Episode 101: How to Build Great Employee Experiences (Interview with Jason Averbook)
On the show this week, I am talking to Jason Averbook, CEO and Co-Founder at Leapgen, one of the leading global authorities on HR technology and employee experience.
Throughout this episode, Jason and I discuss:
His thoughts on how companies should approach employee experience and why that involves a whole person approach with human experience as the focus.
Why it is so important to understand an individual's purpose and how they want to work, so you can design solutions that meet them where they are and where they are going
The role of data and technology in helping organisations to understand and measure employee experience
Why building trust and understanding how people feel, is so important when designing employee experience. And finally, Jason walks through some examples of how some of the best companies are building great employee experience.
Support for this podcast comes from 365Talents. You can learn more by visiting https://365talents.com.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Jason Averbook, CEO and Co-Founder at Leapgen and one of the leading authorities in our field, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Jason, it is great to have you on the show. I have been wanting to get you on the show ever since we started in late 2019, can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and to Leapgen?
Jason Averbook: David, How are you?
David Green: Oh, very good actually. How are you?
Jason Averbook: We can't just start with all that formalities stuff.
David Green: I know. I know. I’m fine and you are too? I know you are in a hotel room at the moment, in Cincinnati.
Jason Averbook: Yeah, it's all good... so, Jason Averbook. I have, weirdly enough, I was raised by my parents to be in HR. I have been in the HR space for a long time, three decades, David, crazy to think about.
So, I started implementing payroll system here in the United States. Eventually ended up going to be a product manager and build one of the first Windows applications, as people switched away from DOS. I left that company, which was Ceridian Corporation, to move on to PeopleSoft, where I did everything from implement PeopleSoft to serve in product strategy roles.
I ended up leaving there in 2004, when my first son Ben was born. And then we started a new company that same day that Ben was born, called Knowledge Infusion. Do everything in groups, it is always good for the stress level.
I had that company for eight or nine years. Sold it and went on to be the CEO of a company called The Marcus Buckingham Company.
We ended up selling that to ADP and then started Leapgen in January, believe it or not, of 2017. So just celebrated five years.
So, a long journey, but the whole time I have been working with HR technology and everything about transforming our function.
David Green: And obviously we have known each other for quite a few years. I think we first came across each other in London back in 2013, which I think was the first event in London that Marc Coleman and the team at UNLEASH, actually ran.
Jason Averbook: It was called HR Tech World, or something like that, wasn't it?
David Green: It might have even been HR Tech Europe at that point.
Jason Averbook: It is still the best event out there.
David Green: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think they are coming back this year, in person as well, hopefully. So that should be good.
And even then you were talking about the importance of employee experience, I think mainly framed from a technology perspective. We used to bump into each other at conferences all around the world, and obviously we haven't bumped into each other for a couple of years, but hopefully no doubt we will, as we move into this year.
So I think it is entirely apt that we are framing the conversation today around employee experience. Let's start by discussing the approach to employee experience design that you believe in.
What do you mean by a whole person approach to human experience design and why whole person? Also maybe more interesting, why human experience?
Jason Averbook: Wow. Great question to start, David.
So when we start talking about this concept of “whole person” one of the things, and user experience will be my example of the opposite of what we talk about. Forever in the HR tech world, we have been talking about users, users, users and it is not really a very friendly way to talk about people that you want to engage in something. One of the biggest problems with HR technology in general is adoption, so when we start thinking about why don't people adopt? There are so many things that go into that, but one of the big reasons is we don't actually design for them. And that starts by probably thinking about what we call them. They are not users, they are humans. We haven't designed for people, we have designed for functions and then we expect the people or the humans to engage in things that they don't even know how to spell. They don't know how to spell HR.
So that is really the biggest shift and just the start of this conversation, which we can go into more, but as the shift from user to human and how do I make sure that if I am truly going to expect people, humans, to engage that I treat them like humans.
David Green: Yeah. I suppose if we think about customers, we don't call them users, we call them customers.
Jason Averbook: It was just a goofy way of thinking about how many users are you going to have, that is just a good way to license software. But if we are actually trying to endear people to us and get them to feel like we actually care, we probably should take them for what they are, which they are humans.
David Green: And when you think user experience, the experience for the person using the tool is almost an afterthought, whereas if you actually frame it as human experience, you are putting it more at the centre.
