Nick Whiting: Turning employee experience into a creative craft

Pauline Bertry 0:13

Hi Nick, welcome to the den, how are you?

Nick 0:16

I'm good Pauline, how are you? All good?

Pauline Bertry 0:18

I'm good. I'm good. Thank you so much for finding time. I'm super excited for the upcoming conversation.

Nick 0:24

Me too, me too. Thanks for having me.

Pauline Bertry 0:27

Thank you so much. Look, I think by now you know the deal. I start those conversations by asking people to tell me their stories. I particularly enjoy having, asking this question to people I've worked with in the past, because I feel like when we meet in the professional context, we don't always ask this question straight away. And it's super interesting then to discover people's stories. three, five years after you worked with them. So what's your story?

Nick 0:59

Well, a long story. I'm very, very old man these days. I got into design very early, actually. It's a bit of a longer story, but my dad was actually one of John Ive's teachers, Johnny Ive from Apple. He taught him

Pauline Bertry 1:16

Wow.

Nick 1:17

design and technology. So even from a young age, we'd got that work that he'd done at home in these very nice presented marker pen renderings and things in these, in these, presentation books. And I remember thinking, wow, this is great stuff. this is what I want to do. So by the time I got to university age, there wasn't, there wasn't product design. There wasn't, any of this stuff around. So basically it was a graphics back in those days.

Pauline Bertry 1:46

Mmm.

Nick 1:47

So I did a graphic design degree. I found the sort of placement of type on a page quite a dull thing to do, to be perfectly honest. But I enjoyed the idea of moving that type around on the page. So I got into motion graphics. I worked for ITV. And I spent a long time actually in TV news. then that was a real baptism of fire because, know, if you're on air at a certain time, you have got a very clear time window of, know, you've got to create something in two hours, 30 minutes, whatever. And I think doing that for a long time, you get so quick at thinking of ideas and whether that's an analogy to tell a story or a visual way of explaining something. So that was a really good grounding. And then I took that to the next level with Bloomberg. I built the kind of European team out there, which looking back was, think, a great experience in a multidisciplinary team. had designers, we had motion people, we had developers. And I think that started to link into product and ideas around, okay, how could we actually make this into a tool? And I ended up working at a bank in Copenhagen actually, where it was. How can I put it? An interesting environment to say the least, but it allowed me to get into, okay, how do people think about using a particular product or service or tool, which was good timing in terms of how this whole design thinking wheel turned. And then completely out of the blue, McKinsey called, we're doing this new thing. Would you like to go to, I think it was Singapore was the first conversation.

Pauline Bertry 3:30

really? Okay, wow.

Nick 3:33

that was interesting and bit by bit it then moved to somewhere else and somewhere else and in the end it was Berlin or London. We chose Berlin and I hadn't really realized how little I knew about McKinsey when I joined McKinsey. I didn't know about the operating model, I didn't know about utilization, I didn't know about, So it was like hitting a treadmill at 150 miles an hour. was, it was mad.

Pauline Bertry 4:02

can relate to that.

Nick 4:06

and you, you, you go in there with a certain type of experience. mine was all within broadcast and digital. So I thought my natural home would be in TMT doing things around, streaming services. And it was like, No, not at all. And I found myself working on a project in a manufacturing plant in Italy. And in the car on the way there, I'm thinking, I know nothing about this. What am I doing here? I'm going to be rumbled within 10 minutes of arrival because they're going to say this guy knows nothing. And yet when I got there, something really clicked and I thought, wow. Number one, can move the client forward really quickly because it was such low digitization and the team were nice and the project went well. And bit by bit, I just found myself working in this heavy industry, chemical production, food production, manufacturing. And yeah, I just found a really cool niche there where, for almost eight years, that's pretty much what I did.

Pauline Bertry 5:12

Yeah, this is so true because that's exactly how I always knew you. You were like the heavy industry guy. I didn't

Nick 5:19

Yes.

Pauline Bertry 5:20

know you had this past experience in the telco. And what were the points that made you feel like, that's my new home?

Nick 5:37

Yeah. I think these things always boil down to people at the end of the day, especially for me. mean, at McKinsey, you're always surrounded with an A team, right? There's never a

Pauline Bertry 5:47

Yeah.

