Fintech Chatter: Insights From Fintech Leaders
Fintech Chatter Podcast has been leading conversations with Fintech founders since 2019!
Join the Fintech Chatter Podcast, where we dive into the world of fintech with industry leaders and innovators.
Brought to you by Tier One People, Australia's leading executive search and recruitment firm for fintech ventures.
Each episode features an exclusive interview with a Fintech leader, uncovering their secrets to success and the lessons learned along the way. Fintech Chatter has become the archive for anyone serious about launching and building a successful Fintech company.
Whether you're a fintech founder, professional, investor, or enthusiast, gain valuable insights from expert interviews and discussions on raising capital, hiring, international expansion, innovation and technology.
Tune in to stay ahead of the trends in the rapidly-evolving fintech landscape.
Dexter also shares his expertise on careers, leadership and hiring all through a Fintech lens.
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Fintech Chatter: Insights From Fintech Leaders
Decoding Remote Work Productivity and Performance Management with Mark Lewis
In this episode of Fintech Chatter I'm joined by ex-Fintech founder now HR tech founder Mark Lewis, CEO and Co-Founder of Crewmojo.
As we navigate the choppy waters of remote work and productivity, Mark offers valuable insights. We debate the challenge of managing remote workers, the shift from daily face-to-face interactions to asynchronous communication, and the importance of carving out a clear divide between work and home life.
We also ponder the role of leadership in setting clear expectations and helping to grow their teams, the disconnect between high and low performers, and even the potential of a four-day work week.
Mark and I explore the evolution of performance management within hybrid work models, and how to build a mutually beneficial relationship in your organisation. We dissect the power dynamics between employers and employees, and discuss how to get work done effectively as if there was no hierarchy.
Looking at the design of a flexible work policy, we emphasise the importance of aligning individuals, teams, customers, and company, and how to negotiate in a way that benefits all parties. Join us on this insightful journey, where we rethink traditional work norms and discover new paths to productivity and satisfaction.
About Mark Lewis
Mark is a people focused entrepreneur with a passion and curiosity for discovering new approaches to traditional ways. He likes a good challenge and has a need to continually improve himself but he really gets his kicks when he sees the team around him truly succeeding.
That's why Mark started Crewmojo, Performance development for the modern workforce. The Crewmojo platform helps leaders engage and motivate employees with a real-time continuous approach to employee performance.
Previously a co-founder of IP Payments which rapidly became the go-to organisation for complex corporate payment solutions. In 2015 IP Payments was successfully acquired by Bambora Group, an entity of Nordic Capital.
To find out more about Crewmojo go to: https://www.crewmojo.com/
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Connect on Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3DsCJBp
Welcome to Fintech Chatter, presented by Tier 1 People leaders in Fintech Executive Search. Follow us on your favourite podcast player or Fintech Chatter TV on YouTube. Welcome to let's Chat, a new season of Fintech Chatter, where I chat to a special guest about your burning topics. I'm your host, dexter Cousins. Today's guest is going to help me unpack the hottest topic I've had over the past three years. It's a topic every leader wants to discuss and a topic where private discussions are very different to the public communication, and that topic is work from home and productivity.
Speaker 1:Joining me as today's expert on the subject is Mark Lewis from CrewMojo. Mark is a people-focused entrepreneur with a passion and curiosity for discovering new approaches to traditional ways. One of the things that I love about Mark is that he says the corporate world has been focused on process efficiency for the last 50 years and now, in a talent economy, we now have to focus on the biggest impact of all developing our people. Currently CEO at CrewMojo, he's on a mission to help organisations make employee experience their competitive advantage. Mark is also an OG Fintech founder and was previously co-founder and CEO of IP Payments, australia's leading payment gateway. That was acquired by Private Equity in 2015.
Speaker 1:Mark, welcome to the show. Hey, dexter, thank you for having me on. Great to have you with us. I'm really looking forward to this conversation and I think, with the context that you have, not only with the clients that you work with through CrewMojo, but your previous experience as a Fintech founder, I couldn't think of anybody better to discuss this topic. But, mate, I've spoken off. How about you introduce yourself and CrewMojo to our listeners?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, thanks, dexter. So CrewMojo, we help organisations to make employee experience their competitive advantage. And what does that mean when you think the people around the world are really recalibrated on what a great place to work looks like over the last few years? Will I feel welcome? Has my manager recognised my achievements? Has my team got my back? Am I growing my skills? Do I feel like the team around me are trying to lift me up and make me successful? Will we help organisations to make that promise of an exceptional employee experience a reality? And it all starts with a very personalised approach, whether it's personalised at the company or right the way down to specific roles and individuals, and so, in terms of your kind of customers and clients typically, what types of organisations do you help so?
Speaker 2:we help a very wide range of industries. So we've got not-for-profits companies like organisations like Children's Starlight Foundation. We have government organisations like State and Federal, so Vic Health. We have big corporate organisations like Australia Australian Radio Network the whole variety. But the string that really ties all of these organisations together is they're very much focused on that employee experience and how they bring that to life in their own unique way.
Speaker 2:And so how does the platform work, mark?
