Latest / Why Does It Feel So Wrong To Be Human At Work? / A Team of One Is Not a Team | Jen Samuel
Transcript
- 0:00hello, welcome back everybody to Between the Seasons from Why Does It Feel So Wrong To Be Human At Work.
- 0:05I'm Pinaki and of course I'm joined by my amazing host, Chris.
- 0:10What's good everybody?
- 0:11and
- 0:11and our amazing producer, Bree
- 0:14Hi everyone.
- 0:15And today we're really excited to introduce our guest, Jen Samuels, our newest senior account manager at Local Wisdom.
- 0:23say hi, Jen, welcome.
- 0:26Thank you for having me.
- 0:28Absolutely.
- 0:29Yeah.
- 0:30So today we wanted to take a moment to introduce Jen to get to know a little bit more about her and dive into the conversation of what it's like to be an internal comms team of
- 0:40one, which is oxymoronic in my opinion, but we're going to get into that a little bit because, you know, a lot of us are like working solo and, without like help and support
- 0:51from other teammates and stuff like that.
- 0:53So that could lead to like burnout and other issues and stuff like that.
- 0:57And it's just not cool.
- 0:59to feel alone at work, right?
- 1:01So that's what we're talking about today.
- 1:03And between the seasons, why does it feel so wrong to be human at work?
- 1:06So let's dive right into it.
- 1:09I thought I'd start with like a little fun fact about Jen that we actually met when she was a client and we worked together in that aspect.
- 1:18So you come from an internal comms background, Jen, and I'd love to hear about that background if you could just share
- 1:25the internal comms journey that you've.
- 1:28Absolutely.
- 1:29I started in internal comms, I hate to say, but over 20 years ago.
- 1:35So even though don't look my age, but yeah, but yeah, it was, you know,
- 1:42Bachelor's degree in communications felt that I needed to concentrate a little bit more to understand what I wanted to do in life.
- 1:48So it went the public relations route with a master's degree from Syracuse University and happened to get a job right out of school.
- 1:57So I started with an airline and I was in the operation.
- 2:00So I kind of fell into internal comms before, in my opinion, it was a really known niche within the United States.
- 2:09So in the early 2000s, I was
- 2:11embed into operation and really just focus on communicating with the flight attendants and that's where my passion really started for internal comms.
- 2:20you know, of course interned prior to that in agency world pre-ipads, let's say that way.
- 2:27So I was just not into the billable hours.
- 2:29I was not into cold calling and pitching.
- 2:31It just didn't seem like a natural fit for my personality.
- 2:34But starting with
- 2:34with an airline that was young, hip, had a great culture that were people-centric.
- 2:40That's where the passion started.
- 2:42And I just continued my career with an internal just always focusing on where I could grow.
- 2:48So I just left organizations just to find new growth.
- 2:51But I was started there for six years.
- 2:53And my second role was also six years.
- 2:56And after that, restructuring led me along the way for hopping around to a couple of different places.
- 3:03But for the most part, the first
- 3:0412 years of my career was a team of one started with a cybersecurity company after that and that's where I was like wait there's teams then I joined an actual team of internal
- 3:15communicators because they were in my opinion it was London based so I was the only North America person so the fact that there was a team in to my understanding in Europe it was
- 3:25more of a pronounced and kind of really structured niche uh as a profession so that was where I'm like whoa there's a team we can divide and conquer and after that it was
- 3:34It's hard to go back to being a team of one after that.
- 3:38But old paths led me to local wisdom where I was a team of one again, with my last employer.
- 3:45uh being a team of one trying to figure out, how can I do a content migration and do an intranet build on SharePoint as one person?
- 3:56And I had even just gotten the resources to, after many 20 years of fighting for it, of Contact Monkey, being able to just have that tool.
- 4:04came across localism.
- 4:06And after that, I obviously crossed over.
- 4:11That's an awesome story.
- 4:11I kind of go from different places.
- 4:17Yeah, I was thinking, I really love the idea of this uh team of one and what kind of an impact it has on the employee experience.
- 4:22Because I think more and more we're seeing uh teams of one.
- 4:27And I feel like it's compounded by the fact that so many people work remotely full time.