Nick 5:48

kind of B and C team. So the people are always very, very smart, but that doesn't always come. I'm being, careful with my words here, but that doesn't always come with high levels of EQ. It doesn't often come, with a people oriented mindset. So for me, I always worked with teams where they valued what I did. I valued what they did and we collaborated really, really well. And I think once you get that kind of cadence, once you get that kind of shorthand, the projects, don't run themselves in it by any means, but you you've got through all that you foundation stage to the point where you can be useful from that kind of day one. And,

Pauline Bertry 6:36

Yeah.

Nick 6:37

as the clients got savvier, we did more stuff, so we started to do IOT stuff, we started to do, machine learning and those kinds of things. And I was lucky to work with set of partners and senior partners who valued that contribution, And also let me explore things. So one partner in particular, you when I started to talk about employee experience, instead of saying, great, but not for us.

Pauline Bertry 7:06

Thank you but no thank you.

Nick 7:08

He was much more of the opinion of let's try this out, and again, having the flexibility to experiment, of course within boundaries, but try different things out and see how they went. That was a really great experience for me in terms of not only the projects but my development as well.

Pauline Bertry 7:31

And I also know that there is a continuation to your story after Mackenzie, which is even more beautiful and exciting. So I would love to hear the Remedy Studios part, episode of the season.

Nick 7:46

Yeah. So we've been going for, a little bit over a year now. But a friend and I started to talk about, our different lines. He was in the gaming industry and it seemed that we've got this kind of Venn diagram that, the more we talk, the more the kind of central bit got bigger and bigger. We started to think about how we could apply things like gamification across

Pauline Bertry 8:13

Mmm.

Nick 8:14

different industries. That doesn't mean you turn everything into a game or whatever, but it's

Pauline Bertry 8:19

Yeah.

Nick 8:19

how can you use the mechanics of something like that in things like employee experience, performance management. So we thought we, we'll, we'll give this a go. And, we, we are learning very fast about, what what's out there, what the market needs, where our skills can fit. So, we've done a lot of trial and error. We've done a lot of, we think this is going to work only to meet a wall of resistance. And that doesn't mean you have to abandon the idea. It's sometimes just talking about something in a completely different way. So it's been a real learning curve, on multiple fronts for us.

Pauline Bertry 9:04

Yeah. And I'm also curious, mean, I generally tend to get into this part of the conversation a bit later in the podcast, but you started roughly a year ago, if I'm not mistaken. So how are you thinking about the service and the knowledge industry? Because as an agency, are part of the... service or knowledge industry, I don't have a better word to describe it, with all the things that are happening with AI. So what was your thinking when you were starting and how do you see it now?

Nick 9:47

Yeah. Interesting. mean, what, what we've not tried to do is say, Hey, we can come in and fix your AI. we don't try and say to organizations, know, we, we're, we're a, we're a one product, consultancy. and I think that's actually really helped us because we found out, and obviously this was something that we, we, we did a lot of at McKinsey, but We found out that often either the problem isn't what the organization thinks, or

Pauline Bertry 10:21

Mm.

Nick 10:21

there's much more to the problem that needs to be explored. And, let me give you an example. So we were working with a manufacturing client and they didn't want to talk about employee experience at all. that was a almost allergic term to them. And what they did want to do was. increase engagement on the shop floor for their operators. They wanted to do better shift handovers between one shift and another. They wanted the employees to be engaged with the dashboards that sat above the production lines and, and, know, use that to guide production.

Pauline Bertry 11:01

Which is the employer experience.

Nick 11:03

Exactly. So that's what I meant by we have to sometimes talk about things in a different way. Yes, there was a massive part of a better production line there in that conversation, but there was a huge element of employee experience in how that was actually going to work and how that was going to operate. So, it's digging into what the problem is. However, the client wants to talk about that problem is completely fine.

Pauline Bertry 11:31

Hmm?

Nick 11:33

but there's usually then something in our toolkit which we can then bring to the surface, whether it's EX or whether it's CX or whether it's gamification, whatever it is, to make that fly. We just it's a bit of a Jedi mind trick sometimes of, how you get that to land with an organization. Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 11:52

Yeah. Did you stay in heavy industries for remedy? Is this your primary focus?

