Latest / The Action Catalyst / REMASTERED: Creating Healthy Workplace Culture, with William Vanderbloemen (Faith, Executive, Jobs, Career)

Transcript

REMASTERED: Creating Healthy Workplace Culture, with William Vanderbloemen (Faith, Executive, Jobs, Career) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Host: My guest that we have for you today I'm super excited
• 0:02
  about William Vanderbloemen. His company Vanderbloemen Search
• 0:07
  Group wins all these crazy awards. They were like number 23
• 0:11
  best search firm in the country number three best. Third Best
• 0:14
  Place to Work in Houston. He writes for Forbes has a weekly
• 0:18
  column there. He's got a couple books that are out. He's also
• 0:22
  got degrees from Wake Forest at Princeton from Theological
• 0:25
  Seminary. I mean, just a total awesome guy mover and shaker.
• 0:29
  And his new book is called Culture Wins: The Roadmap to an
• 0:35
  Irresistible Workplace. So William, welcome to the show.
• 0:39
  William Vanderbloemen: Wow, that I hope people don't believe
• 0:41
  everything you just said. That was awesome. Great to be with
• 0:44
  you, man.
• 0:44
  Host: Yeah. So in terms of creating an irresistible
• 0:47
  workplace, why do people leave? Like if you have to boil it
• 0:52
  down? What causes people to leave?
• 0:54
  William Vanderbloemen: Sure, sure. Well, so we did a whole
• 0:56
  lot of research for this book we did, we took time to say, Hey,
• 1:02
  we've won a lot of awards for a great place to work. And that
• 1:06
  led people to say, Can you write about this Forbes asked us to
• 1:08
  write about this. And then we said, well, we can tell our
• 1:13
  story about how we built a culture, we actually had to
• 1:16
  reverse engineer, we were like, how did we do that? So we
• 1:18
  stepped back. And he said, I guess we did this and this and
• 1:20
  this. And we sort of intuitively fell into what we've got. But we
• 1:24
  said, You know what other books are out there. But let's not
• 1:27
  just tell our story. Let's get up underneath the hood of all
• 1:31
  the great cultures we can find. So I took a stack of magazines
• 1:34
  that were award winning lists of award winning companies for
• 1:37
  culture, handed them to a young employee at our firm, and said,
• 1:41
  Go find the email addresses of all the CEOs and get me at least
• 1:44
  100 phone appointments so that we can study and it did and what
• 1:48
  we've been covered with some best practices. So getting back
• 1:51
  to your question, what we also uncovered, there are lots of
• 1:54
  studies on the internet, which are all true if they're on the
• 1:57
  internet, right? And the baseline like the most common
• 2:00
  answer to how many people in America like their job, the most
• 2:04
  common answer is two out of three Americans hate their job,
• 2:09
  not modestly dislike not Oh, I can't wait till hump day is
• 2:13
  over, or I need some more time off, I hate their job. And so
• 2:17
  like what in the world is causing that? And we found a few
• 2:20
  common answers. First of all, people don't leave jobs, they
• 2:23
  leave managers. turnover is usually a problem with
• 2:27
  management and not a problem with we don't have enough ping
• 2:30
  pong tables, or whatever the thing is for culture. The second
• 2:33
  thing we found was, people leave the job because they don't know
• 2:36
  what their job is. If people say, I don't know what I'm
• 2:39
  supposed to get done. And then the third thing we found is
• 2:44
  people leave a job is because once they do know what they're
• 2:46
  supposed to get done, they aren't equipped with the tools
• 2:48
  or resources to actually go get it done. So you know, people sit
• 2:52
  around, like, I don't know what success is. And then it finally
• 2:54
  gets defined. I can't get there. And I don't like my manager. So
• 2:58
  I hate my job. Now, a fourth reason you're, you're, I think,
• 3:02
  still a millennial, and what I'm learning about millennials,
• 3:05
  because I'm not one is if there's no why behind the what
• 3:10
  I'm out, there's got to be a cause. Behind the what we're
• 3:14
  doing, you know, the Simon Sinek talk that's been seen 18
• 3:17
  bajillion times. Now, I should start with why that whole why
• 3:21
  behind the what is a big deal? And I think, well, that's the
• 3:24
  fourth place answer right now. I bet in 10 years, it's number
• 3:26
  one, because that millennial generation is starting to
• 3:29
  dominate the workforce just by sheer numbers. So I think you're
• 3:33
  gonna see an even bigger shift. So the answer your question is
• 3:36
  people leave managers, not jobs. But I think within 10 years,
• 3:41
  it's gonna be people will leave if you don't have a cause for
• 3:44
  what you're doing.