- 4:32ah I've always just been curious, Jen, about uh your view and your perspective on uh
- 4:41how you feel like it's had an impact on mental health and what you've done to counterbalance some of those impacts.
- 4:52Yeah, that's a very good question.
- 4:53I would say earlier in the career because that's all I knew
- 4:57I felt like I had to just accept it and just deal with it until I realized there are organizations that have teams.
- 5:03So especially um when I left the airline, I literally was the internal communications department for an organization that was growing.
- 5:11So I had a dotted line to public relations, but I sat in HR.
- 5:15So it was a weird juggling act of wearing, you what is that?
- 5:19wear many, master of many things.
- 5:21uh Jack of all trades, master of none, because you can't really be the best at one thing.
- 5:27in one moment I'm helping with open enrollment but then there's an IT outage that I have to stop and do that but then also wait I have a global town hall that we have to work on
- 5:36with the CEO which is the top priority but then there's other things that are so it was really juggling a lot so it was a lot of burnout there was a lot of late nights that was
- 5:45the only way I could get everything done was just working late in offices was all pre-covid before the remote work world
- 5:53And so yeah, there was a lot of burnout.
- 5:54And like I said, once I found an organization that I joined, that there was a team, that's where I love the phrase of being human at work.
- 6:03That's where I learned that, wait, I don't have to take my laptop on vacation.
- 6:07That was one of those things that in the prior organization, I would be traveling for work.
- 6:12or even sadly once to a funeral for personal and I had my laptop and in between gates I'm sending out a company-wide email and I'm wait let me send out these results before I go to
- 6:22my grandfather's funeral it was just all these things that the laptop was just normal like you just carry it with you ah even flight attendants used to make fun of me because
- 6:30they're like they don't know me but they're like we always see you at the gate with a laptop
- 6:34So then once I joined a team and understood that I took my first vacation and I said, but I'll have my laptop with me.
- 6:40And my boss at the time was like, why?
- 6:43And I was like,
- 6:44He goes, I'm here, could pick up for you so-and-so.
- 6:47And so having the ability to have a team or just a supportive team, even if it's not an internal comms team, a team that understands and gives you that balance was huge.
- 6:57But then just my trajectory put me back as a team of one um throughout my course.
- 7:03But yeah, it got to the point that I think now that I am older and wiser, I think most recently before I came to Local Wisdom, I was able to make the choice to step away from my
- 7:13career.
- 7:14from a job, not my career, but from a job that no longer served me at a time that I was going through some personal changes and transitions just in life.
- 7:23And when corporate changes affect your job as a communicator, know, your job, you know, we go on autopilot and restructuring, yep, the corporate ambiguity, that's our job.
- 7:34We have to be comfortable with ambiguity as a communications person.
- 7:38But when it comes to the point that I can't be strategic anymore,
- 7:42And then other parts of my life feel like off balance.
- 7:45It's not oh always financially a good option for people, but because I had the option, I chose to step away, recalibrate my life.
- 7:54And then one thing led to another that I landed at local wisdom.
- 7:57So I know I always joke with Pinaki and Bree, it's very serendipitous how I landed here, but it's, I'm so happy that I'm at a role that like, I can be human.
- 8:08I can like say I need to step away to take care of this.
- 8:12Or life is lifing right now.
- 8:13Yeah.
- 8:14It's interesting.
- 8:15Yeah, it's interesting, Jen, you know, as you're talking about this a while back, I just asked ChatGPT because I remember when I was in school, uh one of my required readings, I
- 8:28think it was a labor relations course.
- 8:30ah It was a book called The Tyranny of Work by James Reinhart.
- 8:34And so I asked ChatGPT can you just give me a quick summary just to remind me what the key points were of The Tyranny of Work?
- 8:41And it actually gave me a summary of another book called The Tyranny of Work by a different author whose name, I'm just looking it up here, is James Bloodworth.
- 8:54So actually it's two authors named James, both writing this book called The Tyranny of Work.
- 9:01But the reason why I was just bringing it up is you triggered something, Jen.
- 9:06One of the things that Bloodworth, the author of the book that I wasn't intending to ask about,
- 9:11One of the things that he was arguing about was this idea that work has expanded past what's economically required and now shapes identity, self-worth, and morality.