Speaker 2:What we do is we first of all understand what our organisations are looking to achieve in terms of aligning their culture, their values, to the way that their people work, and then we create these experiences which can be automatically triggered to put people into a particular process flow.
Speaker 2:So, for example, if you're a new starter, the system will recognise our Dexter's just started with us. Let's put Dexter into a six-month flow where he's going to have a set of objectives to meet at, say, the first 30 days, and those objectives could be things like making connection with the team, making a contribution at 60 days. And we organise one-on-one meetings between yourself and your manager. We help you to get feedback from team members as to how you're progressing and we also survey you to understand if the onboarding experience is meeting the expectations that were set at the beginning of the process. Then it starts to flow into things like the more regular flows of work, such as setting goals with your manager, understanding what your team goals are, how you contribute to those and then ensuring that you have frequent coaching one-on-ones and again seeking your feedback. Have you had a good quality coaching conversation with your manager over the last 90 days and being able to then create that level of accountability around that particular process?
Speaker 1:Now, one of the things that I really loved about when we first met, which I think we were both starting our businesses around about the same time 2016,. We caught up in those early days and you talked about performance reviews in real time and feedback in real time. It's one of the things that we've got within our process of hiring and searching is as well. You get that feedback in real time. It really helps you to very quickly overcome problems and challenges, rather than wait until the end of a process, three months in, and you find out can everything's gone wrong. So how does this kind of real time I guess kind of feedback loop work within Crew Mojo, and what kind of feedback have you had from customers as to how effective it is?
Speaker 2:It's what has completely reimagined the performance process from this clunky once a year annual process, which is inherently biased and unfair, and it's totally changed that into a much more reflective process of someone's performance. And that is by capturing these small moments of feedback throughout the year and giving people an opportunity to course correct so that they don't feel like hang on a minute. You're giving me some feedback at the end of the year on something that I did nine months ago and it's too late for me to do anything about it. Instead, you're giving people an opportunity to course correct or to understand what they're doing well so they can do more of what they're doing well and build on those things. And capturing that in a centralized area so that when it does come time to perform that review, it's a much lighter task for managers to do, because they know all of the data to support a much more fair and accurate process and, at the same time, it's bringing together information that's been collected throughout that entire period.
Speaker 1:Now one of the questions that I've got for you is how did you get on this path of building a platform around performance and development, having just successfully exited a payments business? They kind of seem very different types of businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a really. It sounds different, but it's a remarkably simple story and that is that in our payments business, we had a tremendous culture and we've thrown away a lot of the traditional processes around management and we wanted to build this really engaged team and ultimately that was built on the foundation of effectively treating people like adults, removing a lot of the policy, and we managed to outperform and outpunch a lot of organizations in the FinTech space back then that were significantly more resource than us in terms of people, in terms of funds. We won literally nine out of 10 of the major corporate PCI deals that were around back in whatever it was 2008. And that was 100% a result of the team that we had and this culture and being able to take accountability, having the freedom to experiment with, achieving creative answers to brand new challenges that were being faced. It was like trying to put this strict PCI compliance over really old legacy systems that had been around processing payments and hadn't been touched for a long time as they were being brought into an online world.
Speaker 2:When we sold the business to private equity in 2015, one of the things was you can't go into payments for a couple of years. As a ex-founder from that organization with my current co-founders in CrewMojo. We got together and said, well, what do we want to do next? We're not allowed to be in payments. So we really enjoyed the culture that we'd managed to create and to build and nurture in IP payments and we could see this amazing alignment between individuals, the team, the customers, the company and recognized. If we could help others to achieve this, then it would be quite an achievement. And that's when we set about founding CrewMojo and bringing the platform to life that we have today.
Speaker 1:So in that intro I mentioned, elaine, which I think you know, a quote from you which is actually really quite, I think, kind of dear to me and resonates with me a lot, and that is where you've talked about. You know, the corporate world has been focused on process efficiency for the last 50 years and it really kind of ties in with what I've been trying to get across to the whole fintech industry, not just here in Oz but globally, is that you know people and human resources within every business where we've seen zero innovation. You know, if you look at things like resumes, you know, invented by Leonardo da Vinci in 1482, I think right, like still the main way in which we assess somebody for a job application. You know job ads and job platforms. I mean, they're literally just a digital version of classified ads, right? So kind of you know all of the things that CrewMojo is doing and that they're kind of approach.
Speaker 1:That you've got is something that I think is. You know, I wish, I just wish that every business would kind of take on board and take a heart. What have you kind of seen, you know, as a success? You know, over this last six, seven years mark of the platform and some of the kind of impacts that it's had, particularly as we've moved through this completely different environment. For a lot of the businesses you talked about, you know government agencies etc. Going to remote work I would imagine would have been an absolute, you know, kind of culture shock to the business.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean, there's been a huge swing and I think initially, when we look back to when we started in 2015, 2016 time, it was just at the point where major organisations like Deloitte, adobe, general Electric were literally throwing the entire performance review out and saying, okay, this is actually, in their view, is doing more harm than good. And what we've seen is there's that initial trend, which I believe was an overcorrection, because then what happened is performance decisions started being made on a much more ad hoc base. But what we've seen now is the pendulum has kind of swung back and we're in this much more middle ground, which is where employees are being engaged on a much more frequent basis. It's much more continuous, as we talked about earlier. But what we've seen is this is a very different way of managing compared to the traditional performance process, which had all the power sitting with a manager to do a particular rating.
