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How to Build HR That Works with Jessie Schofer · Disengaged

• Jessie Schofer: I'm not really on the wavelength of like performance management. Like I don't I think it's crappy, it doesn't work, it doesn't do what we intend it to do. we all know it. And we do it because it's the easiest way to put people in boxes and it's the easiest way to digest information because we haven't worked out a better way. And I think people like to see a number they like to like, well, there's, you the bell curve and we have these top top people and there's people at the bottom and everyone has to sit somewhere in this, you know, mathematical thing and At the end of the day, humans are all very different, and performance is also based on the environment you're in and the support you're given and a whole bunch of things that are controlled by the company that are generally not done super well. but also who the individual is and their experiences that they bring to the table and the job that they're in and the manager they have, and there's so many elements to how someone's output or performance is affected. I've seen that it doesn't work. Like it absolutely doesn't work and it's very biased. Like seeing those calibration inverted commas meetings, and just like, Can you please can we not? James: Made up. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Disengaged. Many of the systems of HR. Systems like performance ratings, individualized bonuses. Layers of management, performance ratings rest on a set of assumptions that don't often get tested. Now my guest today, Jessie Schofer, actually moderated two debates I've had recently, one on whether pay for performance works, and the other on whether or not we really need managers anymore. I lost both of those debates. So Jessie agreed to be a guest on the podcast so we could talk a bit about those debates from her perspective as a moderator and talk more broadly about the evolving nature of HR, of which Jessie has some wonderful ideas. Jessie is based in Berlin and spent fifteen years. In transformation, strategy and people leadership. Across governments, corporates, and unicorns before she founded Stacked that's S T A K D dot tech. Which helps people teams understand and find relevant HR technology. And if you've been in the HR space over the last few years, you'll know that there has been a deluge of HR tech, many of it very useful, but it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what does what, and Jessie's stakd.tech offers a solution to that. as always, if you find this conversation interesting, please subscribe on whatever platform you use and please rate the show and finally please tell a friend. This helps tremendously improve the reach of the show and ensure that I keep getting excellent guests like Jessie So without further ado, I give you Jessie Schofer, founder of Stakkd Jessie Schofer welcome to Disengaged. Jessie Schofer: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for this. James: I I've been looking forward to it for a while. We've tried we've been trying to get it on the calendar for a while now. And unfortunately you were Jessie Schofer: Yeah. James: unwell, so we had to reschedule and then I had to reschedule. So we've been trying for a few months to do it. I think Jessie Schofer: I know. James: we've been trying since our first debate, which is when we met. This is a really long time. Jessie Schofer: Yes, we have, which is actually terrible. We haven't made it. James: Because I immediately con I said we should debrief on that debate. I think it'd be fun to hear from you on the moderator. So so just for a bit of context then, so we you ha you have now Moderated two debates that I've been a part of and two debates that I've lost as well. So the first one was pay for performance, yay or nay. So I said Jessie Schofer: Right. James: I was on the nay side of that debate. And the second one was even a more predictable loss, do we need managers? And I was on the no side to that one. So we're going to talk Jessie Schofer: Yeah. James: a bit about those two debates. But first of all, you did a tremendous job on that, because Jessie Schofer: Mm. James: I think without you there, it could have descended into total chaos, anger. hatred. You know, I dunno if you noticed I saw Matt's look on his face. It was very you know, he was a very angry man, Jessie Schofer: Yeah. I James: I think. Jessie Schofer: I think people got very into it is what I would say. but I think that was good. It was really fun. And I really liked hearing both sides of the argument because I'm not necessarily someone who has on these topics, I mean of course I have an opinion, but I'm not I'm also open to hearing alternative views. So I think it was really interesting to hear the different sides of in both of the debates and it was quite fun. James: Yeah. Yeah. I enjoyed your reflections as well. There's a little window after each person person spoke and you sort of reflected on what they were saying before passing the mic on. So again, good job of that. Just getting and you got and and Jessie Schofer: Just gave gave my two cents. As a moderator should not. James: what is it Madame was it Ma Madame Speaker? I w I can't remember what your name was in the previous one. Jessie Schofer: Yeah, I think so. James: So let let's talk about the latter one first, but the the manager debate as well. I I'm just curious because we haven't spoken since then, what your impressions were from that debate as the as the the pure and unbiased and neutral party in that discussion. What what was your what were your takeaways from that? Jessie Schofer: I do love that, the pure unbiased perspective. Let's see. I mean, for me It's we do need humans still at work and we do still need some kind of management leadership layer, whatever it might be, whether it's a layer or whether it's something you actually have as a peer. I do think there is a role of a human in the connection interaction of helping people grow and helping people organize themselves at work. I think it's naturally how we've organized ourselves also just over time. We always, you know, see people people s even say it like they they're a natural born leader or that people people really are inspired by this person and they're really motivated by them. And I think that's okay. And I think we will have that into the future. I think what we have at the moment is an issue with how we in organizations support people in those roles and enable them to be good managers or good leaders or whatever we want to call them. But also that not everyone wants to be in those roles, but it seems to be the only pathway in a lot of organizations. And so I think we end up with this kind of organization or I call organizations like an organism. They're kind of like this living thing and they're very unique and they're always ever growing. And you end up with this kind of it's almost like something that's little bit sick because people are disengaged. I mean that's why we're here to talk about right people are sometimes disengaged. And a lot of the time that comes to do with the human interactions, I think, which we can probably get into more later at work. And so I think the role of a lead up manager person is extremely important and we just don't support them and give them the tools. And not every Everyone wants to be in that role either. So I yeah, the debate was good. I'm sorry you lost, but I did have to go on that we do need we do need to keep managers in a world of AI. If anything, we need to keep the human as much as we can in a world of AI. it's just in the way in which we do it. There's a lot of toxic people I'm not gonna say people. I don't know if they're toxic or the environment they're in encourages the toxicity or brings that out. but yeah, I've definitely been on the side of good and bad managers, so I think we can all understand how important good ones are. James: Yeah, and I fully expected to lose that debate as well. But it was fun to try and think through the arguments against managers. Jessie Schofer: Yeah. Like how am I gonna justify this? James: Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, it's not it's I mean, it was actually pretty easy to just appoint a company and say, Well, look, they don't have any managers and they're running fine. So to me, I was a little I try to be a little bit pedantic here and say, Do we need managers? No. Do I want managers? Yes, I think managers are mostly going to be useful Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: here, but do we need well technically no. If there is one company that's not using them, that's proof that we don't necessarily need them. But I still lost. Yeah, technicality. But Jessie Schofer: That's true. Technic technicality. James: you b a few a few interesting things that I think to your point, I think what we all agreed on is you want We want the best of what managers can be. So we think about all those people in our lives that have brought us to where we've gotten to. And it's always those that can nurture us, support us, protect us when we need to be protected. But what we all agree, I think, is that that administrative bureaucratic side of management is what really weighs people down. So everyone agrees that good management's important. But to your point, we don't offer what we need for them to be good at that, but we do all expect them to spend a ton of time administering and controlling, like administering all those systems of control the companies have become. So I feel like that was a point of agreement in the debate. It's like if we like we need Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: something to manage to to get the best out of people. What exactly that looks like is up for debate, but we do need some capacity for people Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: to nurture and embrace them. Jessie Schofer: And I think that's that's the challenge. You know, you talk about control and systems and processes, right? And organizations need some form of flow, workflow, communication flow structures. People need to understand how to operate within a company. And I think that that's part of the problem is that companies don't think about how they're going to operate. They don't think about the DNA of what is it like to work here. They don't really think about how that without being clear, and I think clarity is the missing piece in a lot of companies, is that foundational clarity of what are we As a company, and what are we asking people to subscribe to? And what are people actually joining when they join our company? And how do we want to promote people? work with people, share information. People don't aren't thinking about that when they build a company, right? You're moving so fast, you forget, you move on, you haven't built anything, you haven't thought about it enough. And it actually hurts the company so much more than if you just stop to think