Nick 11:58

Well, we've done lots and lots of different things. And again, we set out with the purpose. And I know that this sounds almost like a vague mission, but we set out to do work that we found interesting and see where clients were in terms of their maturity, in terms of the kind of things that they wanted to do. And that's actually been just really interesting for us, not only because we've We're not bored of doing one thing. but it's allowed us to get in there and get a relationship with clients that's then said, can you help us with this other thing? Because, we've, we've, we've got a nice working relationship with you now. And so we battled a long time when we started off, do we go down one path and do it really, T shaped

Pauline Bertry 12:49

Mm-hmm.

Nick 12:49

or do we stay as a a creative led consultancy. And we've gone with the latter and we've, we've found that the work has been more interesting. The breadth of the, the, of the work has been more fascinating and challenging, but I think we've definitely got this kind of land and expand mindset of if we can go in and work with a company on one thing, the chances are that we'll be able to. find out more, build a relationship and then explore more challenges that they have as an organization. That said, we've never been averse to something surfacing as we go that might be, end up in a product. So for example, we're doing a lot of work in strategy activation at the moment. And again,

Pauline Bertry 13:36

Mm-hmm.

Nick 13:37

don't, don't call it EX, but it's essentially what it is, right? How do you make a strategy fly with it, with an organization? And that might end up being some sort of tracker or dashboard that we develop over time. But we've not consciously set out to do that.

Pauline Bertry 13:57

Hmm. I see. how... now I will go into one of my favorite topics when it comes to creative things and building them. So as someone with a McKinsey background, I assume you got to touch to a lot of different things. You got to experience a lot of different industries, different functions, et cetera. Most of the people on the market don't always have this chance and opportunity. So with the breadth of offering and services and with the purpose that you are putting out in the world, how are you thinking about building a team for Remedy?

Nick 14:46

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. think we've evolved as remedy to suit to, to, to, that end as well ourselves. So for example, we've now brought in somebody that's a complete AI expert and we brought somebody in that's a complete brand expert because we feel that brand and strategy and AI should be one conversation as opposed to three different conversations in three different rooms. So as a senior leadership team of Remedy, we're trying to work out how we can be not the broadest offer, but be able to bring different flavors into the mix in terms of the team that that then gets executed by. We, we pride ourselves on this incredible network of people. And we know people, for example, that are really excellent at delivering a design system, for example. And we know people that are incredible at 3d motion graphics, at the other end of the spectrum. Now plainly, we, couldn't have all those different skillsets under one roof and, and, exist for very long financially.

Pauline Bertry 15:59

Yeah.

Nick 16:00

We tend to pull people in as, as, as, and when the project requires. So for example, we've been doing a lot of video work for clients, whether that's activation or product explainers or whatever. And, that's, that's, that's come out of the other work we've done. It's a bit of a service that we offer instead of a core thing. So again, we can draw on this incredible range of people to say, look, can you help us construct this video? Can you help us tell the story? and we find that serves the client better than, us having massive overheads. that obviously then get reflected in, in, in pricing. So. I don't know whether I've answered that question very well, but in terms of building the team, we feel we're better placed and the clients are better served. A bit like a McKinsey model in the sense that you would bring in the right ninja team for that project.

Pauline Bertry 16:59

Hmm

Nick 17:02

As opposed to trying to be everything to everybody all of the time. know, so. And that's exactly how our brand guy came into the, into the remedy, because we were doing a project where a company were pressing the reset button after 10 years. They wanted to make

Pauline Bertry 17:17

Mm-hmm.

Nick 17:18

their brand. was part of their strategy. And, we felt we needed somebody to come into that conversation that really knew their stuff inside out. He's now become part of of this sort of remedy framework. but it was the right person at the right time for the right project.

Pauline Bertry 17:37

Yeah. And your answer inspires me to a different angle. So you mentioned that the employer experience, the brand, the strategy and the culture, it's like a Vienne diagram and they all sit together and they should talk to each other. I think often they don't, unless you do it intentionally.