- 9:23And there's an interesting point that was being made, is being so-called busy is treated as being virtuous while not working or working less is stigmatized, even when productivity
- 9:38gains could allow for shorter hours.
- 9:41uh So the big idea, at least as ChatGPT has summarized it, was that work has become like this moral uh obligation and this virtuous idea of being busy, not just an economic one.
- 9:52And I wonder, because there are actual impacts, there's human impacts to this way of thinking about work.
- 10:00I just, I'd love to get your thoughts, Jen, on uh is there opportunity overall in...
- 10:07societally and culturally for organizations to think differently about the nature of work and our impact that we can have that respects that, you know, continues to respect that
- 10:19balance.
- 10:20Definitely, would say, I think the, well, we're all living in the remote or hybrid world.
- 10:27I had the benefit of being remote prior to COVID with the organization funny enough that I said there was a team that culture.
- 10:34I can't say it was the entire organization, but within the communications and marketing team.
- 10:39I became remote because they closed the New York office and the rest of my team was in London.
- 10:43So I was going to commute to London every day, but they said work from home.
- 10:47Like it was not a big deal.
- 10:49And I learned that balance.
- 10:51So I think that's where I started to realize that you can, no pun intended, be human at work.
- 10:57As long as you get your work done, it's okay to take appointments.
- 11:00It's okay to go to the doctor where I always had to feel like I had to be tethered to my laptop wherever I was.
- 11:07And then going back to the point I think you said about just like how it affects you as a human, think earlier on before the world of remote, where you just felt like you had to be
- 11:16busy and well, transparency being a minority.
- 11:19I'm in New York City where there's many minorities, but being a woman, being Hispanic, you feel like you have to always show up because you'll get overlooked.
- 11:30And even that, the harder you work, I still got overlooked because maybe not because of those parameters, but just the role of internal comps also not being respected.
- 11:40And so that's why I left other organizations because it was your team of one, you need to get the work done, figure it out.
- 11:47um And it just was so disheartening.
- 11:50So now that I'm older and wiser, I'm like, yep, nope, I don't need that.
- 11:54And I did see, I noticed, I don't know if this is my opinion, but during COVID, 2019, I went through a nine month gap of not being full-time employed.
- 12:04I was a contractor and it was really hard to find a role.
- 12:08I landed a role month before the pandemic kicked off.
- 12:13And then,
- 12:13Throughout that season, my LinkedIn was just full of all these internal common roles because everyone was saying, oh, we need to talk to our employees now that there's a world
- 12:22pandemic.
- 12:23And you saw the need, just like we saw with DEI And then in that transition, I noticed now it's going down where there are more roles out there than I've seen in the last 20 years.
- 12:35But when you look at the job description, it's one person doing a lot of things that are not realistic.
- 12:42And so I think it's, I'm not sure if that answers the question, but it's just that, I think it's just being able to defend how strategic internal comms is and being as a team
- 12:53of one.
- 12:54One of the things I struggled with was being able to prove myself strategically.
- 12:57would get feedback that it's like, well, we want you to be a strategic advisor to us, to our C-suite.
- 13:05And I could.
- 13:07if I wasn't also updating the web pages.
- 13:09So now that I see like our clients, then I'm like, wow, they, we help them.
- 13:14Like we're running their newsletter.
- 13:16We're posting their, um their intranet articles.
- 13:20But I'm, doing that at the same time that I'm trying to do a town hall, but you want me to advise you, but you're not telling me about the change with time.
- 13:28So how can I plan a communications plan?
- 13:30So it, I felt like it became a knock most recently to my ability, but then,
- 13:35I love that I'm at Local Wisdom because that was hard for me.
- 13:38And I'm like, oh, OK, you think I can do this?
- 13:41There's so much thought back there, something like that.
- 13:44yeah, because yeah, team of one, like first of all, I gotta just kind of keep saying the catchphrase, team of one is not a team by definition, right?
- 13:52And it does think because there's so much that goes into communicating from the beginning to the end and to expect one person to do that for an organization is not feasible.
- 14:05It's just like the math does not add up unless you are working like,
- 14:10uh ungodly hours and things like that.
- 14:12And also you do need like a time for like break and mental rest because if we're in a constant adrenaline fight or flight mode, we're not thinking in our best creative
- 14:25strategic ways, right?