Jason Averbook: David, you are familiar with the F word, right?
David Green: I am a bit nervous about which F word we are talking about.
Jason Averbook: We are not going to break the non explicit label on this podcast. No it is all about feeling. How do we make someone feel? That is the F word. And in 2022, everything we do around employee experience is all about feeling and how do we want someone to feel? Do we want them to feel like it is engaging? Do we want them to feel like they are part of it, it was designed for them? Do we want them to actually feel at the end, like it was positive?
One of the things you and I bantered about a little in the green room, was a little like, hey, how do you measure experience? And I laugh when people are like, ah, we have got to start a big step. Like dude, I don't know if you have ever walked out of the, what do you call bathrooms over there? The loo?
David Green: Yeah, the loo.
Jason Averbook: You walk out of the loo and you see those dumb things that you are supposed to touch to say, green, yellow, or red, like how was the bathroom? They tell you to make sure you wash your hands, but then everyone is going to touch those things when they leave the loo. That is a real time measurement of the experience in the restroom, yet oftentimes we don't ask people in real time, what their experience is or how they feel about what it is they are doing. Whether it be consuming information from a report or from an analytical tool, or whether it be just going through an interaction, notice I didn't say transaction but interaction, how are people feeling?
Notice I asked you, when you started introducing me, how are you? Those words are really powerful. They are not hard, but they are really powerful.
David Green: And that links quite nicely to, if we are going to call it human experience design, if we are designing for a great experience that creates positive feelings, how important is it to understand the purpose of the humans that we are trying to deliver the experience to?
Jason Averbook: It is one of the things that we talk a lot about in experience design, and once again, people are always like, how did you ever shift from HR technology to experience design? There is no shift, the consumer has changed. Back at Ceridian and PeopleSoft, when we built this stuff, we didn't build it for “end users”. We said we had self service, but how derogatory. We said, hey, guess what, you could dial up via a modem. There's an old word. And if the other line doesn't ring, you are going to connect and download a Java applet and that will take four minutes, then hopefully you can change your address, if you know what an effective date is.
All that stuff, that was just user stuff.
When we think about humans and we think about this whole person approach, it is really saying, and by the way, it is happening now with some of this dumb, return to work verbiage. Sorry to go a little off on a tangent here, but return to work. I don't know about you, but I have been working my arse off for the last two years.
David Green: Yeah, I think most people have, haven’t they. Yes I agree.
Jason Averbook: I must have missed the vacation notice or that I was supposed to be off for the last two years. But return to work, It is return to office, which is the physical component of a person, but there is also the social component. The spiritual, which ties to purpose. There is the intellectual component to it. There is more to a person than just where they are physically and that is really at the core of understanding people and understanding, not just who they are by a number, but actually understanding how they work and how they want to work, the persona of that type of worker, really helps you design to meet them where they are and where they are going.
David Green: And on the whole return to office discussion, I was wondering your thoughts about this. I noticed that the whole fixation seems to be, in 99% of the stuff I read, is about the where rather than the how, the what, and the when. And if we have learned anything from the last two years, those elements are all really important but they seem to be out of the conversation at the moment and it is all about the where.
I would love to hear your thoughts about that?
Jason Averbook: David, I have been doing a lot of Google-ing, I know that opens up a whole can of worms, but on how many days it takes to build a habit. And when this whole pandemic first began, in March of 2020, and when it went on to two weeks, we were like whoa. And then it went on to four weeks, we were like, Ooh. And then it went on to four months and we were like, whoa, this might stick a while, this actually might make a change. But there were still 90 something percent of people that said, ah, we will be back to normal soon.
Then all of a sudden we got to eight months, then we got to 12 months, then we got to 16 months, now, here we are at 24 months and we are still doing things differently than we were before. Now, what does that mean? Not only have we built a habit to work in this new way, but we have actually just changed. We have evolved, it is not just habits, we have evolved, work evolved.
If I could just stop right there, work evolved, period. What does that mean? That means all of our practices around people that do work, need to evolve, period. And then just stop the rest of the conversation like, when is it going to go back to normal? When are people going back to the office? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It has changed.
And as much as you and I were talking in the green room once again, about luckily, our families weren't affected personally by the health pandemic but at the same time, work was affected and people were affected and change is not a bad thing.