Nick 18:02

No, completely.

Pauline Bertry 18:05

Could you tell me more? what's going on there?

Nick 18:07

Yeah. Yeah. So, the, the, old phrase is, that companies operate in silos, but there tends to be this baton pass that goes on where, one person or one team will do their thing. And then it gets handed to a, to another team to do, to do their part. And. That that's something that can only end in either problems or complete failure. If you, you, you're not lucky, we know ourselves that, so many transformations end not reaching their intended targets, right. And that's not because people aren't trying their best or it's because there's bad intention there. But when you've got this, it's almost a waterfall thing. There's this pattern pass.

Pauline Bertry 18:53

Mm-hmm.

Nick 18:53

You're going to lose something at every stage in that process. So what we try and encourage all the time is that, the more you can get multidisciplinary voices together, the better the conversation you're going to have ultimately. And again, I think strategy is a great example. We're working with a company now around, how, what does that new strategy look like with AI in the mix? We, we convinced the team, the senior team that, the strategy is shaped in this room, but the work starts outside in terms of actually how you, you activate that. Right. So

Pauline Bertry 19:31

Mm-hmm.

Nick 19:32

that's the point where employee experience comes into the conversation. That's where, using brand as a strategic tool comes into the conversation. And it's better to try and get that conversation going with, the right people together as opposed to having eight or 10 different conversations. Does that answer the question or?

Pauline Bertry 19:54

Yeah. Yeah. it, leads me to another one, but yes, it does.

Nick 19:59

Thanks, Chris.

Pauline Bertry 20:01

but so you have a extremely flexible team from, from what I understand that people come in and, like jumping when you need an, a ninja expert. and then you have this really core belief, which is quite controversial to what most of organizations do. Right. Because. I think in most of the cases, strategy will be done separately, brand will be done under marketing and then employer experience will be done under HR. So how do you, how do you ensure that people who are coming in to join you on a mission or a project or a client engagement that they, if they're a brand expert, for example, that they are not only focused on brand, but they incorporate this entire philosophy that you are bringing.

Nick 20:56

Yeah. Again, a great question. And this is where the kind of depth and strength of the network, I think plays because, these people have known me or us for a very, very long time. And I think, it's again, I mentioned it before, it's building up a shorthand, a kind of a grammar with people, if you like, about how you

Pauline Bertry 21:17

Mm-hmm.

Nick 21:18

think about things, how you approach a project. And I think the majority of people we work with are just of that mindset. But I think if we take the brand guy, for example, he and I both went to this client strategy offsite, which was four days long together. It was never going to be me going and then somehow interpreting that to him, which again is a baton pass, which you try and avoid all times really, if you can. So, he's sitting with me in the room while this, this senior team. are discussing where they're going to go as a business, what matters to them, know, how their culture is going to evolve, the value proposition and all these things. So, that's being absorbed all the time by everybody from our side. So by the time we left that session, there's not a lot of explaining to do because it's like, well, we now both deeply understand where this is going, what they're trying to do. And I think we feel that that is integral to getting things right from the, from the start. if you're going to have a workshop, we would encourage the client to bring a multidisciplinary team to a lot of these things. And the same with us, it,

Pauline Bertry 22:34

Mm-hmm.

Nick 22:35

it, it only makes sense if you, if everybody's up to speed in the right way. Now, of course that's not always possible, right? you can't take, an army of people around with you all the time. But I think again, if you've built trust with the people that you work with, that shorthand gets quicker and quicker. so one of the video guys I work with, I literally almost by osmosis, give him the brief, and yeah, we've done it literally times.

Pauline Bertry 23:07

Telepathic.

Nick 23:08

So it's almost a shared brain thing. But of course, That takes time, that takes a lot of effort on both sides and it takes the ability to think, to somehow bring out the best of people as a leader on something so that they feel that they're getting a lot out of this and you feel you're getting a lot out of this.