about it for like two seconds. And I think the clarity piece is what I always noticed. You know, I was in hyperscales in the, you know in the unicorn phase where everyone was like hyperscaling before the AI, before during and just as corona was ending. And a lot of the problems came from just not knowing what the company was. Like you didn't know how James: Mm-hmm. Jessie Schofer: to operate. So everyone created their own operating manual. Literally, like every team had their own operating manual. No one understood there, there was clashes between this is how we're gonna do it, this is how you're gonna do it. There was no like one harmonizing way of working. And I think this is what a lot of companies miss. and causes James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: a lot of human interaction problems, which causes a lot of disengagement, actually. James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: If I think and reflect on my career, The times when I've been the most disengaged were when I have poor relationships at work, or if I didn't enjoy the relationships of working with others in my workplace, regardless what I was delivering, regardless of what I was being paid. If the human interaction was not good and didn't feel good, then I was just like not I wasn't bringing my full self, like I wasn't showing up. That that's for me what engagement is, is like how you show James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: up to work, how engaged am I to be here, how much energy do I bring to the table. And that for me, yeah, really is what disengages me personally. And James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: again, I'm not an expert on this. Again, just my experiences here, James: And I feel like the knee jerk is often some kind of system of control. like some kind Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: of well do it this way and you do it that way and I'll bring someone in to make sure you do it this way and do it that way. But y Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: they to your point, they often overlook that purpose. Why? Why do companies skip so quickly past that, you know, that mission, that why are we here? What is our ultimate goal? What are we here to achieve? Jessie Schofer: It is interesting why so many companies skip past it. And I almost think it's not even like it's not even that they skip like why we're here as a company. Because I think a lot of them are like, we're amazing, we're delivering X, Y, and Z, we're saving the planet, where whatever beautiful mission narrative that they have about the company sometimes exists. The company itself can still be crap to work for. and I think it's not only purpose of what does the company do, but how does the company internally operate with hum how does the organism operate? Because humans it's all the network you it's the network effect. The more people you have, the more complex it is, the harder it is to communicate, the harder it is to, you know, ha easier it is to have lines that are crossed, where people don't understand, where there's miscommunication. I mean humans are innately able y you know, we we We're not we're good at communication, we're also very bad at communication. We're not good at communication at scale. Like we can't communicate any anywhere near as fast or as clear as like the AI can. And I think that's why we like AI so much, because it's so fast at communicating information. You know, we can't we can't disseminate information at that speed. as humans. So we'd have to we create all these structures and processes to enable us to share information through hierarchy, through people, through roles. And that's also why the world of work is changing, because now we have all these other options of how to communicate data and information to each other, which is another whole story. But I think this is where. the focus, the the whole operating model. You know, as part of operating model projects in the past, you know, we're going from we're trying to merge this or we're adding this team in, we're looking at our governance lines and how do we make decisions and, you know, very like, I'm gonna say consultancy stuff. You know, we're looking at, you know, we're we're following a process of what the consultants say we have to tick the boxes of and then we've got a proper operating model and then we're gonna roll it out, you know. James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: But all of it forgets the human element of everything. Like the absolute basis of how do humans, you know, how do we, how do we get rid of ambiguity? How do we keep how do we share information? Just things that just feel so natural to think about if you really step back and be like, how can we make humans operate well? We kind of skip all of that stuff. James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: And this is what you're talking about. Like we're putting all these systems and controls in place. We're kind of putting the wrong ones in. James: Yeah, it's Jessie Schofer: I don't think we shouldn't have systems and controls because I think there's a place for them. It's how they use with people and what we're trying to control. You know. James: It it's so true. And this this question of scale comes up quite a lot because everyone knows that if you're in a small team, generally things are fine, everyone can see each other. As soon as you get bigger than that, the visibility falls, and to your point, communication falls. And there's a wonderful quote, if I can remember it, I'm gonna get it wrong, but loosely, Ricardo Semler, who obviously created Semco, the famous decentralized participative work environment in the 80s, he said, People focus on the economies of scale but forget the diseconomies of human scale. humans don't scale up the way, you know, other assets do. We're not a means to production. we we scale up awkwardly and in a very difficult way. And the related concept I really like is Dunbar's number, right? Robin Dunbar, 150 is a number of people in your life that you can interact with. Beyond that, you start seeing people as non-humans, just a group of people, like these and they're not individuals, they're just Jessie Schofer: That's so interesting. James: a group of people. And even but if you want to have meaningful connections, then the number's much lower, it's twelve to fifteen people. So When companies think about that, that like those organizational changes, it's often from this assumption that it needs to be top-down. We someone needs to decide it and all of you need to follow. Therefore, we need a pyramid-like structure, which is very turgid, it's very slow to move, very unnimble in the way it works. But actually, if you look at the companies that have truly scaled up, they tend to operate in a very decentralized way with a lot of autonomy down at the base and only limited controls from the top. Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: And and I feel that's that's a way around it, to limit the control and to trust that people are gonna get things done. As long as they understand the purpose, Jessie Schofer: I think also we're not very good at, you know, bringing people into a business. You know, we don't we're not clear at saying this is what you're subscribing to. I think like Zapier talked about, you know, they actually are happy when people like pull out of their process or like people pull out because they just are like, we don't want to they just don't want to work in an organiz organization like that. They don't want to work where there's this type of operating model or that type of way of making decisions. And I think that's okay. And I think companies are too worried about people not wanting to work for them versus getting the right people to work for them. And I think it's James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: good if people like self-select it. They're like, this is how we do it. We have the pyramid. Do you want to work in the pyramid? This is how we make decisions. Do you like this? Be honest. And I think a lot of companies are not honest about how they operate and what they're doing. And then you get people coming in because they've been sold the story. And they come in and they're instantly like, hang on a minute. What did I sign up to? And then they're instantly disengaged. You know, you instantly go, Okay, well, even if you come in with a lot of engagement at the beginning, like most people do, James: Right. Jessie Schofer: then you've got all this. systems and problems that come along with poor internal infrastructure and poor communication systems and all the other things that come along with just internal infrastructure. I'm I'm I'm very much like a systems person, like how do things connect? How does information go from A to B? How do how do decisions get made? But at the same time it has to be the context of humans. And we just somehow haven't gotten very good at that. We've gone too rigid in a lot of ways, but also lack of I can I can only say it again, lack of clarity in communication. It always comes down to communication. I think I've also posted this a number of times. Every problem we have is basically you can come back to communication most of the time in business. And I think you even have to, you know, I was working, I was working somewhere and I said to the leadership, I'm like, we need to talk about this a bit more. We need to be communicating these things. But we told them last all hands. And I'm like, that was one time. One time. We've got to be saying this. James: And also and also that's not communications. That's telling someone something. That's not the same as communication. Right. Jessie Schofer: That's exactly exactly, you know, and it's like the feeling that you think you're saying it, you know, you think you're saying this message all the time and it's it's like repetitive and it is repetitive, but people need to hear that repetition. It's like marketing, you've got have like exposure to, I don't know, a brand 20 times before you'll buy from them or something ridiculous these days, or even more. You know, the touch points have to make sense and that building it into how you do things, you know, is super important. So I just think we've we've we've gone with control and structure in the wrong way and we've missed the whole point of having some kind of system in place to support us as humans in the way we actually naturally op like need to operate with communication that we're not able to scale very well and we are kind of messy and we do have feelings, you know, but we are all different James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: people. James: That's that so you reminded me of something. I think it was I think it was Alistair Darling, the spin doctor for Tony Blair's government, and he said if you in a in any given speech, if you if you're not sick of hearing the same point, you haven't repeated it enough. To you as a founder, if you say something once, sure you've made your point and why can't we? But to everyone else, it that's again, that's the complexity of human communication. And that last point I think is really astute. You need emotions in the workplace. You can't pretend that people are robots. If you want robots, then use AI and and automate things. But if you want humans and you want the innovative capacity and the new ideas that come with a human, you've got to treat them like humans and humans work with their emotions and that that whole notion of leave your emotions at the door, you know. And Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: growing up as an accountant, I had a lot of this, like you can wear a suit and you sort of act in a certain way Jessie Schofer: Yeah. James: and but they're basically kind of telling you not to be yourself. Do you I I feel that's changing though. I think that is a positive change that I've seen in my career so far. I feel there's a lot more of people's whole self that's allowed to come in to the workplace, but I don't know what you think about that. Jessie Schofer: Has it improved over the years? I mean, I've been out of the workplace now since 2020. When did I leave? 