Jeannie Walters: 0:09

Hi everyone, I'm Jeannie Walters and this is the Experience Action Podcast. This is the episode of the month that I get most excited about. It's our CX Pulse Check episode, where we go over things that are happening in real time today and their impact on customer experience and other topics. And, speaking of that, I have a special co-host with me today. I have Enrique Rubio, who is the founder of Hacking HR and an expert on HR, employee experience and lots of other things. So, Enrique, welcome to Experience Action. I'm so glad that you're here.

Enrique Rubio: 0:46

Hi, Jeannie, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this awesome conversation and your phenomenal show. Thank you.

Jeannie Walters: 0:54

Thank you. Well, I would love for you to share a little bit more about yourself and the role that you play.

Enrique Rubio: 1:00

Yeah, absolutely. Well, my name is Enrique Rubio. I live in the beautiful town of Flagstaff in northern Arizona. I am a technologist, or used to be a technologist, by trade. I am an electronic engineer.

Enrique Rubio: 1:16

I worked for a long time in telecommunications and then I switched careers to HR, of all places that you can go to right I mean there doesn't seem to be a connection in there, but there is, and I've been in HR for the past 12 years of my life, as a consultant, then as an actual practitioner. My last corporate role was as a chief of staff for CRO and now as a community builder, building communities for HR with Transform and Hacking HR, which are the two communities that I take part of. So that's a little bit about me. I am incredibly passionate about possibilities in this new era of work and I am particularly excited about the very real but difficult but very real possibility of HR leaders and HR practitioners to be the leaders, the business leaders, leading the way forward for others to follow. I always say HR can become the trailblazer, marking the path forward for organizations, for people, for other business leaders to follow and be able to succeed in this new era of work. So that's a little bit about me.

Jeannie Walters: 2:31

I love it, and one of the things that I think you and I have in common is a lot of organizations sometimes don't give these leaders a place at the table, both with customer experience and HR, and when you really focus on these things, they become business drivers. They become the things that make the business go. So I'm excited about this conversation and we saw each other recently at X4, which is the big Qualtrics event in Salt Lake City. We literally bumped into each other after not seeing each other for a few years, and one of the things I just wanted to touch on before we jumped into our hot topics today is a little bit about that event.

Jeannie Walters: 3:12

It's a huge, very well-produced event that they do every year, and what I always walk away with is there's so much excitement about the technology that's available to us now and some of the use cases that you can start really dreaming up when you see all of these amazing advances.

Jeannie Walters: 3:33

But I also love hearing from the different leaders that they bring in and from lots of different industries, lots of different types of organizations, and one of the things I walked away with this year was that we're finally getting to the place where employee feedback and customer feedback, that cycle, is being more connected and operationalized and so, instead of just doing that employment engagement survey once a year and having your customer surveys over here in a different part of the organization, they're connecting the dots the leaders who are doing this, the organizations that are doing this really well, and I just thought that was a really positive outcome that not only this technology is providing, but strategic leaders are providing that vision. So that's what I saw, that's what I walked away with. What are some of the things that you saw there?

Enrique Rubio: 4:27

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, the first thing is, you know it's showing gratitude to Qualtrics for inviting us to be part of their event. Great, great show, great conversations, and I had the chance to interview four leaders during the conference and all of them obviously in one way or another taking advantage of Qualtrics tools to be able to listen to their employees, to listen to their customers and, in the back end, connecting the dots, right, in what kind of information they are receiving and how they can translate that those insights into actions that allow them to build a better workplace and a better business for their customers. So the connecting of the dots was, to me, perhaps one of the most interesting things that Qualtrics is working on together with our clients, and you and I were offline.

Enrique Rubio: 5:33

We're talking about the fact that every one of us is, at the same time, a customer and an employee, and we sometimes, and very often, we are spoiled by the capacity that a business has to serve us in a way that is incredibly easy, streamlined, straightforward, and then they create an expectation in us and that expectation becomes the expectation that we bring to our employer.