Pauline Bertry 23:33

And I think so I am I think a lot of people who are now in let's call them senior design leaders position, either like you who are owning their own, who are building their own story or people who are in VP or head of design positions at corporate organizations. They started their career 10ish, 20ish years ago. And I think most of And I carefully get into the band, but I feel like I'm lucky still because I got to experience this multidisciplinary beauty of design. I got, I started as a computer science engineer. I got into web design. where I was doing everything, then I built the UX toolkit, I started doing UI, I did touch a bit to a brand, et cetera. And McKinsey was very helpful in that. But I think a lot of people who started their career a bit later, maybe in 2020s, they came into the industry that was very siloed internally already. had product designers, UX designers, UX researchers. design system experts, design ops experts, et cetera. And what I feel you are sharing is that you need to have this multidisciplinary approach and expertise and understanding to be able to say look, I'm very deep on design systems or on brand, but I assume if you're talking to the brand person you were referring to about strategy, they... they get it because they've most likely touched it in the past. I'm wondering from your experience of working with clients, McKinsey, observation on the market, how do we build this expertise in the people who haven't had the chance to experience all the different facets of design earlier in their career?

Nick 25:56

That's a great question. I think to some extent, designers brought this on ourselves because there was this need to have, different roles, different titles, different expertise. I think to some degree to validate just, what we're doing and how we're doing it. I think... In some ways that's good. In some ways that's extremely dangerous when design is moving and evolving so fast that you find yourself on one seat doing one thing because it's moving so quickly. You might find yourself with a set of skills that are pretty much, redundant, if not careful. And AI is accelerating that as we know. And therefore I think I always try and encourage younger designers who talk to me or who I interview or whatever to, you don't have to be a Swiss army knife, but you need to have more strings to your bow than I'm just a design researcher. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing to be. I'm saying that the way that it's like the music keeps stopping and who's got a chair left, right? Well, I only do research.

Pauline Bertry 27:14

Yes.

Nick 27:15

We're not doing design research anymore. Right. Okay. Okay. Well, I now need to pivot to something else or I only do design systems. Okay. Well, we've just worked out how to do that in Figma with the press of a button. okay. I'm, I'm, do you know what I mean? So I think, I

Pauline Bertry 27:30

I love it, I love it so much. That's gonna be my favorite quote from the podcast.

Nick 27:37

think It really, really, really, designers are by nature, I think, curious people who want to explore different things, right? But I think it's really important not to go down rabbit holes where you are the, number one world expert in one thing, because it's going to change tomorrow. Do you know what I mean? And let me give you a great example. I was on the interview panel for EMEA for McKinsey and I interviewed loads of people at Bloomberg, et cetera, et cetera. And what always, always has been the case is that young designers turn up or low level experience designers turn up with these very polished folders, And portfolios. And it's like, wow,

Pauline Bertry 28:23

Hmm.

Nick 28:24

really slick and glossy and it looks great. That evolved into people telling a little bit of a better business story about their design. So what was the challenge we solved? What was the impact, et cetera. But what I think has been lacking all the time is, okay, that's great. I love the fact that you've got an iPhone on its side with a great screen on and things, but how did you get there? What was the process that you took? What was the path? And I don't mean, I don't want five D's, six C's, three E's or whatever the kind of methodology was. I'd like to see the rough sketches that you did. I'd like to see the workshops that you held because... Ultimately, that's always going to be the unlock to a solution. Anybody now can go to multiple sites and just get templates. They can get, we all know, you can just type something in and you've got an ad,

Pauline Bertry 29:22

Yeah.

Nick 29:22

five seconds later, right? But what's been the dialogue to that point? how did you solve problems on the client side in the path to this glossy looking thing that you're showing me now? what I'm referring to here is this mindset of I want to, as as an employer or as a design leader that's going to have you on my team or in my team, I, I, I want to see that you are, you're bringing that, that, that mindset, that kind of. I can wear five different hats if needed to a project. Do you know what mean?