Speaker 2:And when we realise that jobs and work has changed so much from when the initial performance assessment was built, when you think now it's no longer about a manager having come up through the role of doing each of those jobs so that they know exactly how things work, as in a factory floor where you can say this is how I assembled it. Now I know how it's done. This is why I'm a manager, and now I'm going to direct you how to do that Instead. Now a manager's role is much more about people enablement. They typically don't know anywhere near as much as their individual team members on their respective areas, so the manager's role is now to be taking a much more coaching style interaction where they're saying what are the blocks that are in your way that are stopping you from achieving the things that you need to do? How can I enable you, what resources can I bring so that you're as successful as you can be? So it's really kind of flipped that role from the directive manager on his head to being much more coach and enabler.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one of the kind of elephants in the room about and we'll talk a little bit more about working from home and productivity but one of the elephants in the room has been that managers, leaders really haven't been given any training and development on how to manage remote teams, how to manage a kind of dispersed workforce. Have you seen that kind of reflected as well in some of the feedback and some of the candidate data that you've seen from the platform?
Speaker 2:Well, actually, we even see a significant challenge in businesses. Managers are often not taught how to manage full stop or how to lead full stop. They literally were good as an individual contributor. They've been promoted as a result of that into a leadership role, and then often is the case, they don't get equipped with the skills as to how to manage, and this is a completely different set of skills than those individual contributions. Layer on top of that, putting them into a remote environment, whether they're going to manage a team remotely.
Speaker 2:It's really compounding that and it's quite an unfair situation that managers are actually being left with trying to work this out on their own. Some of the key routines that a manager can bring in that regard is to shift from this more daily conversation which they would normally have in the office, where they're coming in and just catching up on what's going on. Instead, it needs to shift to this much more asynchronous approach which is really around agreeing what the outcomes are that their team members are going to be working towards on the next maybe a week or maximum two weeks, and then letting them ensuring they've got what they need to be successful in those areas and then catching up at the end of that period and saying how did you go with these particular objectives or outcomes that you were working towards? Did you manage to get them done? So it's shifting a number of ways, but ultimately you're right. We need to be providing more support rather than just expecting managers to find the answers themselves.
Speaker 1:So we talked at the beginning of the show and one of the reasons why I brought your arm was around context and relevance.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that I found really surprising, mark, is that all the things that you talked about in the platform and what you learned at IP payments around that process and the different behaviors and attitudes and skills that are required in order to be productive within a startup environment or a smaller business, you think would lend itself really well to startups being able to navigate this last three years and be even more productive working from home, and those things shouldn't really have had the impact.
Speaker 1:Certainly that I'm hearing and seeing that it's hard To the point that we've got some of our most successful clients. They actually have everybody's in the office five days a week, even in the office on weekends as well. What do you think that potentially might be down to and why do you think, kind of even those businesses that you would expect should be able to be more productive working in this way, perhaps a struggling as you've mentioned that, as we've talked, the context of the individual organization is absolutely critical, and when we're talking about what does that look like, the context is the type of work that's being undertaken.
Speaker 2:It's the stage that the organization is at. Let's just look at some examples. So if we're an early stage organization and we haven't yet established ways of working or playbooks for sales or playbooks for marketing, we're very much in this create mode. We have very little which is an operational flow, and even when we do have things that we think of an operational flow, often they no longer work when they get to a certain stage. So it goes back to create mode. It's constantly reinventing these processes.
Speaker 2:Now, that type of creating style work requires a significant amount of collaboration, because you've got different stakeholders in the business coming together to come up with a new way of working, a new solution to this problem. And you cannot beat having collaboration in person to be able to get around a whiteboard or to be able to come together and discuss it. Even it's often the case that you might go for a walk at lunchtime and then, all of a sudden, the answers start to pop into your mind. It's like I have some of my best thoughts in the shower in the morning. So it's these sort of in-person coming together that helps significantly when you're grappling with particularly challenging problems. So I can imagine that in the context of what you were describing there, where you're saying it's the early stage. Conversely, the work from home is going to work really well.
Speaker 2:If you've got people which are feeling very engaged in the business they're understanding exactly what they need to get done from their own contribution perspective, they have total clarity of what that is and it is aligned with what the organization is trying to achieve, then it absolutely makes sense that they can be working from home and achieving that. In fact, they're probably likely to be more productive in that regard because they then don't have the distractions of people around them. It really comes down to this nuance of the type of work, the stage and where they're at.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was actually in the office yesterday and it really struck me how more productive I am in that environment than I am working from my home office. It's just the change in the environment and actually being taken out of that. Whereas I'm at home, I can hear the washing machine going and I'm like, oh, it's a nice drying day at best. You go to get a coffee and you're like, oh, what are the kids going to have for dinner? There's just so many these micro distractions whereas I'm in the office and I find people working around me way less distracting than the mountain of tasks and things that I have to do in the home environment. And having that kind of separation.