So all that being said, it is time to reshape and I was sharing with you earlier that I did a podcast yesterday, and someone said, do you really think people are ready, outside of HR, to change? Sorry, they kinda said it in that voice, so sorry for the weird voice. But I was like, dude, they were ready before we were and they are ready. Watch your fricking kids. Look at how your kids work, they are already doing stuff that we don't do at work.
If they say, what do I do when I have a baby? They talk in English, they don't say, what do I do if I am having a dependent? That is HR talk.
We have to evolve to meet where they are and they have been ready, they the workforce, has been there. Now for us in HR, we always say, oh, not everyone is ready. Or, I can show you a person over here, or a factory over here, that they do everything on paper. And yes, I totally get it, we can design for them and we can help them along. But gone are the days where we sit and wait for everyone to somehow consensually say, we are ready to go digital, because it is never going to happen. It is happening all around us and if we don't do something, we just fall further behind.
David Green: Yeah and actually a really good point there which leads to the next question around purpose. Let's be honest, organisations are usually behind the bulk of individuals, and perhaps even more so at the moment.
Does individual purpose and organisational purpose have to align? And then, what is the impact if they do? I imagine measuring that is pretty cool. What is the impact if they don’t? And, is there maybe a grey area in between the two?
Jason Averbook: Yeah. It is a great question, David, alignment is a hard once again, period. Alignment is hard. So when people say, do they have to align? There has to be some level of, I like long hair, we like the same things, we like long hair, you just happen to be able to grow long hair whereas I can’t. But at the same time, we both like long hair, so there is some alignment there. It doesn't mean we have to look exactly the same, you are more blessed follicly than I am, but we both like long hair so we are aligned but not exactly. We don't look exactly the same. Our hair is not exactly the same.
In organisations there has to be some level of alignment. Now people say, no we are not aligned, we don't use the same words, you are using analytics and we are using intelligence, we are not aligned so gotta move on. That is not the level of alignment that we are ever going to get within organisations, but the purpose, the bigger mission, the values as to why an organisation exists and what IT wants to be known for and how IT wants, see how I am intentionally saying it, wants it’s people, the most important asset, to feel, needs to be aligned. That needs to be aligned all the way from the minute or the second that an applicant, on their mobile device, says, wow, I would love to work at Insight222, all the way to guess what? I just left Insight222, but I know the values and the purpose of that organisation mean they are going to welcome me back at some point, if I need to.
And that concept of that air cover, we will call it, is so crucial because everything you do can feed that air cover. If you don't have that air cover, everyone is just throwing stuff around and to the employee it doesn't feel, back to that F word, it doesn't feel like anything, it is just a bunch of blah.
But I just want to be really clear because we have had organisations that we work with every day, that will say we are not aligned. You are actually more aligned than you think you are, you just need to coordinate a bit, but most organisations aren't that far off. Most organisations know whether they need glasses or not. They just might need little adjustments here and there to find the right org model and design, in order to make sure that they can see clearly.
David Green: And it is providing that clarity around the purpose and values of an organisation as you said, if you are very clear what the purpose is and what the values are, then if you are an applicant looking to join the organisation, you can think, yeah I want to be part of that, or I don't want to be part of that. It is where it is not clear, I guess is where you could get the real challenge. And yes, we can also understand from the humans within the organisation what drives them, from a purpose perspective.
Jason Averbook: One of the things that is really interesting about what you are saying is, my father worked for the same company for 48 years. You have probably heard me tell this story. And my grandfather worked for that same company that my dad worked for, for 49 years. So that is 97 years for the same company. 97.
So back in those days, if the company wasn't exactly right, or it is not feeling great, ah, we will wait five years and see how it is.
I really remember my dad saying, this is the leader that we have now and I was just a little kid, probably in five, 10 years it will get better. Today, people wait 5 to 10 minutes to make a decision. So we can't afford that kind of vague, grey area that you are talking about because once again, today, the minute someone starts to feel that this isn't aligned to them, and all the pandemic did was just accentuate this because when we are faced with some weird mortality that no one knew we would ever be faced with, all of a sudden we are seeing people around us either die or change radically, guess what? That time just shrinks as to how much we are willing to deal with the crap of work.