Pauline Bertry 30:07

Yeah, yeah, I love it very much because I was recently talking to a person who is specialized in design recruitment for the past 10-ish years, I think. And she was mentioning exactly the same thing. And I think overall what is going on now is that with AI, people are getting the business stories very sleek as well. Because we did have a period at some point where if you... we're a bit of a strategic, like a designer with a bit of a strategic angle, it was much easier to identify it by looking at the way you were writing the case study, because you had the numbers, you had the business impact there, et cetera. And she's like, now everyone is having this. And this is also something I noticed, because I talked to a lot of junior folks. in as part of mentoring exercises. And I'm like, they have portfolios I never had 10 years ago. they're really, really, really sleek. But she was telling me now what people start appreciating is when you have in your portfolio, a block or an angle or a section for each case study around what is yours and what is AI's. Because I think People are using it in extremely different way. And the question is, which part of the thinking you brought in and which one you prompted AI to bring in without it being judgmental, but more to say know how to use AI to augment myself. And this is becoming a bit of a new trend in the portfolio

Nick 31:57

So yeah, I think, I think that's a bizarre development in many ways, right? this is what I,

Pauline Bertry 32:02

Thank

Nick 32:02

this is what something else did. But I think, suppose what you're trying to get, as I said before, you're trying to picture that person in the room with you on a project with a client, for example, right? And you don't want to find out that this person hasn't got interpersonal skills or, the ability to storytell or pull together an idea very quickly in that room with the client, right? That's not the place to find that out. So I think. What am I trying to say? I would, I would love to see examples of here's my rough sketches of how we got here. here's my know, this was the whiteboard that we did while we were in the room, stuff that you can't cheat and you can't fake at the end of the day, right?

Pauline Bertry 32:54

Hmm.

Nick 32:55

Because That that's where the rubber hits the road. I was often shocked to work with designers where you're in a room with a client and you get to a really crucial point in the conversation. might be around a feature development. It might be a way of telling the story. And I'm not saying everybody's got to be brilliant at drawing or sketching, whatever, but you need to be able to pull up a whiteboard or a piece of paper and just say, so, however rough it is and articulate your point of view, the next direction you're going to take, on the fly there and then. And again, that's something that you can't ever AI your way out of. And that's to make

Pauline Bertry 33:39

No.

Nick 33:40

difference between somebody that's going to be a proper deep problem solver, than somebody who's just an executor. I don't know whether that's clear or not, but if you go back to the old agency model, there was often a very hierarchical approach from the creative director

Pauline Bertry 33:59

Yeah.

Nick 33:59

to the art director to the, whatever. And you'd often got people that were just the people that were doing the pixel pushing, The

Pauline Bertry 34:07

Yeah.

Nick 34:10

chances of that person going to a client meeting were very, very small because that's not what they did. And I think going back to what I was saying before, If you've taken yourself down a path where you're very good at one thing, great for a while, but that might be the point where you get caught out. think you've got to, you've got to try and stay as, as open and as multidisciplinary as you can for as long as possible. Not to be a jack of all trades, not to be everything to everybody, but keep some skill sets going so that you have got those differentiators at the end of the day.

Pauline Bertry 34:48

Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think, I really enjoy looking at how the industry is evolving, but I'm also very happy to observe that at certain points, we need to go back to the basics. for example, now I hear a lot of conversations in founders community, etc. about design, the slope, because everyone can now create web pages and landing pages with LavaBall and V0 and Cloud. And they are beautiful. Our entire website is built with Cloud design because we are a small team and that's what we did. However, there are very, very typical mistakes and typical patterns. It applies. And especially when you start iterating, the the proper UX patterns are breaking very, very, very fast. So after three, four iterations, you need to know the basics in order to be able to clean this up and make it an appropriate experience for people. So definitely.

Nick 35:59

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I also think, AI is an amazing tool, and I use the word tool very carefully there, but, know, you're never going to find lightning in there, right? You're never going to find that golden nugget by doing things that way. And I think, that's when it comes back to you, as you say, the basics, Can we get a couple of people in the room? Can we get this up on the wall? Can we, thrash this out together? And it's those also those serendipity moments where someone says something and you have that light bulb moment, which then takes you to the next thing and the next thing, AI is a little bit like a production line to some degree. You put stuff in, you get stuff out, it's

Pauline Bertry 36:53

Yeah.

Nick 36:55

never going to make that incredible leap on its own. It might do one day, that for me is one of the key things here as well. And even if we go back to how we started at McKinsey, when COVID hit, I hated not being in a room with people for a workshop. It was agony doing it via Miro.