Enrique Rubio: 6:03

And then we ask ourselves why is it that with one click in my phone, I can do all these things as a customer of a business, but then when I go to my employer to do something that is a lot simpler than the action that I am taking with that business that is serving me, to do something that is a lot simpler, I have to go through all these hoops and all these processes and all these hurdles to get something done, and that's frustrating because our expectations as an employee but as a customer, is not anymore just informed by what my employer is giving me, but also by the awesomeness that I am receiving from the businesses that are serving me.

Enrique Rubio: 6:51

So, connecting information about my behaviors, my expectations as a customer, and then how that translates into what I expect my employer to do for me and what I expect me to do for my employer, connecting those dots, it's just such a holy grail of information and data that can guide actions and new ideas for those companies the ones that I'm working for but that are also serving other people. So that, to me, was the most interesting finding from the conference that connectivity between employee and customer insights from data that we're collecting, in this case using Qualtrics.

Jeannie Walters: 7:39

That's right. That's right. And Danny Meyer from Shake Shack, the founder of Shake Shack and he's also just a very well-known restaurateur, he talked about how you know we have to remember that your employees are your first customer. Your employees are the ones who are going to you know, need to follow these processes, have less friction, all of these things and that was a theme I heard repeated by some of these leaders as well. I think it was Delta Airlines and some other ones who talked about how you know, when we look at the friction points in the customer journey, if we actually take the time to talk to those employees and understand what's happening, we often will see it's not just that you know it's friction for the customer, but it's friction for the employee. There's some process point, there's some policy that is making it difficult for them to serve the customer in the way that they want to be served. So I think this deeper connection between HR and employee experience and customer experience is just going to benefit everybody. But it's that real-time connection that this technology is allowing for and that, I think, is very, very exciting.

Jeannie Walters: 8:56

And speaking of technology, that's what we're starting with a little technology firm you may have heard of. Let me share the headline we're talking about. So this is from HR.

Enrique Rubio: 9:10

Just Apple.

Jeannie Walters: 9:11

Yeah, just it's Apple, it's this little California company. So this is from HR Executive and the headline is Apple's $500 billion US investment what HR leaders need to know. Now, I mean this has made a lot of headlines for a lot of reasons, but I thought this was an interesting angle. When we think about this investment, part of what Apple is doing is really trying to and this is how I interpret it put a stake in the ground for US talent development and for developing all these opportunities for US workers. So I'm curious on your take on this. What did you see in this? What do you think HR leaders need to know? How do you think this will impact, kind of either current or future work?

Enrique Rubio: 10:05

Yeah, absolutely Well, when you think about a $500 billion investment, I think any person would immediately know that this money is going to processes, technology, systems, lines of production and people, right, and people whom you will need to recruit, whether it is existing talent in your pipelines, in your existing pipelines inside your organization which is unlikely, by the way because an investment like this immediately tells me that you will have to hire more people than you currently have or move them around, and that entails re-skilling, that entails creating new designs for your organizations, new job descriptions, new job design, new policies, right, you know, new hiring strategies, talent attraction strategies. So you probably will need to build an entire HR function around just this investment.

Enrique Rubio: 11:12

And, to me, when this happens, I think it's a great opportunity to not begin from scratch, begin from the baseline of what have we done right and what have we done wrong in our organization. So what do we do to not repeat the same mistakes of the past and what do we do to leverage the good things that make our company such a hallmark of technology and brand and all these positive things, right? So that's one thing you got to take advantage of what you have done right, and you have to make sure that you're identifying what you don't have, what you have done in the past that may not have delivered the value that you wanted to deliver. So I would begin from there. Obviously.

Jeannie Walters: 12:07

You know what I just want to follow up on that, because I think it's a really good point where sometimes we invest in kind of what is already happening just because we want you know. That's how we think of scale sometimes. Yeah, well, we're going to just do more, we're just going to have more.

Enrique Rubio: 12:24

We're all the same. Yeah, yes.

Jeannie Walters: 12:34

And I think you're bringing up a really important point that this is a great opportunity to reevaluate, to say, okay, what is happening here, what is working, and also what might not work for tomorrow. Like it might be working today, but we know that all this innovation is happening. We know that customer expectations are changing. We know that even the way different generations are entering the workforce, they have different expectations right. So, thinking through all of that before just saying more, I think that's a really critical question that any leader should be asking right now.