I say this all the time and I know you have heard me say this, we are humans outside of work, but what are we inside of work? Still humans and so it has to be the same. Just like it is 2022 outside of work, what year does it feel like inside of work? They should feel close to the same. Does that make sense? That is where, to me, purpose values and alignment really have become accentuated now, is that what is driving this great blah, blah, blah, resignation, reshuffle. I know you put out brilliant work on how you compile headlines. I was actually having some weird dream about you last week where I was like, how do you compile all of these things? Great resignation, great reshuffle, great restructure, great reset. First of all, I am not sure that any of that is great.
David Green: No, no, I would agree with you.
Jason Averbook: I am not sure why everyone is calling it great. But second of all, this whole evolution, revolution, of the human, of the employee, that is happening right, beautifully in front of our eyes, that is our impetus to change, I think. People say, why are you so excited now after doing this for three decades? I am like, because finally there is something other than Y2K or The Cloud, that might make things change. It is actually the world that is making things change.
David Green: It is ironic, isn't it, that everyone talks about, technology, data, technological revolution, industrial revolution. But it seems that a lot of stuff in the past has been driven by technology, whereas at the moment it is being driven by people. People that want their companies to care about the climate, that want their companies to be more inclusive and that is forcing big companies to change and to actually care about more than just shareholder value, for example. I am sure some of them still just care about shareholder value, but they are actually having to be very public that they do care about other stuff, they do care about the climate, they do care about inclusivity, they do care about their people, because otherwise they will lose them.
Jason Averbook: Weird. Who would have thought that people are our most important asset, that we might actually start thinking of them that way. You have heard me say this also, how do we stop counting people and making people count. Well maybe now, finally, is the time. Which is why I am so excited about what we do.
David Green: Yeah, it is definitely an exciting time, unfortunately it has taken a health crisis to maybe push it forward a little bit faster.
Jason Averbook: You know what, David, everyone that listens to your podcast, I am just going to say this and someone is going to probably get mad at me, but right now we are the characters, we are the actors, in this movie and someone is going to look back in the year 2030, back to right now, 2022 and say, what did these actors do? What did these characters do? Did they sit back and still talk about their Cloud? Do they sit back and still talk about employee self service? Or, did they actually do something to change work? I am not going to be the person that doesn't do something and I think that as a rallying cry for everyone in this space, it is our opportunity.
David Green: Yeah. Something I have heard you say before around, this is the opportunity for HR. I think it is even more so now, isn't it? Because we have actually seen quite public examples of organisations with strong, effective, HR leaders who are dialled in well to their CEO and the C-suite, actually changing things over the last couple of years and are putting people at the centre.
Jason Averbook: Yeah, for sure, but at the same time we also see, every single day, someone crashed and burned because people aren't dialled into the fact that people are at the centre. I am just going to go ahead and abuse women because they are not humans and I am not going to pay them equally. Those days are coming to an end. I am just going to abuse the fact that I have a lower class people off shore, that can do the same work and pay them a wage under poverty level. That is not accepted anymore. You lose consumers as that gets out. Just like there are people that are doing the positives, I hope that some of this work around human, actually allows us to change the world and get rid of some of the labour practices that have been hideous, as far as I am concerned.
David Green: Yep, I am with you on that. And maybe one of the ways that we can do that is to make it transparent, measure experience in different organisations, use the data to really highlight and so people can actually vote with their feet and go to the organisations that do care.
Obviously, you have been working in this field for a long time, Jason. When it comes to measuring employee experience, what kind of measures should organisations be focusing on to understand what is successful employee experience?
Jason Averbook: David, there are so many different levels to that question. Measuring employee experience, it starts at the micro and it builds up to a macro.
Is an employee frustrated today, based on the fact that they are trying to do something at work and they can't get it done? How do I answer that question? Yes or no, not 3.726, and I don't mean to be so weird about that.
But are my employees frustrated, yes or no? Well, it is kinda in the middle. So what happens when it is in the middle? Nothing. Yes or no?
Did an employee feel like an interaction they had, as part of being an employee of that organisation not an interaction with HR, but as being an employee of that organisation, how does it make them feel, good or not? Thumbs up, thumbs down. There is no this, sorry for those of you listening, I did the thumb in the middle. But thumbs up, thumbs down.
If I can do that, then I can move to the next level up, which is what is the impact of a lot of positive little experiences, micro experiences? Oh, the impact is people are staying longer, or the impact is people aren't leaving because they are frustrated, or the fact is that wow, people are staying when they get a call from a recruiter, they ignore it. Cool.