• 3:45
  Host: Are people job hopping more?
• 3:47
  William Vanderbloemen: Totally. And not just job hopping, career
• 3:49
  hopping? And you're talking about a generation and you can
• 3:51
  blame me and say those millennials? Or you can drop
• 3:55
  back and say, Well, why is that? So you know, the generation
• 3:58
  before where you do 35 years at Ford, and you retire with the
• 4:02
  gold watch and all that. That's the generation that grew up with
• 4:05
  radio, and then by later in their career, they had three TV
• 4:10
  stations to choose from. Now, think about your life, think
• 4:13
  about somebody 10 years younger than their life. You know, when
• 4:16
  I talk to older groups, I often say I'm old enough, I'm mid 40s.
• 4:20
  That for me, my favorite part of the week when I was a kid was
• 4:25
  Saturday morning. And the younger part of the room looks
• 4:28
  at me like what in the world are you talking about? The older
• 4:30
  brother room just nods and it you know why? And all the old
• 4:33
  people say the cartoons were on right you look at a millennial
• 4:36
  and say what are the cartoons on? What are you talking about?
• 4:38
  I just watch what I want. Again, an on demand. I watch it on
• 4:41
  YouTube. I watch it we're so you, you've got a generation
• 4:44
  that's grown up in a world of infinite options. So why
• 4:49
  wouldn't they see their career as a span of years full of
• 4:52
  infinite options? It's just natural. So I think you will see
• 4:57
  not just job hopping but career hopping and that's Where I
• 5:00
  found, you know, as we studied what makes a great culture? And
• 5:03
  who's sinking money into it, and why are they spending money on
• 5:06
  it? When I interviewed CEOs, I got a lot of different answers
• 5:10
  about why I spend money on culture. But the number one
• 5:13
  answer that every one of them answered was retention. The
• 5:18
  money I spend on culture always pays for itself because people
• 5:22
  stay longer than they would have otherwise, maybe that means they
• 5:26
  stay eight years instead of four, not 35 with a gold watch,
• 5:29
  but but when you start running the numbers of what it cost to
• 5:32
  replace people in the end of this loss, retention is the ball
• 5:36
  game for the future of the American workplace.
• 5:39
  Host: What are some of the numbers like, what's the cost?
• 5:41
  William Vanderbloemen: Well, yeah, I mean, you can justify
• 5:43
  anything you want, you can find a study on the Internet that
• 5:46
  will give you any number you want. But but we try to read a
• 5:48
  whole lot and then boil it down to a transferable principle. And
• 5:51
  what what we found is just for round numbers sake, $100,000
• 5:56
  employee, which is a high level employee, should they leave and
• 6:00
  will not will not even factor in Is it a good leave, or a bad
• 6:03
  leave? Is it $100,000 employee leaving will probably cost you a
• 6:06
  quarter million dollars. And that's how I did soft costs all
• 6:09
  wrapped together. And so it's and it's gonna happen, I mean,
• 6:13
  turnover happens in turnover, and always bad, you're gonna
• 6:15
  fast growing organization, you probably got people that were
• 6:17
  great when you had 40 employees. But when we got to 100, they
• 6:20
  couldn't, couldn't hang. And that's not their fault. It's
• 6:24
  just different. It's a different company. But if you can mitigate
• 6:27
  the amount and frequency of turnover, especially unnecessary
• 6:30
  turnover, then your ROI goes up. I talked to one CEO of a
• 6:34
  software company, he's up in New York City, and they have a very
• 6:38
  particular software solution that they sell. They're three
• 6:41
  companies that all sell the same type of solution, right? And all
• 6:46
  three of them sell it at the same price. They sell to the
• 6:49
  same market, there's no product differentiation, and he's a $20
• 6:53
  million company. And he said last year, he spent roughly $2
• 6:57
  million on culture. I'm like, what, why in the world? He said,
• 7:01
  well, because my EBIT da was 60 some percent higher than his
• 7:07
  competitors. I said, What do you mean your earnings is, is better
• 7:10
  than your competitor? You got the same price point, same
• 7:12
  solution said, Did you do more sales? Nope. Same revenue. He
• 7:15
  said, In our industry, we're notorious for churning through
• 7:18
  people, the average churn rate is about 38%. And I've got my
• 7:23
  churn rate down to one and a half percent. So if you think
• 7:27
  he's got 200 People 38% means 76. People would leave me
• 7:31
  normally every year and my other two competitors, they lose 76
• 7:34
  people every year. What are you going to charge me? Well, you
• 7:37
  have to do 76 searches, what have I got to do to train 76 new
• 7:40
  employees? How much momentum do I lose, and morale that drops
• 7:44
  when these people are walking out the door? I spent $2 million
• 7:47
  people love working here I fly my whole team to a big retreat,
• 7:51
  I spend money on things, not competitors don't, my people
• 7:53
  stay. And the fact that they stay makes us more profitable,
• 7:57
  even though we're not charging one penny more and not selling
• 8:00
  one widget more.