Speaker 1:Have you seen as there being any data around? You know you talk before around the engagement is the productivity. That and this is kind of something that I think I've recognized over this last three years the biggest debate or issue that I think we've got around this whole kind of working from home and hybrid model is that what an individual employee describes as productivity isn't necessarily translating through the productivity for the business, and what I mean by that is that, hey, I'm saving two hours traveling a day and I'm getting my work done, but yet the business is struggling and is not being profitable and there's a lot of other challenges. Are you seeing something similar?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a number of angles on that. The first one if it was as wildly successful and productive as some people would say, then businesses would have no problem in saying look at this, we're 20% up on where we expect it to be. Let's just keep this working from home. They're going to stick with that, oh mate.
Speaker 1:I remember right now weren't for recruitment firms. If you were making money, they didn't care where you were right, and I've been able to work from home since the mid 90s. But if you're not, you're expected to be in that office and make calls at 4pm on a Friday, even if everybody else has gone home, and I think that's just the harsh reality of commercialism, Exactly.
Speaker 2:And I think also we've got to look at the how do you measure productivity? We can easily measure productivity from a business perspective when it's producing widgets, but when you're talking about knowledge based work, that's really hard. It's incredibly difficult to come up with an accurate response to that. So the key challenge is when we're asking a lot of the time, the data asking individuals are you more productive at home? What lens are they bringing to that? It could be a personal lens where they say, yeah, I'm absolutely more productive because I can get to the weekend and have an entire set of time available, because I've managed to do these nuanced things. And sure, maybe that's absolutely okay if you've managed to achieve all of your outcomes at work as well. But it's really looking at this balance of what is productivity, how's it measured? And asking to flip it and say, well, is the team overall more productive? And starting to look at those other lenses on what productivity means and are people achieving things as fast and as quickly as they could if they're in this environment versus that environment?
Speaker 1:Now, one of the things that I've always said with startups is, when it comes to hiring and talent and performance, you have to think more along the lines of an elite sports team rather than a corporate business or business. And Ed, very much is around. How do you bring in those elements of performance? And if one person in the team isn't performing, the whole team suffers and the whole business suffers and there's really kind of not the bandwidth to carry people in that environment.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I'm starting to hear more and more of is I think there's been two kind of factors here. One is that when we were in the midst of lockdown, a lot of businesses decided that I think quite rightly it wasn't the right time to be kind of performance, managing employees and really kind of turning the thumb screws on their people. The other is that this kind of environment now has created a kind of expectation where the bar has dropped significantly and I'm seeing now there's those high performers who really want to push on and there are those who have become accustomed to hey, look, now it's down here, right, and that's kind of these are the expectations. Are you kind of hearing similar kind of disconnect between, and kind of a gulf between the performers and the non-performers of a business.
Speaker 2:Certainly I can say that we did see a number of organisations in the lockdown process literally dropping the entire review piece out and very much focusing on the coaching and the one-on-ones and getting that up to speed.
Speaker 2:We are absolutely seeing now those reviews are back in place and we're also seeing that if and I said this is stands forever is that if you've got high performing people on a team and they're putting in the effort and there are low performing people, that high performer knows damn well that there's low performing people on the team.
Speaker 2:And if leadership isn't taking action to either put those people onto a development plan and give them fair chance to lift their game and set expectations of where they need to be, if that process isn't happening, then the high performers will actually drop their performance there's plenty of data on that because they start asking themselves well, why am I going to put in as much effort for the same amount of recognition that someone who's not performing? And eventually those high performers will steadily become disengaged and they'll move on. So it's really critical to be looking at a genuine perspective of let's lift genuinely lift people's performance by giving them an opportunity, saying hey and it doesn't have to be a big deal. It's hey, these are the expectations we're working towards, these are the standards that we're expecting, and we're articulating and making it very clear about what's expected and then working towards that and giving people the tools they need to be successful.
Speaker 1:So we're seeing businesses settling on a hybrid model. There's some variances in that. You know there might be somewhere you've got three days a week and it's fixed and everybody's in the office at the same time. Others are flexible and it's kind of very much to do around the office location and availability of seats. What are you seeing as their kind of consensus around what the optimal optimum model is for a hybrid working? Or again, is it contextual?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're very much seeing that it's contextual and it's coming down to the individual organizations. We've seen data that supports everything from one day a week through to five days a week, and it's really coming down to the individual organization. And some of the examples I would talk about is you look at the Atlassians of the world, which is kind of at the extreme. They've got work from anywhere as much time as you want. You just have to be in the office. I think it's once a quarter in their context. This works well for them because they need access. I think they grew their team by a couple of thousand in a very short space of time, so they need access to a much broader pool of people. So they need to then be incredibly competitive on what they're offering to employees, whereas a smaller company that's not growing as fast, they can choose to tip that balance a bit more the other way and say well, we're being facing some creative problems. We want to be bringing people together a bit more frequently. We're wanting to establish our culture so that as we grow and we bring more people in, we have a much more ingrained culture that we want to grow the business and that's what makes us successful, so they can then afford because they're not having to pull in so many people. They can choose to go that way. But it really is balanced. It's.