2023. When my son was born. 2023. James: Right. Jessie Schofer: And God, I had to think about that. It's been, yeah, like three and a half years since I exited like working for someone else versus working for myself. And so I don't, I don't know. I can only hear from you know the grapevine and the people that I talk to. From people I've spoken to, it I don't know if it's getting l like maybe it's getting a little bit better, but I don't think it's getting that much better. I think there's still a lot of there and if anything, there's a lot of pressure on people these days to like the speed at which we change is absolutely crazy right now. You know, like you step out of out of work for like two weeks and you feel like you're ten years behind. Like it's absolutely crazy. It's going to hurt, of course, mothers and women who take, you know, time off to have children. They come back to the workplace. It's going to be like a whole new world after six to twelve months or even two years or whatever people are taking. It's going to be absolute crazy. So that I I just think there's a lot of pressure that comes with the world that we're working in now. So we I think there's also a bubble that we're in. I think there's a you know, there's there's a tech bubble and there's this hype bubble and then you've got like the older enterprises and all the other institutional like businesses that are there that maybe aren't as AI focused or aren't able to move as quickly or just the nature of their work work is just different. And I don't know if that's actually the case. I think we'd like to think it is. And I think we're good at talking about it. I we're good at being like, we've got, you know, people coming in to talk about, you know, even neurodiversity and doing workshops. And but actually if you're in the companies a lot of the time, it's not making the impact. It's it's a lot of visibility of, look, we're doing something, but the actual changes are maybe not there. I don't know. Maybe that's a little pessimistic view, but I do see a lot of people, you know, do still struggle with the workplaces that we have, especially women. fairness, toxic managers, you know, there's a lot of things that I think aren't going well and I think AI doesn't help it at the moment. I think we like to think AI is helping it, but I think it's causing a lot of people a lot of internal stress and a lot of anxiety. James: Hm. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: Which, you know, it's another whole topic, right? But I don't know. James: Well yeah, the re the reason I think like I think it is that you know, i i it's very difficult to see change, I think, like but it but if I think back like and again I'm I'm started my career in London and now I'm in San Francisco, so that's probably biasing it. Like when I look around I don't you know, I work myself so I don't have a company, but when I look at people on their ways to the office, I see a much broader array of looks and, you know, hair colours and tattoos and things that would have never been ava Jessie Schofer: No. James: acceptable in the corporate world. in London when I started out my career. So but Jessie Schofer: Tree. James: but again, those are different cultures, so it might be a little bit biased. I like I I always like to think I can sort of see the change, but like you say, the reality might be different. Jessie Schofer: I like that. I am in San Francisco, but it might be a bubble. I might be in a bubble in San Francisco. James: It might yes, yes. It could I I can't be sure, but it could be a little different here to the rest of the world. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: a little different to the rest of the world. Look, I'm not saying that things haven't gotten better in some spaces. They obviously have in some areas. I don't know if the engage but we are seeing that the dising that there is a lot of disengagement still. And we are seeing a lot James: Yes. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: of actually more disengagement to some degree in some pa in some cases. And I think it comes down to things that we were talking about, you know, where where designing organizations have to move at the speed of light. So you can't James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: actually set the foundations, you can't set things up correctly. People also have a different expectation of work now. People expect more freedoms, expect to have more space for innovation. People expect to have more trust than I think they used to. You know, before it was like You know, you go to work and you do this and you do that. Now we've evolved from that just like women didn't used to work and now women go to work. And, you know, we haven't really caught up the systems overall sus in in how we actually run society, I think. Maybe a little bit cra you know, going a little bit out of the scope of work, but in general, like we haven't really adjusted to all those new expectations. And I can even relate it to I can even relate it to relationships. You know, we haven't caught up either with how the expectations of relationships and how we raise families and how we raise people and how we there's so many things that you can relate to the speed of change in which we've had over the last, you know, ten to twenty years since probably we've been in the workplace. And that on top it seems it seems good. And it all looks fresh, but I think underground everyone's like the duck legs are like, my god, and everyone's got a bit of anxiety and it's getting worse and worse to some degree. I don't know, maybe that's again pessimistic view, but yeah, I think we have a problem with clarity and structures in organizations, that we haven't fixed yet. And I don't think AI is fixing James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: it. James: in many ways it could make it worse for a little bit before things get better. Like I think I I I agree with you. A lot of the underlying systems of of company governance are inherited from hundreds of years ago. So you know we talked we'll come back to pay performance at some point actually, because we haven't talked about that debate either, but like that that notion of pay for performance that comes straight out of scientific management from the early twentieth century, when you could do time and motion analysis and pay people based on the number of bars of pig iron they brought from one place to the next and that was the basis of compensation. And that Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: a lot of those assumptions have just generationally carried their way through to companies. And my fear is that particularly with AI, everyone knows performance management's broken. Everyone hates it. And it's one of those ubiquitously despised things, the performance rating in the annual performance review. Almost everyone doesn't trust it. Jessie Schofer: I mean they're ridiculous. James: It's ridiculous, but but I've heard talk that well AI is gonna fix that now and then we can find their performance ratings. The idea is that AI can see your emails, it can re look at your conversations and it can see the way you interact. Therefore, that's gonna be a better gauge of your goodness as an employee than a manager can ever be. And that concerns me a bit because that's just more control. Again, more monitoring, more control, to me, scientific management two point zero, which will set us back in terms of workplace engagement, not forward. That that I think to your point, that that's where I think AI could be very damaging if it gets deployed in that way. Jessie Schofer: Yeah, I'm not really on the wavelength of like performance management. Like I don't I think it's crappy, it doesn't work, it doesn't do what we intend it to do. we all know it. And we do it because it's the easiest way to put people in boxes and it's the easiest way to digest information in a way because we haven't worked out a better way. And I think people like to see a number they like to like, well, there's, you the bell curve and we have these top top people and there's people at the bottom and everyone has to sit somewhere in this, you know, mathematical thing and At the end of the day, it's very complex and it's not, you know, humans are all very different, and it's it it performance is also based on the environment you're in and the support you're given and a whole bunch of things that are controlled by the company that are generally not done super well. but also who the individual is and their experiences that they bring to the table and the job that they're in and the manager they have, and there's so many elements to how someone's output or performance or whatever is affected. And I don't think that performance management makes sense in the way that we do it. I think that measuring some form of output or company prog progress is important. How we measure, I I again I don't think paying I don't know, I don't think paying people based on a certain number makes sense. Like, did you get a five out of five or a four out of five? Yeah, I'm I don't know the right answer. I just don't like and I've seen that it doesn't work. Like it absolutely doesn't work and it's very biased. Like sitting in you know, being in the compensation base, seeing those calibration inverted commas meetings, and just like, Can you please can we not? James: Made up. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: Like you couldn't you you just breathe and you're like, Should I say something? I think I should say something, but you can't because they're just gonna do it anyway, James: Yeah, yeah. Jessie Schofer: you know, like Yeah. Yeah. James: this is a this is an interesting area for me. Like the the individual and the system and the relationship between those two things and what we expect from each. And W. Edwards Deming famously said a bad system will beat a good person every time, which I think is completely true. It doesn't matter how good the person is, if you drop them into a system that doesn't make sense, they will not gonna succeed. Jessie Schofer: Cool. James: But why do we have this tendency then to always look to the individual for blame or reward? Particularly in the West, I find particularly in North America, it's a more individualistic society in the US, I think, less so than continental Europe. But there is this idea that We must get it down to the individual. We must understand that individual's contribution. We must understand the individuals that are or are not contributing. Hence, to your point, that vitality curve model, the best and the worst, you sack the worst and you promote the best. Now it's whole Jack Welsh model from the nineties that corporate America absolutely fell in love with for some reason, despite not an ounce of scientific credibility around it. But yeah, so why why is it? Why do we keep why do companies keep striving for that? Jessie Schofer: Because it's easy. Because it's the easiest way to do it. And it it means you don't have to self-reflect. I mean at the end of the day, humans don't like to say they're wrong. Like people no one likes to be like, I'm wrong, I didn't do that. It is hard to accept that, you know, maybe you did something incorrect. even in relationships, you know, you're with your husband and husband and wife, it is hard for even husband and wife to be like, hey, I did I I was the I made the mistake. You know, you're in love and you're in a family and you care about each other. And then you think that it's easy with your workplace to be like, I'm no, I I maybe made a mistake there, or this maybe was something that I contributed to that meant that that didn't work. Could you imagine people feeling safe enough to say that? I mean, it's it's not necessarily safe because of all these lots of reasons, structural reasons. But there's a lot of ego in the workplace, especially when you have, you know, levels of authority and hierarchy that then give people power. We know that sometimes power brings out not the best in people. Then you mix in money, right? And then you mix in human nature. And then you go, well, why does someone look to blame someone? Well, because it's like that's literally what we're gonna do. We set it up for that. We literally set up organizations to do that. We don't, we don't, again, we don't think about how do we want our organization to operate and how do we want to communicate and how do we see mistakes, failure, issues that are going on, how do we want to handle those kind of situations and how do we want people to show up and how do we create trust? And those things are lacking. And then you have maturity. Everyone brings their own level of maturity to a business when they join based on their life experiences. All these kinds of things. So it's not an easy thing to do. It's extremely complex because humans are complex. And we're trying to then make it a super simple equation. And that's why it hasn't worked and it won't work. But it has to put you have to put effort into it. And I think we'll see actually more tiny teams. So you're in San Francisco, there's tech. AI can do a lot of things and I think we'll see a lot more tiny teams, more smaller teams that can really, these organisms that can work really well together, they gel together, and they can be really productive and they can be really they can be high trust, low ego, and they can move at speed, you know, because they're small enough and they are thoughtful enough about how they how they grow that organism. James: Mm. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: And we're seeing that with some companies already, that they can do that. And if you can do it in a small space, you can then slowly grow it. But I think we will see more and more of these companies like being smaller, really amazing agile teams, because they have that advantage of one being small, but two taking away a lot of the administrative burden and structures that we used to have to have and focus because of AI. You can put focus elsewhere. and also because we've learned maybe a little bit. If you have the money and you can, then you probably spend the time and effort a little bit more than other companies would. but yeah, I don't know where it's going in terms of the disengagement what do we call it, epidemic over the last years? James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: We've just seen more and more of it coming. I don't know. What are your No. Do James: stubborn as well, isn't it? Like it's y like you say, it's not getting any better. I think it's actually dropped off a little bit. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: you see like a way of do you see a solution? Do you see what do you think companies should be focusing on? Mm. James: Trust, like you said, I think like at your point, I do I do like mini teams have been shown again and again to be much more enjoyable places to work when you have a group of people. And the reality is those companies that think they're big monoliths of centralized control aren't. People are still working in small teams. You naturally gravitate to people you care about and you trust and you want to work with. Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: So it happens naturally. It's just trying companies are doing their best to stop it, which is the baffling thing to me. So I did what was the word was it mini teams you said? You used a nice little phrase there and I I for Jessie Schofer: Tiny teams. James: Tiny team tiny teams. Tiny teams is the way forward. And I think i I think it was Semco and they called it the amoeba model. And the point was that if a team gets too big, then it needs to split like an amoeba. Like it's split into two teams because then you can Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: retain that connection that you you know you're gonna get from small groups of people and you know you're gonna lose. as it gets bigger. So we've got to stop pretending people are stackable units of production and start acknowledging the cognitive limitations. And that's I think that's certainly one way to do it, right? and like you say, we're seeing more and more companies do that and do it very successfully, like Haier Mondragon in Spain, you've got Handlersbanken in Sweden. plenty of companies do it. They just don't shout about it and it just works very well for them. Jessie Schofer: Yeah, I think it's always like, you know, I think we called it back in the day was like the pizza. Like eight once you had a pizza, you're out. Like you eight people and I can't remember, but we used to talk about it as being a pizza. I don't know where it was coined. I'm sure someone very smart came up with that. But James: Yeah, the p who was it that said that? Yeah, the pizza model. I I've heard someone else refers to that. Yeah. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: we used to be like, All right, we're getting it's a pizza, time to time to split. James: Yeah. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: and I think the challenges when you split is keeping the teams, the individual organisms within the organization. somehow communicated and connected and sharing. And James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: I think that's where AI can actually help because this whole the transfer of information can be much faster as long as you build your company around that behavior of sharing information. And I think that's actually a behavior you can build into a company is information sharing and communication can be something you build into a culture and that you hire for and that you that you look to and that you inspire to be better with communication and sharing. And I think that's the number one thing. Again, I think it's the be all end all of every issue we have in relationships, in work relationships, in businesses, everything comes down to how we communicate and how well we can do it. And so if you can James: Mm-hmm. Jessie Schofer: work on those elements, you then create through the way we create trust is through communication, through our behavior, James: Right. Jessie Schofer: through the way we speak to others, how we share things. And I think it's the thing that we actually spend the least amount of time focusing on. I mean, since when James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: does anyone get put on a communication course? James: Right. Yeah. Everyone assumes that Jessie Schofer: Like since when? Like James: you can do it, right? Everyone assumes that you it's always on a on the job description. you need to be a good communicator. I'm going, sure I can be a communicator, right? What does that mean? Yeah. Jessie Schofer: Like I can talk. And you know, people think they think people think they're like you know, I've worked with people before and they think, well, I'm communicating really well and I'm going I would beg to differ, you know, but that's my perspective. James: On the receiving end and I disagree. Jessie Schofer: You know, and like I've also been terrible communicator in my career. I have, you know, been in stress positions. I have communicated terribly. I've been unfriendly. I have been so many things, you know, also a a a result of the environment you're in to some degree. You know, you have elements of pressure and stress. People don't show that show up perfectly when they're in those situations. So how do you create situations where you know, how do you help people learn to trigger not negative behaviour or negative communication methods, but positive ones in times of stress. But again, these things are not just things you have, right? I mean we learn them over time. It's a maturity of communication. And I would say that's where we should be focusing. I in James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: the workforce, young people, communication. How do you even how do you communicate with AI? How do you share information with AI? How do you share information with your team? you know, I worked with someone I remember working with someone and they said, well, you know, I sent it to you. This was, you know, years ago by email or whatever. but I sent you I sent you the email. You're like, but we sit next to each other. but I sent it to you, so you've got it. you could have just like but you could have just said the you We're sitting next each other. You know, we're sitting next to each other. I'm confused. James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: You know, and you don't read the email for five hours and it's like, but I told you it was urgent in the email, you know, didn't tell the person sitting next to them. So, you know, there's just this it's just how you build those it's almost like a