Let's go up the next level, now what does that do? The next level up shows me that, wow, if people are staying longer, guess what? It is not costing me as much to recruit. Now, I am still not really speaking a CEO's language, but guess what? If people stay longer, wow, it might drive better customer experience. If I have a better customer experience, I might have more profit. If I have more profit, I might have better shareholder return.
So does that make sense? I'm sorry, I am not being very articulate.
David Green: No, that makes perfect sense. If you don’t look after the micro experiences you can forget about the macro.
Jason Averbook: You don't just start with the frosting, you actually have to build this intentionally, from those micro moments so that you build up to whatever that outcome is that you are trying to achieve. For as long as I have followed your work, I have always been amazed at your passion towards analytics. There is probably five of you weirdos, in the world that I am so amazed with, at your passion. Maybe not five, maybe three. But the challenge that I always have, when we try to take stuff to business is, they don't know what to do. They don't know what it means, like when you tell stories, David, I have heard you MC and I don't want to make this a love fest, but I get touched by it. But most HR people, when they tell stories about their data or about their people, not only am I not touched by it, I am bored to death. So I don't see the impact, I don't see the correlation between what I am trying to do as a people function and overall purpose outcomes that the organisation cares about. So that was a long way to say that employee experience is the root of what drives any of these macro measures that we are looking at and without the employee experience being somewhat positive, the thing breaks down pretty quick. If you are going to start measuring profitability and you have a bunch of people unhappy at work, you have got a problem already.
David Green: Yeah and I think as you said, the really important thing is to frame that conversation whether that is with employees, whether that is with the CEO, put it in a language that is going to resonate with them. As you said, with X, Y, and Z, and by doing that we are having a positive impact on something the CEO cares about, customer experience. where profits are up because we are keeping people happy. It is those sorts of things, rather than saying, oh, our attrition has gone down from 14 to 12%.
Jason Averbook: And I hope David, that another thing that people start to take away is that just like human experience matters, human storytelling matters. It is fascinating to me, the number of people that still count on a system to tell a story. Systems don't tell stories, systems give you the words to be able to tell a story in your own words, but the system itself isn’t going to tell the story. Once again, in the green room we were talking about why people are not happy with systems and that is one of the biggest reasons why. It is because they are like, Hey, what we saw in the demo, isn't working with the CEO. Yeah, no CEO wants to see your dumb report. Sorry. CEO's want to hear you tell the story about what you are doing to impact what they care most about and that takes a human. Don't try to get rid of humans when it comes to storytelling, please. Get rid of humans when it comes to data entry, but don't get rid of humans at that final mile, when you are finally trying to show the value that our function delivers to an organisation.
David Green: That kind of leads on to the next thing. I will actually ask the next question and then we will maybe look at some organisations that you think are doing this well.
Experience and feeling is one thing, but trust is another. A bit of an obvious one but I would be interested to hear your thoughts about this.
Why is fostering trust so important for both designing and measuring employee experience?
Jason Averbook: Trust is, at the end of the day, what determines whether someone feels, back to that F word again, feels good about something. Whether they feel like it is accurate. I still laugh, David, the number of people that measure employee experience based on how a screen looks. If the way a screen looks builds trust in you and makes you completely trust, you are off on some weird phishing scam. Think about all the things we do online, so let's pretend that we are creating this podcast together, but what the experience comes out to, to the user, is nothing like what you and I talked about to today. You chop it up, you edit it, you make it into this thing where it is like “Averbook, says HR people suck”
David Green: We won't do that.
Jason Averbook: But what would be my feeling related to trust, to you, for them? It would be gone.
This might be a great experience recording this, but if the end output is not a good experience, the trust is gone. I might go in and do my self service transaction as an employee, but guess what? At the end of the day, if my pay is wrong, the trust has gone.
If I go into a portal and type something in the search bar, or as my 14 year old says the answer bar, and I don't get an answer. The trust starts to go away. So great user interfaces are the first step, but they don't create the overall experience.
If you order a pizza and you say, I want a pizza with ham and pineapple. I have always thought people are weird that like hot fruit on pizza. If I want a pizza, a ham and pineapple, but what gets delivered to me is pepperoni and sausage. I might love the user interface, but I hate the experience because that was not what I wanted.
So I hope that makes sense.