Pauline Bertry 37:18

Yeah.

Nick 37:19

It worked. We got something out of it, but you weren't having those coffee conversations. You weren't

Pauline Bertry 37:25

Yeah.

Nick 37:27

sitting around talking crap after the workshop where something else came up, that was really interesting to explore. I think, keeping those basic skills, interpersonal skills, the ability to get people aligned in a room. those soft skills as they're now referred to, I think that they really, really need to come to the fore because, quite frankly, anyone can do this stuff these days.

Pauline Bertry 37:53

I agree and I have a super interesting question as a follow up on that. So first of all, I think after COVID, I'd say 50 % of companies, we are now in officially or unofficially hybrid mode. So it's much more widely accepted. I think there are, in Europe at least, there are not a lot of teams that are fully remote, but there is a lot of hybrid. from very small companies to huge corporations, et cetera, et cetera. So that's my first observation. The second observation, I think there is this entire team around agentic AI and AI being an employee in a team and people collaborating with AI on certain tasks. And in certain contexts, we are even starting to talk about AI leadership. we were talking about people leadership a few years ago. So I'm wondering from, because I know while you do a broad set of topics, know employer experience is one of the kind of key bets and your favorite things. So with all these changes, with all these big things that are influencing how we work, with Gen Z also coming. becoming the part of the workforce, et cetera. How is... So how as a society we need to adapt our ways of working and we need to apply things differently? And what are the things that organizations should be careful or should keep their attention on while designing for this new world?

Nick 39:46

Yeah, that is the million dollar question Pauline. If I had the answer to that question now, I think I would be talking to you from a beach in the Maldives perhaps. I think organizations tend to try and approach everything in a kind binary way with this, with that, with something. And we know that people don't operate like that, We're all hybrid, we're all dispersed, we're all on site. I think, there's a way through that somewhere that I don't think necessarily has become a well-known model yet. But a couple of things. I think when you're a junior or starting out in your career, you need proximity to leaders. You need proximity to conversations that you're not going to have in your spare bedroom. Right. And it's like, where, does lightning strike? And I think at the start of my career, if I hadn't been completely immersed in, in, a newsroom with editors and producers and, know, the whole experience, I think would have been bizarre, think

Pauline Bertry 40:56

very different.

Nick 40:58

about, and you, think you, you're, learning and your acceleration is just, tenfold if you are around people that said, The idea of going into work at seven o'clock in the morning and not leaving till nine o'clock at night is also, you probably a 1980s Wall Street mindset, right? When I worked in Copenhagen for three and a half years, Not many people got to the office before nine o'clock in the morning. And most of the people went to pick their kids up at three, 34 o'clock in the afternoon. Now you could argue that that was already a bit of a hybrid model because they would log on again in the evening and they'd do something or whatever, but they're doing it after they've had dinner with their family. They've, they've engaged with their kids, their community or whatever it is.

Pauline Bertry 41:46

Mm-hmm.

Nick 41:46

And, I was more productive in Denmark than I think in any other job that I've ever done, because you knew you were going to be in the office for this window of time and therefore you just got stuff done. Meetings didn't go on and on. You you were, you're highly productive, you're highly focused. And I think how you find what the ideal model is, I don't know. But again, if you're an organization that is tapped into your workforce under this employee experience umbrella, you're going to work out what that is faster than if you run a survey every year and hope for the best. At best, those kind of things are lagging indicators as what's going on in the business.

Pauline Bertry 42:27

No.

Nick 42:28

But by that time, you've probably lost good talent. You probably missed good talent. because things have just gone in the wrong direction in terms of the working model for too long. So I think by having a employee advisory board, running regular touch point workshops, collision workshops, all these kinds of things, you're gonna sense this barometer of how are people thinking about things here? What does a regular Tuesday look like for someone in our warehouse and someone in our sales team? And it's about Let's dial it up here and let's dial things down here. there might be ways that you can experiment with, pilots have given us a particular department, flexibility on whatever. And again, I think that stops what I said before, where it's this binary decision of we're all this or all that, like

Pauline Bertry 43:18

Hmm.