Speaker 2:In some cases I feel like I'm sounding myself. I'm against remote work. Our entire team is remote and that works really well for us. We've worked together for years. In our context, we've worked together for many years, so we have our routines very well established. We've got our weekly meetings, we've got our regular catch ups. We know when we can interrupt each other. So all of that's really nicely established and it's just a natural flow of working for us.
Speaker 1:As you pointed out before, if businesses are being productive and it really is working, there's every incentive there to continue to do it. It's still a massive debate, right, and it's like it's a really you go online right. It's really heated and, you see, I can only describe as like people who really just click bait and who are kind of all on the side of any business that doesn't offer remote work as a dinosaur and all this stuff and it's kind of you know everybody's like yeah, right on, right on, but I'm not saying a single chief, exec or leader you know post and going yeah, right on, that's the way to go. What do you see is kind of the you know the kind of root of this kind of argument and all the emotion behind it as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's. Again, it's multi-pronged and, like you look right now, cost of living is going up. This is a significant problem for many and if you start trying to take away something that someone's been given, like this work from home ability, and all of a sudden that's going to start adding on a hundred and something dollars a day for childcare, cost of commuting, it's whether we like it or not. It is bringing in personal circumstances and it's actually clouding a very objective, what could be a very objective discussion.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's helpful to be calling organizations dinosaurs or or archaic or whatever it happens to be. Equally, I don't think it's helpful to be throwing names. It's just black and white thinking or this binary thinking is not helpful and the suggestion is really to bring people together for a discussion where you're like stating the objectives from an organization perspective and from an individual perspective. It's like what are we all hoping to get out of this and bringing a more productive away again that takes into account these nuances, and it may be that a one size. Well, it's often the case that one size doesn't fit all and we might be able to have specific policies for people in certain roles or situations.
Speaker 1:Now, talking about the kind of performance management piece again, one of the things that's kind of really struck me has been, you know, that I've actually had people approach me or one of approach them about opportunities and when they found out that it's been a full, fully remote business, they've decided against pursuing it and their rationale was that, you know, from a career development perspective, I want to be spending my time around people that I can learn from and develop and you're going to be mentors and where I can kind of really develop myself as an individual. Or you kind of seeing or hearing of similar feedback where people's careers now are being limited somewhat because they're not visible.
Speaker 2:Well, certainly. I have another close friend in the recruitment space and she's got some just come out of uni children and she doesn't want her kids going into a. I say kids, they're young adults going into a fully remote environment. To begin with, because the value that she's placed on those connections and being able to learn from people around them is in. You know, it's a significant help to bringing their skills up around how to you know work with people, how to have those interpersonal connections and those communication skills which are so important.
Speaker 2:And you peel everything back and you go hang on. Just from a common sense perspective, it's if I was going into a new role and I'm remote. Sure it can be done, but is it going to be as effective? I would much rather be in an environment, even if it's for a period of time. Again, I've got a friend similar age who's just gone into a new role and it's remote, but he's very much wanting to go into the office and he's spending the first number of months getting to know people and understanding. You know, how do I fit in this environment? How do I work with these people? Who do I go to for specific challenges? So I honestly believe that you just peel back all of the layers and go from a common sense perspective. Where does this sit?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, on the leadership side, you know, what's been interesting is that I think we've seen more and more not just myself, but you know, talk to colleagues, peers in the recruitment space as well where, particularly when it's come to exact positions, anybody who's been talking about you know, working from home and working remotely in an executive role, I think, is very quickly being dismissed, you know, as a potential candidate, because the perception is, hey, this person actually get understand, you know what's actually required to get the outcomes that we're expecting this person to get. Do you think there's a kind of case again that you know people are really kind of overestimating their own abilities to be able to influence outcomes and get results working in a kind of, you know, 100% remote way?
Speaker 2:Again, I think it's incredibly challenging if you are an executive remote position, trying to establish those, that mentoring, that coaching of team members and being able to make more than a transactional connection with your team, because when you jump online you have a quick call. It's typically about the work in progress, the project oriented stuff, and it becomes harder it's not impossible, but it becomes harder to establish those more connected relationships.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the questions that I wanted to ask you, as well as a previous guest on the show but spoke about on AI.
Speaker 1:He's got a question for you. Before I ask that question, I do want to touch on AI and it's a little bit which you know, as some research had a found last week, is that chat GPT its biggest use in the workplace has been to write a resume, with, I think, 33% of people using chat GPT to write their resume at work, which is quite interesting. But what it kind of what it does touch on is, you know we're in the midst of, you know, mental health issues, burnout at work. To me, it seems really kind of a logical that we can be blaming a workplace on burnout when most of us are spending 80% of our time, if not more, at home. And I wondered if you were kind of seeing, you know, within the data that you have, you know what might be some of the reasons for people claiming to suffer from burnout and what, potentially, you know some of the red flags and the triggers kind of might be for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've seen a really interesting pattern with with working from home, and the interesting pattern is the benefits of working for home show up almost immediately in terms of people being able to be more productive on a specific task or more focused on the task that they're wanting to get done.