• 8:01
  Host: So what really makes them stay? I mean, is it just the
• 8:05
  inverse of why they leave? Is that why they stay?
• 8:08
  William Vanderbloemen: I think a lot of it is inverse, you get
• 8:10
  people who actually want to be at work. I think when you say
• 8:14
  you know the culture doesn't belong to a corporate entity, it
• 8:17
  belongs to a person, the companies that I studied that
• 8:19
  got serious about defining what their cultural values were
• 8:23
  started hiring around those cultural values. So that up, put
• 8:27
  it this way, you know, everybody's crazy. And if you
• 8:29
  haven't figured that out, then you know, you will. So it's not
• 8:33
  finding people who aren't crazy to work for you. It's finding
• 8:36
  people who are the same kind of crazy as you. And when you start
• 8:38
  hiring, where you've got a tribe of people that are similar,
• 8:41
  well, then you're gonna have personality clashes because
• 8:44
  people are broken. And that's just the way the world is. But
• 8:48
  at least you're in the same tribe. And the manager is not
• 8:53
  insufferable. So frankly, most cultural problems are really a
• 8:57
  hiring problem. And I think that companies that have gotten it,
• 9:01
  right, the ones that have gotten it, right, frankly, are mostly
• 9:04
  newer companies, because they've been able to build from the
• 9:06
  ground up, you know, a company two, three generations deep or a
• 9:10
  couple 100 years old. The culture is pretty hard to turn
• 9:13
  on a dime. And if you've got a real problem, it takes a long,
• 9:17
  long time. But the other the other interesting thing about
• 9:20
  why people stay, you talked about millennials, job hopping
• 9:24
  Barna, you know, this group, they're a polling and surveying
• 9:27
  group pretty well known and they asked a question of people born
• 9:32
  in different decades. Here's the question, pretend your young
• 9:35
  adult 22 years old, what do you want to have accomplished by the
• 9:38
  time? You're 35? Great question. Right. So every group that
• 9:43
  answered except Millennials had almost identical, the same top
• 9:48
  five answers. Here's what they want to get done. They wanted to
• 9:51
  by the time that 35 We want to get married, start a family,
• 9:55
  owned a home, be on a secure job track and have some financial
• 9:59
  peace. Millennials? Have those top five answers, how many of
• 10:03
  them hit their top five? Just one, financial peace. So what
• 10:08
  does that mean for the workplace and for culture, what that means
• 10:11
  is you're hiring people who probably aren't near their
• 10:13
  family probably don't have a family to go home to probably
• 10:17
  haven't locked into a career yet, and probably see their
• 10:20
  workplace as the closest thing they're gonna have to a family.
• 10:25
  And so if you find a workplace, that's just, frankly, hell bent
• 10:29
  on building a culture where that family can feel like they're
• 10:33
  more connected than just their work and connected through a
• 10:35
  cause, and connected to the cultural code, well, then people
• 10:39
  are gonna stay, and they'll put up with highs and lows
• 10:42
  economically a lot better. And they'll put up with rising
• 10:44
  health care costs, and all those things a lot better. If this is
• 10:48
  my family, I don't have a wife and kids to go, this is it. And
• 10:51
  it's a cause I believe in and a well defined culture. And the
• 10:54
  people here are somewhat like me in terms of belief and how we
• 10:58
  function and the companies that I studied that got that right,
• 11:02
  have very few turnover issues.
• 11:05
  Host: So getting into the practical, how do we actually
• 11:08
  keep people? How do we create retention?