muscle. You've got to like learn it, you've got train it, and you've got to be reflective on yourself. And I think self-reflection in this day and age is probably one of the number one things you should have is be able James: Mm-hmm. Jessie Schofer: to r self-reflect and judge yourself. and be okay with not being perfect and try to find ways to improve yourself and focus on your communication in general. I don't know. I don't know. That's that's where I would go. That's where I'd be putting my money if I was in an organization. James: Yeah. It's I said No, it's so important. and like someone that's written a lot about this is Amy Edmondson with psychological safety of course, which is just so important. If you want to stand any chance of innovating you've got to have huge amounts of psychological safety and a big part of that is being able to admit I made a mistake. And her research is all about the capacity to admit whether you made a mistake or not. And if we go back to the traditional mechanisms of a company, the performance management, the ratings, the bonuses, the promotional architecture, it all disincentivizes admitting you made a mistake. There is no financial Jessie Schofer: A hundred percent. James: reward to say any of those things or to communicate effectively. But the more you bring up your colleagues, The more you've got to share your dollars with the people that you're actively competing with for those promotional dollars or those Jessie Schofer: Hundred percent. James: merit budgets. So that's why, and I'm gonna this is gonna bring us back to that pay-for-performance debate. This is why I, you know, I th I generally believe pay for performance is generally quite a bad thing if it's down to the individual in a group setting. If it's just a bunch of individuals doing their own work, then you can do it. But the reality is most people are collaborating in teams. But that that to me is the major problem. If you if you truly want to pay everyone as individuals and reward them as individuals, you are you have to accept you're gonna disincentivize that psychological safety, that communication, that camaraderie, and you're gonna get people sending emails rather than having conversations. Jessie Schofer: Exactly. You're gonna get the wrong outcome. Which is funny because we're trying to incentivize good outcomes for business. So I think again it comes down to it comes down to deciding how you want to operate. I mean, if companies want to pay for performance, great. Then you create an environment of low trust, probably, competitiveness. I mean it's I think it's like a consulting framework, right? Like I there's a lot of consulting companies that work on that framework of pay for performance. And, you know, they do have structures very well, documented structures of how you're going to get paid and what you what it contributes to it and how you're going to win that extra bonus, right? Fine, you know, it works for them, obviously. But those environments, you know, you hear about them. They're not the most lovely workplaces, you know, they're pretty cutthroat and they're pretty ruthless and they're pretty, you know, you kind of sell your soul, it's like blood money a little bit. so like sure you can have an organization like that, but you will also have the people who will probably churn at some point and you will, you know. So what is the what is your goal as a business? I don't believe you know, I b businesses can do what they want at the end of the day. The no one's controlling them. I do think there should be a level of transparency and fairness, right? But at the end of the day, businesses will do what they decide to do. And every business is going to be different. And maybe for some, they're going to use pay for performance and they're going have the consequences of that system. Do I think it's a good system? No. Would it be something I want to work in? No. but there are people that will show up for that. So I don't know. I think if I think there needs to be a level of, you know, matching the What is your goal as a business? What are you doing? What is the type of work? What kind of people do you want? This whole, again, what is the DNA of the business needs to make sense? And then you prescribe to that, right? And you sign up to that. what's what's the worst case is if you, you know, sell a story and you show up and it's different. And I think that's happened to probably all of us before in our careers. but I remember I remember in in Corona and a scale-up, I wanted to Haier someone. Actually, it was a director of comp. And we desperately needed a director of comp because I was like, I was doing comp and I'm like, I'm not an expert, please. We need a director comp. We need someone. We've got thousands of people. and she applied, she was fantastic. I was like, she's amazing. But she was like, I'd love, you know, she wanted certain things in her career. And she wanted certain things in her workplace. And I was like, We literally can't Haier her. We're just gonna lie to her. Like we can't offer that. We we're it's a little like it's not the kind of environment she wants to be in. She will literally pack up and leave after a month. And so I told her, I was just like, look, this is the kind of environment, this is what we're this is what you would be stepping into. It doesn't really align with what you've said. We want to Haier you, but you've got to make that choice. Do you really want to join or not? She was like, actually, I don't think I do, you know? And she she opted out, even though I really wanted to Haier her. I could have tried to, you James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: know, win her over, but it would have made no sense for anyone. But I think a lot of companies do just like win people over, bring them in, and then they're very quickly disengaged. And then, you know, within six to twelve months, they're turned on somewhere else because, you know, it wasn't it wasn't the right fit from a lot from a different perspective, then can they do the work and do the have the skills, you know? and she was they she's now a friend of mine and she's so thankful she's like that the best into that was the best experience she's ever had where someone was so honest with her about, you know, is this gonna match her? And she was really happy that I was that I shared that with her and she could make then the choice of, you know, is this the reality I want for myself or not. So yeah, I think it's a disservice not to be honest in interviewing. yeah. James: I mean that's really good as well that you had the psychological safety to be that honest and weren't under pressure to fulfill the wreck, you know, then get that and yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Okay. Well the th so you as a person then gave yourself a psychological safety. Jessie Schofer: I mean I was under pressure, don't get me wrong. But I but I chose not to let it get to me too much. I chose to let it slip through my fingers. James: So, you know, a lot of people listening are in HR, and I actually found a little quote from you with our mutual friend Matt at the Foundation Series podcast, I think it was earlier this year. And You said that HR is literally burnt out. And they're burnt out because part of the reason that they got poor infrastructure. So and I see this as well. Like HR become kind of policemen and they're just kind of there to enforce rather than do what we probably both agree they should be doing, which is all the good stuff we've been talking about in this podcast. So why is that? And what what can HR do about that? Jessie Schofer: I mean first the first point is why why is it like that? I think it's because HR was never what it is today. The expectations were just different. Like we talked about in general, like workplace expectation of what you expect when you show up to work and how you operate has completely changed over the last twenty, thirty years, or longer, right? It's been evolving, but it evolved very quickly over the last, you know, let's say ten, fifteen years. And so HR's role was, you know, like we do contracts and we make sure, you know, people have a you know get paid and whatever, right? There wasn't this expectation of, you know, this culture and this, you know, the delivering all these all these things into the business, these and also s the speed at which companies grow and build is now totally different, you know. HR used to have years to go from X amount of people to Y amount of people. Now we're like, well, in like one year we're gonna be 2000, so can you build like go from a zero company to a 2000 organization and build it all with like three people, please? You know, so there's a level of expectation change, speed of change in terms of like what's what's happening in the workplace. but also, you know, there's an element of what I found interesting coming into a HR function from a non-HR background was HR are now expected to be or have the role of s to some degree customer service, internal customer service to employees. And managers and leaders, as well as a change function where they're constantly delivering new things into the business and basically initiating change and how we operate and how we do things as an organization, but also within the team itself. And so you have you basically have a change function, a customer service function, you have an administrative function, and you need some kind of strategic element in there too. and the teams aren't set up for that. There weren't the s the skill sets that are required. Like HR, if you learn HR, you're not learning change management. You're not learning necessarily customer service and how to do that. So again, it's kind of like how do you know we're not teaching people communication. Well, we didn't teach HR, and we didn't give them the skill set and the toolkit to now deliver on the function is now that we now expect them to deliver on. So it's like, of course we're in this position where we've got teams that are eager and keen, but have had no time and support and energy to get them to that place where they can actually be effective in the new role, in the new evolving space that we've given them, which is now this people team, people experience, whatever you want to call it, people as a product functions. All sounds fantastic, but it's changing what the function actually does and how they operate. that wasn't hasn't wasn't hasn't isn't done well over the years, at least from my perspective, from what I've seen being the organizations, but also talking to people are very under-supported, very underfunded. and so you've got that mixed in with Okay, well we've got to now, especially now in the last years, we've got to transform, even before AI. You know, we've got to transform, we've got to deliver all this new stuff that the business needs, and we've got to be able to, you know, focus on the human stuff, stop doing admin. It's like, but all the skill set of the team is