Speaker 2:But we're seeing the drawbacks of working from home something that happens over a longer period of time, so it's more that that feeling of isolation or disconnection and the dropping off of relationships is something that happens very incrementally over many, many days. And what we're seeing is this then people suddenly go hang on a minute. I'm feeling pretty lonely here, like I haven't had a conversation with someone. That's really meaningful, especially if it's. You know, you've got children around and things like that, which are not giving you that opportunity for an adult conversation just to get stuff off your chest and things, whereas if you've got teammates that you're going to work on, you can get a lot of that human need from that community of people and ultimately, that's what builds a more engaged, less transactional relationship. But yeah, I totally see and we have seen those patterns emerge.
Speaker 1:It's interesting that you mentioned that word community because if you look at the way in which our lives have evolved, your societies evolved over the last 50 years. You know when I grew up, the local community, the local neighborhood, you know you'd be out in the summer at 10 o'clock at night playing cricket and everybody be out, and I remember the Jubilee and we were all in the streets and, yeah, the whole, you know the whole street would get in. Everybody knew their neighbors and that's not the case anymore. Right, for a lot of communities. You know the community is shifted to work, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And I think that's one of the real benefits that I believe work can bring is when you do have this team of people which are really coming together around a particular problem, it becomes a shared challenge and that builds those bonds of people working towards that. And when you've got that wrapped with the good fundamentals of management, that people understand what their role is, what their responsibilities are, how they fit with the rest of the team, what they need to do to be successful, that's when you can just create this real sense of buzz. And when I look at what we achieved with our previous organization, with that type of culture, we still have people coming together years later which are, you know, proper, genuine friends. And if you can get that in the place at work, that's something that is absolutely going to be boring and it means that people are not concerned and worrying about things which are then taking away their mental capacity from actually bringing their best to the challenges they're facing.
Speaker 1:What you've just touched on. There is something that I've been taught about since 2010, I think, and I remember back then a lot of my clients, which were big Aussie corporates, were going down the off-shoring route and sending roles off to India. And there were two concerns that I had and I think a lot of people voiced them which was cutting off the entry kind of level for their next generations of talent, which we're now seeing to be true, because we've got the greatest talent shortage that we've got or we've ever experienced, which seems crazy, right, because we've got eight billion people on the planet highly educated, but yet we haven't been investing in the development you know, which goes back to your statement, right, which is the last 50 years. We have not been investing in the development of people. We've been investing in process and technology and I think, unfortunately, the kind of other aspect to this process fascination is exactly what you've taught about Success of an organisation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, the product and process and all of that stuff and I'm going to sound a bit like David Brent here, but it is the people, right, and it's the energy and the magic that comes when you get a group of people together, usually in a physical location where they're all unified to one mission, right, and I've had that experience of working in those types of environments as well, and 20 years later I'm still friends with most of the people.
Speaker 1:You know they were high performance teams and I think that's it's just something that's so overlooked, right and it's. You know, I kind of like to use the analogy of imagine the rolling stones, right, but they never, ever went in the studio to jam and they just did it. You know, all dialing in on Skype, right, and imagine going to that concert and you're watching four screen, giant screens of people all dialing in from their bedrooms. It's going to make this like there's just not. It's not there, right, and I think you know we talk about this thing of we want to hire rock stars. You know, I think rock stars want to perform, right, and want to perform in front of an audience, right, and they want to kind of feel that energy in that buzz. Yeah, I.
Speaker 2:It's what you're describing. There is mojo right.
Speaker 1:Everybody's got their mojo and they're really yeah, yeah yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's nothing like it. It's when the team is all in sync with each other. It's a connection. And also it's not just about passing people on the back. It's holding each other accountable, because everybody knows that that type of feedback is coming from a good intention. The focus is on the collective goal that's trying to be achieved. It's not about trying to put each other down, and everybody recognizes that and they feel better because they're becoming an improved version of themselves as part of being that team. And it's yeah. Those types of connections are what create an incredible competitive advantage over a very transactional team. Who's more about ticking that they've done the job today to a level that gets them past it's, you know it's, it's pulls apart.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just remember, you know, I'd start a new job and I was really fortunate. My career just, you know, work with like just some of the best people in the industry, everywhere worked and you'd walk in on day one and you just kind of absorb, right, and you'd hear people say things and do things and you're like shit, I got to step up like three gears just to try and keep pace with these people. Like you've got a really, you know, and that kind of level of, you know, I think, healthy competition but also you kind of peer group and peer group pressure and aspiration and all of those things. They're kind of lost digitally with us all sitting in our bedrooms together and I know there's some things that you can do to replicate that, you know.
Speaker 1:I think you know we look at kind of engineering and developers.