• 11:11
  William Vanderbloemen: I think it all depends on what's the old
• 11:13
  advice of I forget which Greek philosopher it was that his his
• 11:17
  best advice was know yourself. And I think if a company will
• 11:20
  take time to drop back and know themselves, and then build all
• 11:24
  those bells and whistles around that, then that that will make a
• 11:28
  difference in here. So I'm guessing that a lot of your
• 11:32
  listeners have businesses that already have what they call core
• 11:36
  values. But are they cultural values? And when you say
• 11:38
  cultural, you know, you think what, what is a culture, and
• 11:44
  lots of different definitions are out there. But it's the
• 11:47
  traditions and symbols and behaviors that are passed along
• 11:51
  from one generation to the next without thinking about it. And
• 11:55
  and if a company can can get a hold of those customs and
• 12:00
  traditions and behaviors? And what is it that that we do
• 12:03
  that's good, and then build the ping pong table in the vending
• 12:06
  machine in the Yogen. Stir all that around that well, then that
• 12:10
  is a win. And here's a really practical question to ask if
• 12:15
  you're saying we do have core values, but they're not cultural
• 12:18
  values. They don't describe how we behave. They don't describe
• 12:21
  our customs. They just say things like, excellence. I'm so
• 12:25
  tired of excellence being a core value, I want to find the
• 12:27
  company that says, you know, mediocrity is really what we're
• 12:29
  after. But, but like, a cultural value is more how do we behave?
• 12:36
  It's the how we get our work done. And the question that a
• 12:39
  company can ask all of its employees to start the
• 12:42
  conversation is this, you can say, Look, when we are
• 12:46
  functioning at our very, very best. What do we do as a team
• 12:51
  that's common to us, but uncommon to other teams we see
• 12:55
  around us. Because there's some quirkiness that you guys share
• 12:59
  when you do your best for us. It's like responding with almost
• 13:04
  dysfunctional speed. Like, don't you have a life form getting
• 13:08
  back to me so fast? But you know, that's, that's our deal.
• 13:12
  And it's been a signature for us. And we didn't even realize
• 13:14
  that we went through this exercise. When we're functioning
• 13:17
  at our best, what do we do as a team that's common to us? That's
• 13:20
  uncommon to others. And long story short, through the process
• 13:25
  of building cultural values. We named it as ridiculous
• 13:29
  responsiveness. That's our deal. And, you know, we interview for
• 13:35
  it, we, we do sneaky bad stuff, during interviews to see if
• 13:39
  somebody's got the same dysfunction we do. If they're
• 13:41
  really ridiculously responsive. If they are, they're gonna fit
• 13:44
  if they're not, they're probably a great employee for somebody
• 13:46
  else.
• 13:48
  Host: Yeah, before we go, where should people go? If if they
• 13:52
  want to kind of learn about Culture Wins? And where would
• 13:54
  you point people?
• 13:55
  William Vanderbloemen: You can go to culturewins.org And find
• 13:59
  the book there. If you're really interested in other things about
• 14:02
  us, you can go to vanderbloemen.com and it just
• 14:05
  spell it just like that.
• 14:08
  Host: It's clear and obvious and easy to spell, and there's a lot
• 14:12
  of vowels.
• 14:13
  William Vanderbloemen: You know, we bought probably 300 domain
• 14:16
  names when we started. And we hired an SEO consultant and
• 14:19
  said, which one of these I don't want to name it after me, don't
• 14:22
  be my name on the door. And he came back and he said, I got
• 14:25
  good news and bad news. I got the great website for you.
• 14:27
  You're not going to like it. So bad news. He said, We need to
• 14:29
  use your last name. Your last name is so screwed up that you
• 14:33
  can misspell it 200 different ways into Google and it'll feed
• 14:36
  back to you so we just went with that. So misspell it however you
• 14:39
  want vanderbloemen you'll you'll find your way or there or
• 14:42
  culturewins.org.
• 14:43
  Host: Smart. Alright, William. So what's the first thing? The
• 14:48
  first step?
• 14:49
  William Vanderbloemen: That's a great question. We tried to
• 14:51
  answer that while we were writing the book. There's really
• 14:53
  two layers to culture. The first thing you have to ask yourself
• 14:56
  is is this a healthy place to work? It is toxic. That's a
• 14:58
  whole different conversation. And then defining values. So to
• 15:02
  help people know, are we functioning? Well, we did some
• 15:05
  research, we found eight key areas of health or toxicity. And
• 15:10
  we built online assessment. So if people go to the culture
• 15:14
  tool.com, they'll find a free online assessment. They can have
• 15:17
  their whole team, take the test, we'll send you back a report
• 15:21
  that shows you how you measure up, what's your median score,
• 15:23
  where you work, what's better, what's worse, and how do you
• 15:26
  measure up against all the other businesses that have come and
• 15:29
  taken this test? So that's the culturetool.com.
• 15:33
  Host: I love it. Thank you for sharing this this as interesting
• 15:37
  perspective to have from somebody who has a full time
• 15:40
  living of talking to people that are coming and going in and out
• 15:44
  of companies.
• 15:45
  William Vanderbloemen: Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me
• 15:47
  on.