Nick 43:19

like that. People don't operate like that. The young people I talk to are not thinking in that way at all. so. have the dialogue, have the conversation, and you're going to get, I think, smarter, faster, and therefore adapt quicker.

Pauline Bertry 43:36

So true on the younger generation. So I'm teaching now a course about career search to the service master graduates. And as a result, I've been doing a lot of research on the latest data on the market, the latest numbers, et cetera. And I think the one number that made me laugh was that 45%, 42 or 45 % of Gen Z people never showed up to work in the first day when their contract were about to start. And I was like, is this for real? And then they are like, yeah, this is for real because then boarding wasn't proper because they didn't hear from the employer at some point. So yeah, definitely. I'm fully fully aligned with what you are saying. I think in the spirit of closing the conversation on the aspirational note, what would be your, as someone who is designing employer experience in this very heavy, difficult industry sometimes and very physically present, what is your recommendation to... to people leading these organizations. what are the three things they can easily and very simply do tomorrow without having to require a lot of energy, a lot of resources, a lot of money, but that really can make an experience of people working in the organization distinctively better.

Nick 45:25

Yeah. I don't know where I can think of just three off the top of my head, but I think what we're always, always surprised by is two things. Number one, companies not really listening to their organization. And to being present in their organization. And I can give you a really good example of that. We did a workshop with a team where we did the management in the morning, senior leadership team at this particular plant. And in the afternoon, we did the workforce, the operators. So the operators came in in the afternoon and we said, we did this workshop this morning. They couldn't name a single manager in the right? The operators. Couldn't set names in, and when we talked to the senior people about what does a day in the life of look like, hardly anybody really knew what they did. So there was this huge disconnect between top floor and shop floor. And I think incredible, right? And we just thought you were about to enter a $20 million transformation here of this organization. and you've got this gap that is just incredible. So how do you, how on earth do you think it's going to fly? And there was one plant in this network where the boss of the plant, you could never find him in his office because he was always walking the floor. He was talking to people. He could say to somebody, Hey, Mary, how's your dog? know, Joe, how are you getting on with it? And it was this connection, that was stunning to see in comparison to this other site where no one knew who each other was. So I think that that sense that you as a leader, especially in these times where AI is a another isolating factor for people,

Pauline Bertry 47:24

Yes.

Nick 47:24

and you don't interact with others, you just type prompts and off you go. I think this idea that you actually walk the floor, you go and meet people, you talk to people. It sounds so simple, but it's so easy to get caught up in the, in the high level, day to day stuff. So that, that would be one. And I think going back to the listening comments, part of that is the walk in the floor that I was talking about, but Organizations don't typically run workshops or touch points or listening sessions with their own people.

Pauline Bertry 48:01

Hmm

Nick 48:02

departments are really good at employer branding and EVPs and all this external facing stuff because they want to look like they're a great place to work, come to us. But it's a bit like the banking world. They spend so much more getting new clients. They don't spend that much money nurturing the clients and looking after the people that they've got. actually understanding the pulse of your organization way beyond a survey, I think is another way to say, hey, look, we're heading down a bit of a wrong road here, or this part of our strategy isn't going to fly because we've got these fundamental challenges here, here and here. So again, you're not going to pick that up unless you're carefully tuned in to the pulse of the organization. And that's what I mean by listening. it's crucial to engage. which is what we're pushing all the time, Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 48:59

I love it. Speak less, listen more and be present.

Nick 49:03

old phrase, two ears one mouth, right? mean, the reason for that.

Pauline Bertry 49:08

That's amazing.

Nick 49:09

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 49:10

Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the chat and I hope to see a a lot, a lot better customer experience now that you guys are growing. I'm not

Nick 49:23

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 49:25

in manufacturing, but I'm expecting much better factories around us.

Nick 49:31

Well, we hope so too. we're very broad at the moment. We're working with companies that do EVPs. We're working with companies in the shipping industry. We're working with a company that does software. So I think, the factories are of great interest to us, but we realized that there's a lot of companies out there that need help and assistance in multiple areas. So, yeah.

Pauline Bertry 49:55

I agree. All right. Bye-bye. Thank you.

Nick 49:58

Thanks for having it to talk to you. Bye bye.