firstly a lot of that admin work was what the skill set is, firstly, but also the actual operating model was set up in that way to deal with admin and not to deal with the rest of it. So you've got this problem, then you've got pressure James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: of speed of change. And then you've got the pressure of the team going, my God. They've got the human element of these peop poor, poor teams that are completely under pressure, having to transform themselves while transforming the organization, while delivering things into the organization, while being the mentors, while trying to, you know, bring people along this journey, at the same time as having leadership that don't spend any time, like we just talked about, don't really spend any time understanding and designing what kind of organization they actually want. Right. And a lot of those things that HR have to deliver on are in accordance with, okay, the CEO wants, you know, we do pay in performance philosophy in this way. Or we do we communicate and we these are our foundational behaviors and how we want we see the company, you know, growing in this mission kind of vision, internal mission vision. that's not done well. So then you've got HR have got no compass to work towards. They're trying to build a compass while delivering on the direction which isn't clear and then people aren't happy with it. And then you're deciding on the fly and then you're pissing people off. And you know, it's like an absolute nightmare of a function. And so people always have these expectations and they're never met. And of James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: course then you as a HR person feel completely disengaged and you don't feel like you're delivering. You feel like constantly getting, you know, not to swear but shit stick kind of. and blame for everything when you're actually there just trying to like hold things together. so, you know, that's kind of the cycle and problem that I see. I think what needs to happen is again, the infrastructure needs to make sense. People need to step back. Need to think about what is the company, what is the DNA, what is the operating, what actually needs to happen for the goals of the business, not the lovely nice haves and the wants and the needs, but What are we actually trying to do with what we're doing in people team that actually helps the business and the leaders get to to give the output that we need the business to have? Not just putting in a performance framework because that's what companies do. You know, I feel like you've I've seen these playbooks and they're like, Well, when we get to this many people, we need a performance framework. And when we get to this many people, we need a and I'm like, This makes no sense. Like I hate it. Like, can we throw this out? James: I've seen those as well. Like yeah, like it's I mean it's great for selling stuff. If you're trying to sell like design services, it's a great model to have, but yeah. Jessie Schofer: It's perfect for consultants because they're like, this is exactly why you need to pay us hundreds of thousands to come in and implement this thing and then we're gonna jump out when it's not perfectly James: Yeah. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: well because it will never be fully embedded with a consulting company because you can't afford that. James: Yeah. And because that won't work, then the k year after then you're gonna come back and be able to do this bit as well to make sure that bit that wasn't working is now gonna work and yeah, right. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: Yeah, exactly. They'll sell you another project. Exactly. It's the perfect perfect model for Consci. So I there's just so much in how we haven't supported and thought about the actual function of a HR team and how the this organism of the HR team actually functions because then you've got silos within HR teams, you've got competition within HR teams, you've got TA being like, I don't want to be part of people team. I'm my own function, I'm a talent function, and you're the people operates and you know. Like the amount of stuff I saw working in, you know, HR was like, this is crazy. And always try like unify people and be like, We are a team. We are working together to deliver on a goal. Like, you know, and tried to move towards this change. Like, how do we actually deliver change into a business? And how do we do customer service and bring different things from different parts of the business where we actually have proven methodologies for a lot of this stuff actually. It's it's not new ways of operating in a business. It's just new to a people function that we adopt those principles. And so I just think we haven't been given as a function the support and time to our end education, learning space to change from where we were as a function years ago to where we need to be as a function today. And then you just add AI on top and it just makes it all worse because We haven't solved the problems from five years ago or six years ago or even eight years ago when it started to kind of become, you know, when the people teams started to show up with people experience and engagement surveys and all this stuff started to kind of come onto the market in the last ten to however many years. But we never really we didn't get that right yet. Like we didn't quite get there. James: What is the so and is is part of do do we need HR? Human resources. I mean if you even if you look at the name human resources, it i I hate it. you know, it's humans are not resources. Jessie Schofer: Wait two. James: So is the problem that it's a function that was designed to solve one problem, to your point, that n is no longer fit for purpose, does that mean it needs a rethink or does it just needs to cease to exist and those responsibilities you talked about get get taken up by other parts of the organization? Jessie Schofer: I mean spicy take, I think it can be either. I think it needs a rebrand regardless. Like I don't like the idea of I I think human resources makes no sense. Like we don't it it just doesn't make any sense anymore and it has such a bad association, a negative like association these days that it just doesn't help anything anyway. I think I like to call it organizational success because I think that's what a people team does is puts the foundations internally for organizational success, by supporting the organization in what it needs. By delivering, you know, people products to the you know organization and delivering, you know, what the leadership need to do their jobs and making sure we drive organizational success. And so I like that term, but it doesn't really matter what it is as long as for me it just the focus of it and the skill sets and the constellation and infrastructure have to support the output that that function needs to have now, or those those functions if you split it. and that includes hiring, because hiring is such an involved important process in a business. so yeah, I mean, I think we need a rebrand. I've been saying HR's dead since as I can remember and everyone was like, can't say that. HR's not dead. And it's not that HR, the human the people and the all the th the work that the function has to deliver is dead. It's not. It needs to be rethought, re rethought, rebranded, reimagined, break it down and rebuild it somewhere different, new, however we do it, but I don't think a lot of organizations just, you know, do the playbook. Well we'll just hire our first, we'll just hire this, we'll build it like that, because that's how we know it. James: Yeah, I think so and what was it organizational success that you're preferred? yes. But yeah. Jessie Schofer: Yeah. I mean it's random, but like I'm like I feel like it could work. James: Yeah. Well, it was interesting to think that if we to go back to purpose, that's a very different purpose to HR traditional purpose. The traditional Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: purpose of HR is managing a cost to the business, right? And managing potential legal cost coming from that Jessie Schofer: Course, yeah. James: resource. So to me, there's like and there is always going to be a legal requirement, you know, contracting, employment law, there's always gonna be some degree of centralized control required of anything that involves people. Jessie Schofer: Yeah. James: But to me, that there's a certain set of skills that is quite old school that that that can do that. There's more legally oriented and more process oriented. But what Jessie Schofer: Course. James: you're talking about is the purpose of this new function, this sort of organizational success, is much more around what do we need to ensure that. we get in the most out of people. That's a very different set of skills immediately that you need from the people Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: we hire into that team, very different brief. And also it's no longer just a cost center at that point. Now you're looking at that and saying, what is the value that that can deliver to the business, which changes all the measures of success in addition to the talent that you'd need to run then? Jessie Schofer: Yes. Yes. Yes. And this is why we still see people team as an admin function as a cost. And even though a lot of the fun a lot of the initiatives that people teams are working on, HR teams are working on right now are what I would classify as these organizational success things. It's like how do we get the most out of our people? How do we build behaviors and culture that mean that we can get the best out of our people to deliver on the mission to then to drive business value. And you know, they are already the signs that that's where the value can be. But because we're so, firstly, under-resourced and the infrastructure's not there to take away a lot of the admin and automate a lot of the stuff that we can do now with AI, a lot of it can be done. But we're still operating in a very like unimaginative way, You know, we we can reimagine what HR could look like. And like you said, break it down, rebuild it, do what we need. Totally different mission. I think that's what we need and I think that's what some more businesses will start to do and they have started to do. They've started to look at it in a different way. so if I was building a company, I wouldn't build it how we have it, basically. I wouldn't build it in the way that I was in HR or how we how a lot of companies do HR. whether it's right or not, I don't know, to be seen, but I do think experiment. Can't be any worse than what we're doing now. James: You try something out. You'd experiment, right? You'd you'd try something different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: Ha ha. James: the point you made earlier was some companies might choose that. model of a more of a gr an aggressive performance mentality. You know, you're competing with your