- 14:26We're just trying to find the fastest quickest way out of the situation.
- 14:30And so I don't think it's a good idea for companies to have like internal comms teams of one, especially if
- 14:40this is the group that is providing communication and clarity to the entire organization.
- 14:46So it always kind of like boggles me.
- 14:49it is one of the reasons behind local wisdom is to support this group of people.
- 14:53And that's kind of why we kind of started having a soft spot in our hearts for internal communicators, because uh all communicators have a bit of a rough time, but public
- 15:04relations has been more established and known.
- 15:08So yeah.
- 15:07uh
- 15:08I just got on a soapbox for a second there.
- 15:10I apologize for that.
- 15:11uh But it's kind of one of the things that, uh Jen, before even you joined Local Wisdom and to kind of start capturing uh or mitigating this kind of loneliness, one of the things
- 15:24that you did was join communities, uh internal comms communities.
- 15:28Tell me about that, that experience of like what kind of got you in there and what you found out of it.
- 15:33And even what are some of the communities, because I know like we were talking about Joanna Parsons and
- 15:38and like Chuck Gose and things like that.
- 15:40Absolutely.
- 15:41think for the many years of being a team of one, I didn't have the time to really explore LinkedIn.
- 15:48To me, LinkedIn was really just to look for jobs when you needed it.
- 15:51Or I would post something related to the company that had nothing to do with my group.
- 15:55Like if it was warranty programs, hey, we did this.
- 15:59um So I didn't have the time.
- 16:02Or I would have a professional development budget, join IABC, PRSA, and then never have the actual time to join these webinars.
- 16:10And then I forget what prompted me to become a little bit more active about two years ago on LinkedIn.
- 16:18I think it was because I was in the branding and marketing department at my previous organization, Internal Comms.
- 16:22So I became more active and I came across Joanna's Parsons posts before she even started the Curious Tribe that we're part of.
- 16:31And I felt seen.
- 16:32I was like, someone understands what it's like she would post things about being a team of one or some of the frustrations of being order takers.
- 16:39That was one thing that really resonated with me because I've always been that, the order taker.
- 16:45You can't really say no.
- 16:46I mean, you could push back, but sometimes in certain organizations or cultures, I couldn't say no.
- 16:51So being that postmaster and order taker, that resonated with me.
- 16:55And then she put a post of like, hey, I'm thinking about starting a group.
- 17:00Would you be interested?
- 17:01And I just said yes.
- 17:02And then thankfully my organization at the time, they helped me finance it.
- 17:07But I was, so I'm proud to say I was an inaugural member of Joanna Parsons Curious Tribe.
- 17:12But it became really just a space where it's like the biggest thing was feeling seen.
- 17:16was like the same frustrations that I've had and the joys, but the frustrations other people got it.
- 17:22And we had a safe space to say.
- 17:25doesn't this annoy you when this happened?
- 17:27Or also strategically, I'm faced with this, I don't know where to start.
- 17:32And you have people within that group that we were able to vent to.
- 17:36And then just also just learn from Joanna's experience, which was not much different than my own to be fair.
- 17:42I saw her as like, whoa, and untouchable.
- 17:45But when I got to know her on a one-on-one level, her career trajectory was pretty much similar to mine.
- 17:51always find it interesting whenever I talk to internal communications folks, how often they use the phrase small but mighty to describe their team.
- 18:01So whether it's a team of one or it's just in a very large organization, you have a very small team to support.
- 18:08And one the things that I always feel like, especially with a team of one, is that no one ever really talks about scope creep.
- 18:13because it's only the one person.
- 18:15And so all arrows point to that one person whenever there's internal communications needs.
- 18:21I don't, one of the, just to close off the conversation, Jen, I'd love to hear your perspective on what do you find different about working at Local Wisdom that gives you a
- 18:33voice to be able to put your hand up and say, ah need some additional support here and your ability to have some more
- 18:43flexibility in terms of uh finding that balance.
- 18:47And I could put on earmuffs too, if you'd like to.
- 18:49Pinaki, you could just step out for a moment.
- 18:52No, no, in all honesty, and I know I, it might sound very like I'm just because Pinaki's here, but in all honesty, it is in reflecting back and think of making about the time of
- 19:05this recording three months in, but.