Trust is key and the minute that you abandon on a technology journey, or the minute that you abandon because a report you say, David, gave me this data and Ian, gave me this data. Guess what? Trust. Gone. I don't trust any of the data anymore.
Trust is at the core and a good experience or a great experience builds more trust and then it is a flywheel because guess what? I can now trust and I can deploy more and all of a sudden people don't see HR as the police, they see HR as someone trying to be proactive in helping them drive different outcomes.
And I don't want to sound preachy, I know I do, but trust is at the centre of humanity and what makes up a human.
David Green: And I think, a really important point about trust is as HR professionals, we are collecting a lot of data, increasingly amount of data about the people that work for our organisation. Let's be transparent about the data we are collecting, why we are collecting it, who has got access to it, and what benefit you are going to get from us actually looking at this data. So for example, if we are collecting skills data, we are going to collect skills data, we can give you personalised recommendations to support your learning, to support your career paths within the organisation. We can we can give you information that will tell you how much your skills are worth both within the company and within the external marketplace, and we are also going to say that if you have got skills one to five, if you learned skills six to seven, this is going to help you move towards this level of opportunities within your organisation. Then if I am an employee, I have got trust because okay, you are collecting my data, but I am getting personal benefits.
Jason Averbook: Yeah and David, I agree with you and but, LinkedIn doesn't tell me how they are going to use my data to make sure that your articles pop up at the top every month, but guess what? They do. And the reason I keep going there is because I find value.
Instagram, it doesn't tell me how it is going to use my data yet, I keep going there because I keep getting value.
So I just want to make sure that we don't over-engineer this too much. Oh, we have to ask permission. I know that is a huge thing, but guess what? Someone is not going to give you permission and then what is going to happen? Nothing. So we have to be really clear.
And my personal opinion, I don't mean to sound radical here, if we are going to create personalised experiences and we, as an organisation, already have the data. Do we have to continue to ask for permission as to how we are going to use the data? Because I guarantee, if you ask for permission, someone is going to say No. Don't even go through the whole exercise, that is human nature, like we talked about, we are never going to be completely aligned.
So, if you want no, ask the question. If you want to actually get somewhere, it is probably best to start doing and show value like, wow, isn't this cool that it is actually showing me a career path. Not, they never asked me if they could do that. Do you know what I am trying to say? I am sorry, I don't mean to sound like radical about it.
David Green: No, you are right, It is a balance, isn’t it.
Jason Averbook: It is a balance but there is also a point where, if we don't ever just take some chances and we don't ever just start pushing forward to prove that people can trust us, they are always going to say no. We are never going to go anywhere. Then you and I, are going to be 90 years, sitting in some retirement home saying, oh no they have still got file rooms.
David Green: We talked about file rooms in the green room.
Jason, just to wrap up, this is the question we are asking everyone in this series. We have touched on it a little bit, but I know this is something that you particularly have a lot of expertise in. What is the role of technology in supporting employee experience?
Jason Averbook: David, technology is the fuel that allows employee experience to scale. Because there is nothing that we are doing, in the world of employee experience, that if I am your HR person, David, I am the HR person for 10 people, I can provide a good employee experience because guess what? I know everything about you.10 people. I know everything about you. I know what you like, I know what kind of ice cream you like, I know what time you have to pick up your kids. I can provide a really good employee experience because I know you. That word that I want to throw in is scale. So once you get to scale, then all of a sudden, that can't happen. We can't have a one to ten ratio of someone that makes me feel like they care about me. My manager should be doing this, but my manager also has a gazillion other things to do.
So, as I start blowing up that scale balloon, I have to realise that technology is the only thing that is going to drive consistency, otherwise if you ask me a question, you are going to get one answer. If you ask Ian, a question you are getting another answer and then all of a sudden, there is that T word again, I don't trust.
So technology and data are the only things that allow us to scale experience. So that is the first thing. The second thing is, that with all of the data I have, technology allows me to personalise in a way that the human brain just can't do. David, you and I spent a day in Dubai together. I should remember everything about our conversation in Dubai, but I was probably half sleeping and I don't remember it all. But guess what? As a machine, I would remember that and be able to say, Hey, remember when we were in Dubai, we talked about this and this. And guess what you would say? Wow, that person really knows me. That system really knows me. And there is that F word again, that makes me feel good.
So to me, the technology is the fuel. The problem with technology is that people just think they can buy the technology and forget all of the other design stuff, like we just need something out of the box that is going to create a great employee experience.