colleagues and that's what we want. And and your point was, well that's kind of up to them. And my question is, how long is that going to be true for? And this kind of ties into the direction the people functions moving. So the context for this is I I look at like Abraham Maslow's hierarchy and over time companies are socially and legally increasingly obliged to look after the needs of humans. So at one point slavery was fine. And so I see companies and and socially more of an expectation that companies have a duty to take care of our upper needs, which are our intellectual self-actualization needs. Now if you're a company that relies on extrinsic incentives and just says do this and you'll get that and we're gonna treat you as a a cog in a machine you are depriving a human being of their upper needs, their self-actualization, their ability to think and be creative, work with people they want to work with, which is, I would suggest, a moral crime, in the sense that it's like taking an animal and put it in a tiny cage. You know, you're depriving it of its what it can be. So my question is is that is that the direction we're going as companies or is there always gonna be a limit to what companies have to really answer for in terms of how it treats its people? Jessie Schofer: I mean I think well Are we happy with the legal system and how it how it holds companies accountable in every country? Probably not. Should there should there be more accountability held on different levels that you talked about? Probably, yes, in some spaces, some some in more countries than others. I think that there still will be, and there can't be o I don't believe in over-regulation either from a legal perspective. but it needs to be there needs to be some things or the market just doesn't do things right. Like we saw that with, like you said, slavery and the whole. that of other than like very important things that we put into law because it's morally what we should do. I think there's like the the gray area of where it's like this is why I said I think it's also important to say I think businesses can have a different way of operating. I think that's okay because everyone you know likes different things. I think that's also okay. I think that it's just important right now that companies are transparent about what they have. And I think that's the the first step is that companies aren't transparent right now about how they operate. They don't reflect on themselves and they don't see and a lot of people don't even see some of the things you talked about as an issue. Right? We see it as an issue, but not everyone does. And so Do we need more regulation in this space? I think around there already is a lot of laws, especially in Australia, I remember, when I was there, around duty of care. You know, people being emotionally well at work and, you know, not causing them to be burnt out and not giving them mental stress. And I think that is important and should be the case. should be, you know, in place in countries where maybe it isn't already. James: there is more duty of care, there is more legal onus on companies not to burn people out, Jessie Schofer: silly. James: If you if you choose to burn yourself out, is that okay because there was an expectation of your company that you would also be willing to burn yourself out in exchange for? Yeah, is it Jessie Schofer: I don't know. I mean, I work for myself, right? So when I burn myself out is my own bloody fault. But you know, but the you know, there is yeah, it is interesting. You get into whole you open a whole can of worms, don't you? When you get into James: Mm-hmm. Jessie Schofer: this. But I mean at the end of the day I think that companies do have a responsibility to look after their people, obviously. I think we can do it better. And I think if the HR function actually focused more on organisational success, let's just call it that, because that's the term we're using right now. it it does switch around again the b the the measurement, the business case, the investment and and the impact on the business. And then I think you get more towards the direction we're talking about than if we keep it how we have it now. Because we start to invest in the things that actually keep people more emotionally and psychologically safe at work and the duty of care, that that next level that you're talking about and that that we basically want to have, James: Yeah. I I really like that. And the thing if you have that purpose, our job is to ensure organizational success, then you can start asking some real questions about the stuff HR has traditionally done. For example, not just picking on it, but let's say performance management. Does the performance management process contribute to our organizational success? Yes or no. Can we demonstrate for one way or the other? That's the problem for me. There's a lack of, a lack of willingness to explore And innovate in this space and question the assumptions. Jessie Schofer: Which is funny 'cause there's so much research around humans and how we operate and how we operate at our best and what we need to be at our best. And yet we do like the complete opposite in most organizations. And I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm so confused. It's infuriating. James: Yeah. Yeah. It's infuriating. It is infuriating. But again, I don't think people want to no no one sits around wanting to make life terrible for somebody. So it's not like there's a there's no world to improve things, and no company wants to go under because it failed to get innovations out of its people. So it's not like we don't all want the same thing. It's just connecting that research with the people that make the decisions. That's the the barrier. now I apologize because Jessie Schofer: Yeah. I don't know. It's a hard James: I wanted to ask you about stakkd a bit more and I was gonna ask you much, much sooner in the conversation, but we are having such an interesting series of rabbit holes that I didn't get to it. But I wanted to you to tell me a bit about stakkd and and you founded this or co-founded it yourself, right? And what you are trying to to solve with that organization. Jessie Schofer: So stakkd I don't know if you've heard of anyone listening has heard of Stacked. So stakkd.tech is the site. It's a database. It's HR Tech database. It's a discovery space of all the different HR and TA tech in the kind of small to medium business market, rather European, UK focused, but also US, some US tech as well. It came from being in organizations actually where I saw over the scale up how much tech was needed to really like help a business take away all that noise we were talking about and get rid of all the admins so they can focus on this organizational success piece. You do need some kind of technological infrastructure to help with that. if you want to get people out of do that work and into other work. And so I noticed that, you know, during those projects and transformation that we were doing, discovering the tech, like what was on the market, like what was actually available wasn't that easy. And Googling around you like SEO, this and paid James: It's it's got it's got busy out there, yeah. Jessie Schofer: paid advertisement here, and then you've got someone in your inbox there, and you didn't really have like a space to just be like, what does the market look like? Let me just like browse and see high-level what could maybe suit my needs. Maybe tech I never even know existed, you know. And so that's how I started Stakkd I just thought, I'll just make a database. It was a Notion database when I started. I just put I just found a whole bunch of tech that I could find, that I'd heard about, that I'd had to look for, and made it kind of available. And then from there it just grew into kind of its o my its own thing. I moved it out of Notion into like my own custom database and just started adding more and more products in there and making it kind of easy to discover tech. And then of course more and more tech came on the market the last years, more and more and more. And it's just crazy. Like I've had probably, I'm gonna guess, over close to over a thousand inbound requests for different tech. Yes. I have a date. James: thousand unique companies. That's insane. Jessie Schofer: Yes. I only have about four, just under four hundred in the database because at some point it the more tech doesn't make it easier. and if James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: you don't have enough data and enough information on each company, then it doesn't make sense. And so what I'm doing now is actually rebuilding it. So I'm rebuilding a Stakkd 2.0 to kind of try and solve this problem of like current accurate up-to-date data. and actually make an MCP so you can use it with your Claude. So you can do the discovery without SEO and without thinking about like all the other If just ask Claude, or if you ask ChatGPT, we'd go out and search the internet, it would get all the you know GEO and all the SEO like optimized sites, and probably people have been there for years or have paid a lot of money to be there and show up, versus the database where you'd be able to go in and basically just ask it to search the full database and be like, this is what I'm looking for, what kind of stuff is in there? Tell me what has these kind of features, and it'll just like bring you back from the database. so yeah, that's where I'm working on because I just that's basically what it is. It's just to make it easier for how. HR to discover the tech before they jump in and just, you know, most people just pick three big names. They go, okay, well I know this one, this one, and they ask a friend. It's like, cool, but there's thousands of things on the market now. There's amazing James: Yeah. Jessie Schofer: tech out there if we just knew about it. so yeah, that's kind of what the problem I'm solving. And At the same time, I also organize kind of webinars and learning spaces for the community to kind of learn about some of the newer tech or to discuss things around transformation and you know how we can hire differently or how we can use technology in certain processes and think about the whole kind of infrastructure piece in different ways. so I offer those free sessions as well. And yeah, it's been a really fun thing to do the past mm about th three years now. Almost three years now. Yeah. James: It's a great idea. I mean the stacked is a really clever idea because it was getting a bit chaotic a few years ago and it and it continues to be so. Like there's a lot of tech out Jessie Schofer: I think. James: there. Very difficult. And if you want to have a conversation with every single one, you'll never make a decision. So to for you to try and distill some of those features down there to people Jessie Schofer: Crazy. James: what people actually need is really, really helpful. Jessie Schofer: Yeah, and I mean, again, I've I I did find a, you know, a challenge