Enrique Rubio: 13:02

Well, you know, I got to tell you one of my favorite quotes and I'm going to completely butcher the quote because I don't remember exactly how it goes, but not coincidentally it was said in an interview by Steve Jobs. You know, Steve Jobs left Apple and then he was brought back in when Apple had lost its way and was on the brink of bankruptcy, right, and you know, on the brink of like you know, like completely losing what it was. And when Steve Jobs came back, he was asked I mean, he pretty much turned around that company, like not overnight, but it took them, you know, it took them, you know, a quick action right, to turn it around and to turn it back into this very innovative company that it was. When he came back, and he was asked what happened? You know, why did you create such an amazing company? You leave, you come back and the company is almost on the brink of bankruptcy. And he said something along the lines of this right, he said that the company had had many successes, but what it was trying to do was to repeat the same process that it had for some success, to build successes in other areas. And he said that doesn't work, because what got you there. What got you here won't get you there. You know the process that we built to do, you know, the Macintosh, the process that we did to build, you know, certain products won't help us build the smartphone, the next. You know the iPod, the all these new technologies that he was inventing, right? So it is exactly the same thing that you're saying.

Enrique Rubio: 14:36

Scaling as a company doesn't mean repeating the processes that you have in place, but more of it. It may mean that you need to completely, you know, hack out all of those processes, completely, cut them out of the equation and say we got to begin from scratch here, because this process has brought us here but won't get us there. That requires, as a business leader, that requires a lot of energy around innovation and growth and a lot of energy about being able to let things go. Because, again, you know like one of the problems with the people from Apple before Steve Jobs came back was that they were in love with certain processes that were very successful, but not for the new era of technology, and that's why they were on the brink of bankruptcy, right? So, once again, it is the same process here.

Enrique Rubio: 15:34

So, Apple, the message for you is if you want to be successful in your $500 billion investment, do what your founder said Don't repeat the same processes that brought you to this place. Some of the components of those processes may still be relevant, but maybe not the process as a whole, so you just got to reinvent yourself.

Enrique Rubio: 15:57

That's the whole point here.

Jeannie Walters: 15:58

I think you and I, as entrepreneurs who have scaled a little bit, we can relate to this right. There are things that you think this is going to work forever.

Enrique Rubio: 16:09

Yeah, correct, yeah.

Jeannie Walters: 16:11

And then the market changes or something happens, and I think you know we do something with our clients called Disruptor Day, where it's all about innovation, because if you are not thinking about the customer experience and really thinking about how to disrupt your industry, then someone else is going to disrupt you.

Jeannie Walters: 16:31

And so you have to constantly be in this mode of innovation and disruption around experiences and I think the same thing that you're talking about with employee experience and HR, like we have to start being super critical in a way, using that critical eye to say is this working today and will it work tomorrow? And if I don't know what will work tomorrow, I need to start thinking about that now.

Jeannie Walters: 16:57

Because, that's the other thing is that it's very easy to sit back.

Jeannie Walters: 17:00

So yeah, I think,

Enrique Rubio: 17:02

and as Apple, as a company, especially with an investment like this, you got to make sure that you get it right.

Enrique Rubio: 17:08

And because companies like this have so many resources, you can't really stop for one day and think what do we want to build here? Right, you know what kind of company, what is the culture that we want to build for this company? And that takes me back to like the simplest kinds of questions as job design, where people work, from the size of the teams, the kind of leaders that we want to bring. All of those questions have to be on the table if you are going to be investing $500 billion in infrastructure and new products and all of this and you want to make it right. And now you have the data. I mean, you're a company that has been around for 50 years now 40, 50 years so you have enough data to tell you what kinds of things don't work and what kind of things may work. Just stop for a second and put everything on the table and begin from a place that will help you design the right kind of organization.