Speaker 1:You know they're probably, I think, best suited to working this way. And when I look at my 10 year old boy and he's like he's going to be fine working this way and leading this way, because he spends all of his time on a headset, coordinate his mates in a battle royale, in Fortnite or, you know, halo or whatever, it is right, and he's kind of developed those skills already. But most of us you know in the workplace haven't been able to, and I think that's probably why we've also seen this kind of you know disconnect where you know if you ask people that you know they never want to go into the office again, probably about 99% of developers and engineers would sit in that camp that they don't ever want to come in. But the rest of the business they're like no, no, we want to be around people, we want to actually kind of feel that buzz, it comes back to individual type of work again, like if it's a type of work that lends itself well to that environment.
Speaker 2:you still ultimately need the fundamentals so that you know where you're going and what you're working on. The point you said there is spot on as well, but earlier on about, if you're in an environment where you're seeing other people performing at this level and you can see where they're at, naturally it's going to lift your performance. But if you're in a environment of yourself and you don't have that benchmarking of people around you to see what is actually possible from a performance level, there's a danger that this apathy can set in and you just start to get into this rolling. You know modus operandi which really doesn't have that set of accountability around it by saying hang on, a minute, they're going to allow I better actually lift my game. So this is how concept about you become the level of performance that is intrinsically accepted by the people around you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and going back to the elite sports team, kind of mantra right, there were some really dodgy results in the Premier League when we went to lockdown and you didn't have the crowd there but also your teams were unable to train together. Yeah, that would have trained an isolation, right. Yeah, so you would see just some really kind of bizarre results, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's extremely powerful to come together, especially when you're trying to tackle new things, things that require innovative thought, things that require discussion, proper collaboration. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So final question for your mark, and this one comes from Sam Zeng, who's the CEO and co-founder of Curious Thing, who was a guest last week. His question is if you had to design a working from office slash home policy for a 20-person tech company, what would that be, and would it be any different to a business with 2,000 people? Great question.
Speaker 2:I would say for a 20-person company you can, first of all, don't come thinking you have to have the expectations. So I wouldn't be thinking, as the CEO, I need to design this policy and then do a grand unveiling and say, hey, everybody, here's the policy we've come up with. For a 20-person company, you can almost get everybody's input. If you feel like that's too much, go for the key people in the organisation that represent different parts Come together for a discussion on let's design and it's effectively. You're designing the experience. What's our working from home, working from office experience? And we're going to be saying the objective is we want to organise this team so that we are the most successful we can be for the organisation. These are the goals that we're looking to achieve. Now we want to be looking at what flexibility can we bring for individuals so that they can be as productive as possible in their own environment as well. Then we say what do we like best? What's working about the work from home arrangement? What's working best about working from office? What do we like, what do we dislike? And then, with those objectives in mind, we come up with a policy which might be this is where we sit from a company level perspective and we might have some dispensation for different teams where we've learnt some insights from the input from those stakeholders, and we say this is something that we're going to share with the outcomes of this workshop, we share with the entire team and we say does it have any feedback of something that's a glaring problem, that's going to cause challenges in the way that we work?
Speaker 2:Once we've taken that feedback in, we can then say, ok, here's our policy. Now, what we're going to do is, because this is new for us, we're going to test it for three months or six months and we're going to see what the results are like. Then employees have got a responsibility to be making this work as well. Because if the business is then successful and we reach the outcomes, then we go, OK, that's awesome. We can now do more of that, we can tweak it and we can say, ok, these things worked really well. But putting down the fact that this is something that's going to be revisited and the outcomes of it are going to be tested, that's where we start to say if it's not working, then we're going to have to shift it in another direction and try something else. So that might become less favourable from a flexibility perspective. If the outcomes are showing up and the results are coming through, then why wouldn't we go to even more exciting things like a four day work week?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to go there because we'll be on for another hour on the four day work week. And if that was to scale to 2,000 people other than using CrewMojo platform to help you do that, of course, what would you suggest would be the best way to kind of alter or review that policy as you start to scale the business?
Speaker 2:Well, from a 2,000 person perspective, we've actually seen this type of process work right the way up to literally over 15,000 people, and the process is then you're going to key stakeholders of the organisation.
Speaker 2:My recommendation there is you want to be looking at champions of the business, so people that represent the values that the organisation seeks. So when you're bringing in that input, obviously you don't want to be bringing in at the point where people have their own vested interests and they're just seeking a personal outcome. What you're wanting is to seek representation from different parts of the business, whether those individuals have a very strong alignment with the values of the organisation. And then they're going to be bringing a lens of the policy that we come up with is going to be balancing what we want for employee flexibility, but at the same time as making sure we get the results that the organisation needs. And again, I would go through that sharing process and making it consultative so that people are brought on that journey and that it's something that gets reviewed, because these things are new and we can't be expected to have the answers. We only will find out after we've tested and pulled it in.
Speaker 1:One of the cool kind of metaphors that I've heard around that process that you've talked about is to almost do it with the premise that we're going to colonise Mars and we're going to set up a division of the organisation on Mars. Who are those champions that you said that you want to be on that mission? And then, what are the things that we've done really well that we think we can do and apply to Mars? But what are the things that, hey, we're getting the chance to start again? What do we do differently? What's going to work for that environment? And I think the reality is the environment that we're in now around capital and economy and all of those things.