with my own database of like how to keep things up to date and how to make sure James: Mm. Jessie Schofer: it was valuable and useful. And I think that's the biggest thing that I'm solving now with like stakkd 2.0 is trying to make sure that the data's accurate and it that we have like as and that there's as much coverage as I can of the market because the benefit for you as a user or a buyer Looking for tech is coverage and like understanding the market. So the more of the market you can have as accurate and up to date as you can, the more useful it is for the person searching. So that's what I'm trying to solve right now. And hopefully I can deliver on that. but I've been I've you know, I love this space. I love infrastructure. I'm a very like structured person. I love tech, but I also love tech because it enables people to be better. being human, you know, because you get to focus on all that stuff that we talked about. And I just think if you can't get the infrastructure right in a HR team, you just never get the rest of it right either. and so I'm very passionate about, you know, teams doing that. James: yeah, and th the community is a really good idea as well as I think for a lot of people in HR it's quite a lonely job. Jessie Schofer: Yeah. James: you know, and but one the plus side what I have found is the community is very willing to help. So as long as you can connect with people in that community. It's maybe it's because they're so beaten down by expectations, but they're very willing to pass on their learnings and their support to other people. So to I think if you are an HR and you feel a bit isolated, find the communities, like find your community, find those events that you can go to and meet like-minded people, amazing the ideas that come out of that, like that you can just borrow and Jessie Schofer: Yeah. James: use and and like reflect on with other people as well, because it's very tiring to do things in a vacuum sometimes. Jessie Schofer: It is and you know one thing that I never did which I should have done, you know, I came from a non-HR background. I came from projects transformation and then I moved into HR and doing kind of people strategy and change transformation stuff. I I didn't really network and I didn't really go to any, you know, support I didn't go to any community events and I didn't even really know that they existed. That sounds stupid. Like I didn't even know really know they existed. I didn't I didn't go and like find that that kind of support network that I needed and it was much harder because of that. And of course, once you are out of the workplace, you start to like have space to think about that. And so I can understand why a lot of people don't do that. But there's so many communities, there's so many wonderful constellations of people that, you know, put on in person. events, webinars, online learnings, workshops, you know, Slack communities, WhatsApp communities. There's just like literally anything and everything you could ever imagine. If you have a question that you don't know the answer to and you can't get the answer from someone in your workplace, you can literally reach out to these communities or people or myself or even you like people just who are, you know, we're all so happy and and that's what I love about this community, like you said, everyone's so happy to help each other and share. It's unbelievable. And so I think it's just like testament to like the kind of people that are in the in this field as well. You know, they're really lovely people. They want to learn and want to they want to they want to, you know, be the best that they can be. And James: Help. Yeah. Jessie Schofer: they want to help others be the best they can be at work. So I really do love that you know, that's where we're heading, I hope, more so towards that direction in businesses to enable that and help, you know, the HR function be what it can really truly be. James: I I remember being quite surprised at an event once how willing people were to share what they do. like the Jessie Schofer: Mm-hmm. James: programs or the initiatives they're trying and the success or failures they've had. Because in my mind, these are all companies competing with each other for talent. The competition for talent, you know, it's so hot in the A. Why would you do anything that would benefit a competitor if that means that you're not going to have to get your precious talent? But in actual fact, there's nothing like that when you when you get people together and and have them talk to each other, they're very, very willing to share those stories and those ideas. So yeah, again, if you're new to HR in particular, don't be afraid to reach out to anyone and say, like, I want to meet more like minded people. What can I do? Jessie Schofer: Yeah. James: And your point there's all kinds of avenues for that kind of connection. Jessie Schofer: Yeah, and it's really nice, like I you know, something I really appreciate is people actually writing to me, which I really appreciate people saying, like, hey, I went to that webinar, I went to that workshop and I really learnt something, or I really enjoyed that, or I read your newsletter and that really helped me think about something and you know, I'm thinking sometimes I think I'm, you know, talking into the void or I'm doing this all for no reason and then you get messages like that and you think, Okay, this is helping people, this is really in you know, people are engaging with this. You know, I'm not not everyone's cup of tea and I don't need to be, but there's, you know, people that, you know, appreciate the the work that people do. and there's a lot of people in the communities that are, like you said, willing to be there. yeah, and I'm I'm actually really happy to have fallen somehow into the HR space. didn't mean to get here, but here I am and really enjoying it. James: Pretty common actually. I feel like I don't think I've ever met anyone that didn't fall into the HR space from somewhere else. I yeah, yeah, yeah. Jessie Schofer: And they just kind of ended up here. I think it also takes, you know, like a certain I don't know certain kind of people that I don't know what it is, but there's just something. Like you meet people and you're like, yeah, I can see why you're in HR. I can see why you're in this space and you know Yeah, it's a nice it's a nice feeling, to be surrounded with people that support. And I think there's also another thing about HR, they're not super c you how you there's like there's not this competitiveness between the companies, you know, they're willing to share and they open up and everything. And I think that's just because there's so it's so it's so hard to anyway do HR, you know, that it's like you already know how hard it is that like the sharing is almost like therapy, I feel like. You know, like you can when you share something and you can help others, it's just such a like positive thing. And if you can't always help others in your own organization like a lot of people want to, they can help others in another organization potentially get there. And you know, I think also a I believe in, you know, that there's enough space for everyone to win. So, you know, I think sharing is the best policy, being kind, supporting others. Everyone can win. All the companies will win, you know. in their own ways. And I think at the at the end of the day, if you've got good people, that's the main thing. James: All right. Jessie Schofer where can people find you? where can people follow what you what you do and where can people connect with you? Jessie Schofer: Well, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so anyone who wants to connect there, you're welcome to send me a connection, not just a follow, I'm happy to accept. Just say like saw you on James's podcast, and then I'll be happy to connect. and otherwise you can register for my I have an in the loop newsletter that goes out every month. So if you're interested in like what's going on in HR text space and what's going on, if it's I sometimes I also add my like little two cents on a certain topic that I think is interesting for HR, kind of like a how to HR section. so that goes out every month. So I can share that with you if you'd like to share that with everyone. and of course you can find this the tech on stakkd.tech So you can go check out all the HR tech out there. Otherwise, you know I'm very approachable. James: And that's S T A S T A K K D dot tech. Right. Yep. Okay. Yep. I don't think I no, I'd see that. I I saw it and I thought it was stacked. I'm surprised anyone would think stakes. Yeah. Okay. Jessie Schofer: Yes, S T A K K D. Some people say staked, but I'm like, no, it's stacked. Yeah. Some people like staked. I'm like, that's an interesting way. That's interesting way of saying stacked. We're releasing stack.tech James: suppose it could be. yeah, and realise that Jessie Schofer: two point soon. As soon as soon as Jessie can do it, meaning meaning let's see. James: And I'm assuming you'll put that in your newsletter when when that comes out as well. So yeah, so yeah. Yeah. So if you're Jessie Schofer: definitely putting my newsletter or definitely posting it on LinkedIn. So if you're in my realm, you'll know about it. James: Yeah. And if you're sitting there pulling your hair out trying to figure out what comp tech to go with, then subscribe to a newsletter and find out when Stakkd 2.0 comes out. Yeah. Okay. well Jessie Schofer: Exactly. James: thanks so much. It was a great, great conversation. I'm glad we finally did it as well, because it's been fun just to reflect on some of these themes that have come up in our various debates and speak to you directly rather than just get the few microseconds of conversation we get on those debate panels. Jessie Schofer: Yeah, it was really nice to connect. James: so good luck with Stakkd 2.0 and thanks again and I look forward to speaking with you soon. Jessie Schofer: Yeah, thanks. Thank you so much for having me. And by the way, I want to say earlier but I didn't get to, congratulations on the book. I'm so excited for you. Yeah. I James: Thank you. Thank you. Just here, of course, there's close the gap. Yeah. Available at all good retailers so long as they are called Amazon. Jessie Schofer: Nice. Excited for you. And yeah, congratulations again. And thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. And we should definitely have another chat again soon. So make sure James: Do it again soon. Jessie Schofer: to stay in contact. James: Thanks so much. Take care. Jessie Schofer: Tai James: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Disengaged. If you enjoyed it, please remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes and if possible, please give the show a rating. Finally, if you have friends or colleagues that you think might find this interesting, please let them know. This is tremendously helpful and I do appreciate it. see you next time on Disengaged.