- 19:08I truly feel like I can be human at work.
- 19:11there was like, I've referenced other organizations that yes, I had that opportunity as well, but I feel that I can be me.
- 19:19ah I think because of the team of one and all that history, there is ah imposter syndrome that can come up because of like, well, you're not strategic enough and you're not this.
- 19:31and lot of imposter syndrome, and I know it's very serendipitous and not everyone might have this luxury of how I was found to join Local Wisdom.
- 19:40My now boss had already written a recommendation for me on LinkedIn, which was funny.
- 19:44So Rich had already uh complimented me, and now he's my boss.
- 19:50But the fact that I was...
- 19:53matched with the position where Rich says, think you would be a good fit just based on working for a project with me.
- 19:59Obviously there were interviews and things that went along, but just the idea that someone saw something in me and I was just being me.
- 20:07think oh back in May, Pinaki had invited me to a conference and that was just through LinkedIn Connection.
- 20:13It wasn't a job interview, but I joined the conference and in a lot of say I was unemployed.
- 20:18I had just quit my job like three weeks before and I said,
- 20:21How am gonna go to this conference?
- 20:23And like the first question is always, where do you work?
- 20:25I don't work anywhere.
- 20:27And I reached out to Joanna, I said, what do I do?
- 20:29I'm supposed to be networking.
- 20:31She gave me some advice, just be yourself.
- 20:33And I was, and I had nothing to lose because it wasn't a job interview.
- 20:38So I just was myself and everything serendipitously turned around where now I'm on the local wisdom team.
- 20:45And it's just an honor that.
- 20:47They saw something in me as a communicator.
- 20:51I say I'm not in sales, I am on the books, but I'm not a sales person.
- 20:56I'm internal comms at heart, but me being me was good enough.
- 21:00And that is a huge relief now at this stage in life and being on the local wisdom side that I'm learning a lot, but I'm just.
- 21:10also being what's instinctive and natural to me and how I communicate with clients, how I build a spreadsheet to keep up, how I do my not so good math calculations, but learning
- 21:19because I'm a words person.
- 21:20um I'm enough.
- 21:22And I think that's a lot of thing that I think a lot of people have to, you know, encourage themselves in life.
- 21:28But I am enough.
- 21:30I am enough.
- 21:30And it's like, well, Rich saw it.
- 21:32Pinaki saw it.
- 21:33Like even Julia, who I met, you know, saw something in me and I was like, oh, I can do this.
- 21:40The world of work likes to put us into nice little neat boxes and there's so much more to humans than that, I think.
- 21:47uh So much to unpack there.
- 21:49think for organizations, leadership and whatnot, I'll just make a call out to you.
- 21:55A team of one is not a team of one and it's really not fair.
- 21:58I've seen what that does to organizations.
- 22:00uh And there's so much more we can unpack there.
- 22:05I'm thinking that's like a second, uh a part two episode for this and maybe Jen,
- 22:09You could help us convince Joanna to join us for that one or something like that.
- 22:14And if you're on the other side, an internal communicator, who is a team of one, we're very sorry.
- 22:19But what you can do is think about what Jen just said, community.
- 22:23uh Being alone is not fun and it doesn't feel good.
- 22:28So find peers, find others.
- 22:30I have uh other uh stories even in my career where I faced the same thing and I needed to go places.
- 22:38which I had other peers where I could learn from, commiserate with and things like that.
- 22:42Even as an agency owner, I meet with other agency owners quite often and whatnot.
- 22:48you know, before we close out too, know, Bree, I feel like you haven't got much air time.
- 22:52I'm wondering what's going on in your mind before we close out.
- 22:55Yeah, I was just I'm really glad, Chris, that you asked about um Jen now at Local Wisdom, because I was going to if you didn't, um because because, yes, we both know Pinaki was not
- 23:08going to um but it.
- 23:11You know, I started last June.
- 23:14I haven't been with Local Wisdom for even a year yet.
- 23:17And I personally have felt a huge difference uh to.
- 23:22local wisdom compared to some of my previous environments.
- 23:26I also like we had a marketing department last job.
- 23:30I was one of three, but I often described it as we were all on our own islands and we didn't even have like cans on a string to talk to each other.
