that has led to a lot of positive results in those environments.

But that's also, something that I'm very passionate about because I've seen the [00:12:00] good and bad, I think in both, small organization and large. And my job really, my responsibility as I, define it is that I want to take all those. good and bad experience to actually think about the strategy and how can you make, the employee experience better based on what I've seen, what I've experienced, in previous organization.

There's definitely, moments in time, such as, I think the pandemic was a was a really big realization that, you can trust people because they are going to be productive where they are. And that, you can have people that work in different space and time and still be able to connect.

And so I think when I think about scale up and start up, that's the numbers of, I would say the good tests that you've tried that actually works such as, something is is not working. You have to solve a problem really quickly. You try something, it doesn't work. Let's get back to it in large organization.

Social responsibly to your employee almost as shareholders of the company potentially as as, as well as the investors that are, bringing capital for you to to do great products. And we've seen that with the massive number of layoff. Unfortunately, that happened in the tech industry in 2022.

That. completely shattered lives and took people by surprise. And those kind of quick change over time will impact very negatively your your employee experience, not only for the next, three months after. That has been done before the next six to 18 months. So I think that kind of insights about treating employee.

[00:14:13] Dr. Jim: I want to call out a couple of recent examples and get your take on it, on how it can be done differently. So I totally agree that, have to change in terms of how tech organizations handle their people strategy, but we've seen it over and over again.

And especially even recently, you look at the recent layoffs at a company like Wayfair, and you also look at how layoffs were handled at another company, Cloudflare. You had both of these CEOs who, in some ways, exhibited some pretty significant executive cowardice. Wayfair before the year was out their CEO was arguing that you need to put a lot more work in.

It seems like they'd outsourced a HR so that. All of these layoff notices didn't involve any of your direct manager. So it was just like somebody reading off a script. That's not a good look. And it's very short sighted. So I'd like to get your take on how that process should be done differently . The issue that I have is that I get what you're saying. I get the impact on employee experience, but it often seems like a lot of executives don't care.

And I'd like you to draw out why they should care about this stuff.

That's fine. You need to make sure that you have your run rates to manage the business, but that's the outcome that's going to happen. So that's one thing. And I would say, when you build a culture and a strategy, when you think about the good days it shouldn't be just, puppy dogs and yoga on a good day,.

It should also be things that will matter on a bad day. And so in a moment of crisis, a culture and a strategy that is being, very clear and articulated from the top down will help you to actually find ways of When you need to make those difficult decisions, why do you make them? It's really not about just people and HR.

[00:17:07] Dr. Jim: So there's something that you said that I think we need to expand on. You just mentioned that this shouldn't be something that's just purely an HR responsibility. And I think you're absolutely right. I think the challenge becomes when we're talking about people and culture and mission and values and all of these things.

The business often says, Oh, that's an HR thing. Let them take care of it. When you look at in a startup and scale up environment, getting business leaders to own these aspects of people and culture, because people in culture is owned by everybody. What are the things that you would recommend that HR leaders and HR practitioners.

Should be doing to share that responsibility, or at least have the business be accountable for those things, because that seems to be a pretty big gap.

And you won't have someone sitting here, trying to pull the strings on many levels and initiatives as well to do that. So my, maybe we're going to go into a very different kind of people team, people's strategy going forward. And I would love that. I think that would be brilliant. But clearly when leaders are asking questions about those kinds of aspects.

I think it's bringing to the front that they've invested so much in their talents, bringing them into the forward learning the roots, making sure that they're successful. That actually, Losing them will impact really negatively the brand, the product that we're building, a lot of the negative aspects that are really business related.

[00:19:06] Dr. Jim: You just mentioned that there's a lot of resources that are being spent to bring people into the organization. And it's important to bring people into the organization. My disconnect with that is that it seems like all the resources are really over indexed to bringing people into the organization.

And once they're in the organization, it seems like a lot of organizations just don't have the structure set up internally to develop and retain. Those employees, once they're in the door, tell us a little bit more about how that gap can be shored up in practical ways so that you're actually maximizing all that spend on talent attraction.

And that's translating into development and retention of that talent that you brought in.

But clearly, I would probably do an analysis of the talent team being. The very start of the foundation of a house. And when you think about the rest of the lifecycle journey, it's actually the biggest chunk of time that people will spend not on the candidate experience, you will hope really on working with you.

They're just, are going to leave and you are going back to have the same issues where you have going to spend money in onboarding them and learning.

So when we think about narrowing the gap between those two things. What are the things that business leaders need to be doing and being more intentional about to make sure that their employee experience is closer to what's being described in the candidate experience? Share with us a little bit about some of the best practices there.

The thing that I've seen working is really to have a strong onboarding. Suppose that you have a strong, candidate experience, the person is there on The first week offers two weeks of months needs to be the, the kind of core element that will stay into an employee's experience, right?

So the connectivity that they are going to give, the clarity about the role, the incentive they're going to receive from, the top down, the type of. Information that is following to the pipeline for them is really key and important. For example, at Moonpe, we have very regularly onboarding that we do on Thursdays.

Now I think. Usually where things start to be even more important is, at this intersection of six months to a year when things start to be hard, . People are in the middle of their first challenges. They are looking at OKRs, are they going to actually meet them, etc. And I think this six months to a year is so critical to make sure that people do stay interview, that they still check in, that even if people are successful, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily, happy in the position.

I think you shouldn't assume that someone is there or that you don't hear any feedback that you should stop there. So I think the, like regular check in is really important making sure that you offer. Simply being more proactive with people than just sitting at your desk and, relying on Slack to messages because emojis are there to help you.

[00:24:05] Dr. Jim: There's a lot of really good stuff in what you just said, but I think the particular thing that stands out to me is the idea of whether you're in person or remote, you can't hide behind your screen. You need to be intentional and proactive about really building those relationships as a leader and as a manager to create that that employee experience.

And I think your point about this is not something that just stops after the first three months, you need to be present at the six month mark at the 12 month mark. And throughout that entire can that employee's time there is critical because once we often think of. The employee life cycle is a series of stages, and when they're done with this stage, we don't need to worry about like how we actually show up on the next stage, and that's a mistake.

[00:25:13] Vanessa Gilardi: Going back to what we what we just went through, I think one important thing is just Not look at the past as a compass, look at the future as a compass. You don't have everything figured out and that's okay. Especially in startup, we don't expect perfect. We expect things being done and being proactive.

The three thing that I think is important to think of, or I'd like, to reflect back of my experience is one that seems very simple, but be adaptable. Be agile. Always try new stuff. Don't stop creating. Don't stop thinking about how you can, bring different things to the forefront.

We should pause more, be more ready to listen and do less of talking.

[00:26:34] Vanessa Gilardi: LinkedIn, always a great place to start.

And what that means is that you as a leader within the [00:27:00] business has to be able to show up and show people who you are as an organization and as a leader beyond what happens at the interview stage. You've got to be present at the onboarding stage. You've got to be present in any of those training instances.

You've got to be present in all of those moments that matter. That's how you create a five star employee experience. And. We often talk about the lack of engagement that exists with employees at all levels. Guess what? If you're seeing a disengaged workforce, that's your fault as a leader. How are you showing up?

How are you present? How are you being proactive? And these were all questions that we. Touched on during our conversation. So I think that's important stuff for any of our listeners to pay attention to. And I would encourage everybody to make sure that business leaders are looking at this as a shared responsibility versus something that just HR owns.