And that is where organisations go wrong. They have the wrong expectation. They start down the wrong path. They still go live with a minimum viable product. No one wants a minimum viable product, I am going to provide you a minimum viable experience. How does that sound?
David Green: Not particularly good.
Jason Averbook: That is what I mean, how do I switch from minimum viable to minimum lovable. If someone says, I am going to provide you with a minimum lovable experience, you are like, oh cool, that is awesome. But minimum viable experience. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for providing me a minimal viable experience.
So there is a lot of things that go wrong with technology, if we don't actually start with the real purpose of what we are trying to achieve.
David Green: Yeah. And I think that is so important, to start with that purpose. What are we trying to achieve and what is the role of technology and data to get us where we need to get to and tell us that we have got there.
Jason Averbook: Yes, exactly. And then make sure that we, once again, listen. The way we measure our success is by listening, not by saying we went live, but by listening to what people are saying and how they are feeling, so I can then say, hey, I made those micro moments. Now I am moving up on Maslow's hierarchy.
David Green: Well Jason, we could probably talk all day and actually you do have pretty much all day to talk at the moment, but we do try and limit these episodes to around 45 minutes. Just for our listeners, Jason is sitting in a hotel room in Cincinnati, while we are recording this and he came today, especially so he could record this. We are very grateful, Jason, for you doing that.
Jason Averbook: I wish we were live, David, it would be so much fun.
David Green: We should try and do a live episode one day and then if you said about the F word, I would be even more nervous than I was when you said it. I knew it was going to be something good, like feels.
Jason, thanks so much for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. How can listeners stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, and find out more about your work at Leapgen?
Jason Averbook: The best way is just to connect with me on LinkedIn or connect with Leapgen on LinkedIn.
And just in closing, one of the things David, we didn't get to that you mentioned, and I will say this really quickly, there are organisations that are doing this well.
David Green: Yes, I should have asked that question. So let's do that now.
What organisations are doing this well, Jason?
Jason Averbook: It is not easy. There are organisations that are doing this well. The reason that we named Leapgen, Leapgen, is the Leap stands for something. It stands for love, energy, audacity, and proof.
How do you love what you do? If you love what you do it generates energy. If you have energy, you can do the audacious. And then you prove that value with everything audacious that you do. Okay.
So there are organisations out there that are doing audacious things, they are putting in conversational bots. Once again I have jumped right to the technology on purpose. But because they had a vision, because they had a mission, they leverage technology to truly create a personalised experience that makes an employee feel like they constantly have a Siri or Alexa, with them to be able to answer any question. There are organisations that are thinking about employee experience and saying, guess what? Mental health, wellbeing, are a key component and right now, no one can find even how to access these amazing benefits that we offer our workforce because they are buried on our intranet or portal somewhere.
So there are organisations all over the world, that are making small steps to do this. This is not a big bang thing. The other thing that is so important about this, and those organisations that do this best, is they do this and treat these initiatives like pets, not like rocks. You walk them daily, you water them daily, you pick up after them daily. You don't just put it in and like, ah cool, done. Let it sit. And that is a muscle that the experience team, within an organisation, has to build. That could be another whole podcast by the way.
So don't give up, there are lots of organisations doing it, but start with the why. What are you trying to do? Then, what is the best way to achieve it?
David Green: Brilliant. Thanks, Jason. And thank you for remembering the question that I forgot, as that is a really important question as well.
How can people find out more about Leapgen as well?
Jason Averbook: It is just leapgen.com. Follow us on LinkedIn. We do a weekly digital meet-up every Friday, that we would love to have more people from across the pond, in as well. We already have a good contingent from Europe and India. We would love to always grow that though.
You will find all that information on LinkedIn.
David, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And I just have to say, I called you weird earlier. You are the one of the five weirdos, or three weirdos, that I love listening to when it comes to analytics and intelligence. Thank you for everything you do, oftentimes people don't hear that, but the work that you do is truly amazing. The work you do to put together those lists of articles and content is truly amazing and I know the whole industry finds it a value. So thank you.
David Green: Thank you, Jason. I have been called a lot worse than a weirdo, so I will take that as a compliment. And thank you too as well, you have been helping shape this space for a long time and I think companies are finally starting to catch up, which is good. So thank you, Jason. Take care.