- 23:38Like we weren't encouraged to talk to each other.
- 23:40We all had our own projects, kept our head down.
- 23:42Like I would have full work days in office where I didn't talk to anyone because that's just like no one talked to anyone at that place.
- 23:51um And so coming here and having a team and having, you know, people check in with you and like wanting to make sure you're not carrying everything.
- 24:01Like it was a huge shift in, you know, how I saw work, how I showed up for work.
- 24:07Like I no longer, like I had to work from home job once where I sat down at my desk every morning and cried.
- 24:13Like, you know.
- 24:15uh
- 24:16That's not great.
- 24:18So to come into an environment where I could be like, hey, Pinaki, I'm having a really bad pain day.
- 24:24Can I take the afternoon off?
- 24:26He's like, of course.
- 24:27I don't have that anxiety anymore of even mentioning it.
- 24:31At my other job, that wouldn't even be something I'd bring up.
- 24:34I would just suffer through the day because it wasn't an environment that was supportive and that you felt like you could turn to your team and open up to.
- 24:42And that really surprised me when I joined Local Wisdom.
- 24:45it really does.
- 24:46It makes a difference when a company actually takes the time to create a supportive environment that is actually there for their team.
- 24:53like leadership really should be listening to these conversations because it's not just like,
- 24:58an advertisement for how local wisdom is so great.
- 25:00It's two people who have really discovered how important internal communications and employee experience really is.
- 25:29and I, you know, I love the opportunity to talk about great organizations that are just so supportive of the individual as a human and just respecting that space.
- 25:19ah I don't talk about this really nearly often enough, but ah I work at Gallagher, which is a large publicly traded company.
- 25:27a large corporation.
- 25:29But my favorite thing about working
- 25:32at Gallagher is very similar and resonates a lot with what I'm hearing about local wisdom in that at Gallagher, you might actually be a team of one.
- 25:41We've got lots of different pockets where you have individual contributors that are responsible for one thing, that sort of thing.
- 25:48ah But even so, my favorite thing about the culture here is that you just put your hand up and say, I need some support.
- 25:56And culturally, every single person in the organization
- 26:00And we're talking tens of thousands of people in a heartbeat.
- 26:04They will take a call with you.
- 26:05They will.
- 26:06They'll figure out how can I support you?
- 26:07What can I do?
- 26:08And it's something that I've been very, very appreciative of because it's very hard to get that sort of thing with a larger organization.
- 26:16And so it's clearly in the DNA and the fiber at local wisdom.
- 26:20But it is a unique feature of working uh at a larger corporation like Gallagher, which I haven't really seen as much in other larger corporate structures.
- 26:29So
- 26:30Just to close off, Jen, thank you so, so much for joining us and being so open about your experience.
- 26:36It's never easy.
- 26:38And I just wanted to share my appreciation and welcome you to Local Wisdom there.
- 26:44And I wish you all the best.
- 26:46Thank you.
- 26:48Yeah, thank you all too.
- 26:49uh See, like, for just as I close out for everybody, like, just want everybody to know that like, uh Jen and Bree are not coming to Local Wisdom from small companies, they're
- 26:59coming from really big companies.
- 27:01And uh I've worked, you know, as a consultant, right, worked with a lot of companies, oh just like Chris and Gallagher, good employee experience and, you know, human centric uh
- 27:14environments, I have seen them
- 27:16created at large organizations.
- 27:18So it's not like the size of the organization that really kind of deems it or anything like that.
- 27:24So it is doable in both sides, small and large, because I've seen toxic and bad environments in both sides of organizations as well.
- 27:31So once you're all think about that and just carry on and try to uplift that experience.
- 27:37So again, thank you, Bree and Jen for saying those great words.
- 27:41And uh Chris, thank you for joining us here.
- 27:43And thank you for our listeners to tuning into this week's Between the Seasons.
- 27:47uh We're here at Why Does It Feel So Wrong to be Human at Work and asking that question over and over again until we could pick it all apart and then make it right.
- 27:57So thank you all.
- 27:59Yep.
- 27:59Join us again next week.
- 28:00Of course, we're to have another short and honest conversation about the human side of work.
- 28:04And don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
- 28:08Be well everybody.