Jeannie Walters: 18:11

That's right. Well, speaking of data, you set this up perfectly, thank you. So our next topic here is from Diginomica, and the headline is Ford's Data-Driven Approach to Employee Experience Balancing Tradition with Transformation. And the reason I wanted to talk about this is because when we went to, you know, the Qualtrics event and you start talking to a lot of these large organizations, they have to deal with legacy. They have to deal with the legacy of their brand, they have to deal with the legacy of their systems, of everything else, and sometimes to the point we were just talking about, that can be really hard to change. And so, now that we're connecting these dots with data, we are making sure that we are listening to employees in more regular ways, in ways that we can act on, in ways to make sure that it's not just. You know, I remember when I would be consulting with a company and they'd say, oh well, we've got to take a week off because, like of our project, because we're doing the employment or the employee engagement survey.

Jeannie Walters: 19:18

And I was like well, great, I'm sure everybody loves that right, and now that we can tap into this in such a more regular way, and so I think it's interesting to think about a company like Ford, a company that has been around for a long time really trying to figure out what is it that we need, like, what is the data that we need, and they're using analytics to understand and improve employee experience, but especially around career development and digital readiness, and I think that's the part that's really stood out to me. So what did you think about this and what can other leaders take away from this?

Enrique Rubio: 20:00

Very good question and good point about using the data in the context of companies that are bringing a lot of legacy right in the way they operate and in what their brand means. But again I'm going to go back to the same point about Steve Jobs before what brought you here won't take you there. So you've got to be flexible as a company to know how much you pull and how much you push, and what I mean by that is how much you will have to let go. I mean, you don't have to sacrifice your brand. You're an automaker, but Ford started as an automaker using gas and now they are creating all these EV vehicles, right, so that alone represents a push into new markets, new technology. Your brand is still an automaker brand and you want to create the safest, fastest, more energy-efficient vehicles in the world, and you open a new line of production that is creating EV, electrical vehicles. So you just have to listen to what your customers are asking for. You just have to also listen to what your employees are saying and you've got to put that in the context of how do we remain a competitive, innovative company going forward for the next 100 years. So that means that you have to put in the context of that question how do we remain a profitable, competitive, sustainable, successful company over the next 100 years? What that means is what do I keep as the legacy components of my brand? With what do I have to let go to build the new that will help me get to those next 100 years?

Enrique Rubio: 21:41

As a business leader, you can't get attached to things you can't get attached to this is the thing that we do. This is the cash cow. This is the thing that we're always going to milk, because tomorrow is not going to be there and if you fail to see that there are other things happening in the world, because you're so focused on the current cash cow, you're missing out on opportunities and by the time you may realize, oh my gosh, I should have foreseen this in the past. Maybe by that time it's already too late.

Jeannie Walters: 22:11

So I think, one of the things that, again, we heard about a lot at X4 and also just in general. We know the importance of culture in an organization and how people need to feel like they belong. They're part of this bigger culture. But culture is one of those things that people love to kind of talk about but not necessarily define. It's one of those things people feel it when they feel it, but they don't when they don't. And I'm curious with all the new kind of data points and analytics that we can use to tap into how employees are really feeling, how are they really engaged. How can we use that to create and improve cultures within workplaces? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Enrique Rubio: 22:53

Yeah, absolutely. Well, the first one is that culture is the way we get the work done. Culture is everything and it is the blood of an organization, you know. And if you don't have blood in your organization, you're dead. It doesn't matter, you're dead right. So you can add, you know synthetic parts to your body. Without the blood, it's still dead right, because we need that for the entire system to operate properly.

Enrique Rubio: 23:20

So, as the blood of an organization, that means it goes from how you present yourself as a brand to the public, the things you say privately and publicly, the way your leaders lead, the way your direct managers manage their teams and get the work done in those teams, the way people interact with each other. What happens when you are confronted with difficult decisions, like, for example, right now in the US? You know there's a war by the Trump administration on diversity, equity and inclusion. So your culture will determine, not Trump. Your culture will determine whether DEI is important for you or not. But if you, as a company, say we built this organization by having diverse practices in our hiring, by bringing diverse talent, by being an inclusive company where people feel that they belong and where they can be themselves, then we're going to double down on DEI, regardless of what the President of the United States says. Right, because that's part of our core. That's your culture. Your culture is all of that. Your culture is not just actually it's not even the values that you have on your website or on a wall that say, oh, we treat each other with respect. And then you see on Glassdoor that your leaders are being assessed very poorly because they don't treat people with respect. So it doesn't really matter that you say that you're a company that values respect, if that's what you're seeing, but what you're listening from the data, or with the data from your people and what your people are saying about your leaders. So that's the entire spectrum of culture. Everything falls there, right.