Speaker 1:It's very different to the environment that we were in in 2020 when we started to work remotely, and I think this is kind of again one of the challenges that we've got is the disconnect is look, we're running out of capital. It's mission critical. We need everybody in the trenches together and people still in the mindset that, hey, the government's paying us for us all to work from home. There's no pressure. It's kind of that whole environment's changed now, which I think everybody not just leaders, but employees as well kind of have to all be on this journey together, as you pointed out. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And really my way, or my lens that I bring to this, is ultimately trying to get stuff done as if there was no hierarchy there, so let's say there was no power between the two. Basically, you've got an employer and a plea that are coming together. You're trying to negotiate something there which is of mutual benefit to both parties, and I think one of the most powerful things is when there is power that exists, by not wielding that power in a dictatorial way, yields that strength, and you would hope that, because it certainly has gone from being a talent shortage, where employees held all the power, to now it's swinging back around, and now this is an opportunity, in my views, to bring that true alignment where it can be mutually beneficial for both.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, Mark, you have just absolutely nailed. What I've been saying has been not just the issue of this market, but 2007,. 2008 was the same, 99, 2000,. It was the same as well, and we're not learning from that that. It's one big swing and dick and then it swings the other way and we're not actually working as a mutually beneficial relationship. It's a dictatorial relationship which is really toxic for culture. It cannot build high performance culture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it can go from. It's not just employer doing it, it can be the employee saying hey, this is what I'm demanding, I need this, I want this extra amount and I want less days, or whatever it happens to be. It can be. And as soon as you get that, it builds this distaste between both parties and a lack of trust and things come down. So this really is.
Speaker 1:We've both built businesses right and we know that negotiating by bending somebody over a barrel is not a way to build customers and a business and loyalty and have a thriving business.
Speaker 2:And one other thing I'd add to that is even having that employee experience done right when you're in the FinTech space, especially where you've got insurance products or super annuation products or banking products, they are all from a customer end customer perspective, they are a commodity and the real way to differentiate is how those products are delivered. So that's the customer experience, and the only way that you can really make a great customer experience is by having a good employee experience, because that's how they bring the product to market, that's how you bring it to life and they're the frontline for building an experience that's going to win over a commodity product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and look, fundamentally, it is that very premise that I've put out to founders to say hey, look, why do you treat customer acquisition and product development very differently to the way that you look to hire people? As you pointed out, when they go to hire people, it's like you're making people go through all these hurdles and it's like you should be grateful that we're giving you the opportunity to come and waste 10 hours of your life interviewing for a job that we're not going to give you. That is not a customer experience. They're trying to fix the very thing right. They're trying to fix from a banking customer perspective or an insurance customer perspective. They then emulate that very process and wanting people to join their business, going through that very same process and, as you said, it's kind of a rethink of why are we doing this. It just does not make any sense, right? You think of it from a first principles perspective.
Speaker 1:None of the performance review and one of the kind of things that I love about your business and the approach that you've got is it mirrors exactly the approach that we've got around hiring, which is forget job descriptions. We call them opportunity descriptions. What is that person going to be doing in their first 18 months to three years of employment. What does that journey look like? And if they do those things, what kind of rewards can they expect and what tools are you going to give them to be successful in delivering that? And that opportunity description becomes the basis for performance reviews, right? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's a common mistake. It may be a good starting point, but then you realise the experience can be enhanced significantly by stepping people through, so they don't have to have the cognitive load of wondering what am I going to do next? It's just literally laid out as this experience so they can focus their efforts on the job at hand rather than worrying about these external processes.
Speaker 1:Mark, it's been fantastic to chat with you. Thanks for sharing all of your IP and insights with our listeners. I'm sure there'll be quite a few there wanting to find out more about CrewMojo as a platform and a potential solution for them. What's the best way to find out more and what's the best way for them to get in contact with you?
Speaker 2:So crewmojocom is our website. That's the best place they can go to find out more and reach us, and I'm reasonably active on LinkedIn and very open to receiving connections and inquires and very much open to just a discussion. I'm really passionate about this topic and helping people to achieve a great employee experience is something that I would be more than happy to discuss.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. And one more question Do you still have the suit?
Speaker 2:Yes, we've still got the smarty suit. We only break it out for conferences. These days, it's our Mojo suit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's the power of branding. I first saw you wear that suit, I think in 2017, and it's stuck with me ever since.
Speaker 2:We might have had a couple more since then, a couple of new ones. They'd probably be a bit smelly otherwise.
Speaker 1:Well, mark. Thanks very much for coming on. Thank you very much for tuning in. As always, you can connect with me, dexter Cousins, on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you're looking to hire tier one people, you can reach out to me on those platforms or check out tieronepeoplecom forward slash contact. Alternatively, if you are on the market looking for a job, make sure to follow me on LinkedIn, where each day, I'll be posting job hunting tips and you'll also see us mention any opportunities that we're working on. Until the next episode, keep safe. Fintech chatter is produced by tier one people leaders in fintech executive search. We'll find world-class leadership talent to build world-class fintech ventures, and you can find us at tieronepeoplecom.