Enrique Rubio: 25:00

So now we are in times where companies are being pushed to produce more with less resources, where burnout employee burnout is a real thing. Where 60% of employees are looking for another job, sometimes actively looking for another job, which is insane, right. Where you have multiple generations that have different expectations working side by side in the workforce. Where maybe the older generations don't want to retire anymore and the younger generations want to be able to build a family as well. So all of these factors are in play, and that means that you really have to think very, very deeply and strategically about what you want your culture to be, what components of your legacy culture you still want to keep in place and what components are not working anymore.

Enrique Rubio: 25:54

One of these questions, obviously, which I can still believe that we are still today talking about it I think it's just the stupidest thing ever that we're still talking about whether people come to work from an office or remotely. That, to me, is the stupidest conversation that can ever happen, right? Because if you look at the data, the data is telling you that there was a period of time where people had enough flexibility to increase productivity, to be more engaged, and, yes, there were some indicators that were not going properly, like people didn't feel that they belonged to their teams and to their organizations when they were working remotely. Well, you fix that. You don't force people back to an office. You know to. You know to solve a problem that is not going to be solved by that action.

Enrique Rubio: 26:37

So, anyway, the point here is your culture is everything. Your culture will help you hire the best talent and retain the best talent. Your culture will help you go through difficult times. Your culture will help you have people say I belong to this company and therefore, because I am so committed and so loyal, I am going to give 100% of my talents to finding out solutions to the most critical challenges that our company is dealing with. All of that is determined by your culture.

Jeannie Walters: 27:11

And I think the point that you made early on was there are certain behaviors and activities and questions we can ask that really help us understand are we really aligned with that culture? Are people feeling that alignment? Because if they aren't, that's what shows up on Glassdoor, that's what shows up on your retention and all of those things. And I totally agree about the return to office conversation, because people are always surprised. I started this company 15 years ago and we've been remote the entire time and we have, you know, a team that I think would tell you they feel very connected, they feel very much like so there are ways to do it without necessarily saying show up in the office. And sometimes I mean I talk to my friends who sometimes have to show up and there's nobody else there, so they're still doing Zoom from an office which is yeah.

Enrique Rubio: 27:59

Be clear about what the foundations of your culture are.

Enrique Rubio: 28:04

If you are a company where you want people to work from an office, say it. Say it because there are people who do want to work all the time from an office, and you may tap into those people right. Where things get tricky is when you operate in a gray area and it's on the whim of your mood when things change. Right, when you say, oh, today I want everybody to come back to the office after you hire them to offer them flexibility or vice versa. Right, you say, oh, now we want to be an all remote or a hybrid organization. When you hire people to be working from certain locations, just make sure that you as a company, are also aligned and clear about what your values are and what your culture is, and communicate it. Don't be what you're not. Be great at what you actually are, and I think that's going to make a difference.

Jeannie Walters: 28:55

Well, Enrique, I just wish you had brought a little more passion to this conversation. This was so fun. I think it was fate that we saw each other in the hallway there at the Salt Lake City Convention Center and I just really appreciate your perspective and this conversation. So thank you so much for joining me, and if those out there listening right now want to learn more about you or connect, what's the best way for them to do that?

Enrique Rubio: 29:23

They can look me up on LinkedIn. I'm hanging out in there all the time posting content and all the good stuff. So thank you, Jeannie, for inviting me, and I hope your listeners connect with me and we can continue to share more ideas and insights together.

Jeannie Walters: 29:37

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Enrique, and thank you for being here. We, of course, appreciate all that you do every day to make this connection between customer experience and employee experience matter even more, so thanks for being here with me. We can't wait to talk to you again. And don't forget, you can ask me a question at askjeannievip and I could answer it for you here on the Experience Action Podcast. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.