This week’s podcast guest is Thimon De Jong, a social psychologist specialising in the future of human behaviour and the Founder at Whetston.

 Throughout this episode Thimon and I talk a lot about the psychological impacts of the pandemic on the workforce and discuss:

• How organisations and employees confront change during a crisis and taking an experimental approach to hybrid work

• Thimon’s interesting perspective on why asking employees what they want during the crisis itself, might not be the best approach

• The reality of COVID being a digital decelerator despite the speed at which companies have gone virtual

• The Gen Z workforce and how allowing younger workers to shape the workplace might be more effective than trying to mould the individuals themselves, to meet the expectations of the existing environment

Support for this podcast comes from Medallia. You can learn more by visiting https://www.medallia.com/employee-experience/.

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 Thimon De Jong, Founder at Whetston, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show, Thimon, it is great to have you on. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your work?  


Thimon De Jong: Yes. Well, thank you, David. I am delighted to be on the podcast. My name is Thimon, I am from Amsterdam, the Netherlands and I am a social psychologist and my specialisation within that field is the future of human behaviour. 


 So how can we expect people to behave in the near future? So not 2050, not science fiction stuff, but close by. And then how can we use that for business strategy and leadership. I have my own organisation called Whetston, and I help mostly corporate organisations with that. And I lecture at the Utrecht University, in the social psychology department.  


David Green: Well great. Certainly recently, we have seen human behaviour has had to change over the last two years, and certainly that has changed the approach to business strategy and leadership and I guess moving forward as well, so I think we can have some interesting conversations around that Thimon.


Thimon De Jong: It is a tragedy but from a research perspective, it is so exciting because normally we have these small mini lab tests on remote work, hybrid work, and all these small things. But now it is like a true global scale, the whole of society is turned into one big experiment. So, from a people research perspective, these are very exciting times.  


David Green: Now I have heard a rumour that as part of your lecturing you like to break out the bass guitar, every once in a while, to keep students engaged over Zoom because obviously it is very different engaging students over Zoom than it is in person. Any chance that we could invigorate our listeners with a couple of notes? 


Thimon De Jong: Yeah, so what I have, I am actually picking now up a bass guitar, because I have got it handy here for all the students. Deep diving a little bit into the research, the students are struggling quite a bit with their mental health and we moved, well not now because we are hybrid now at the university, but last academic year we were fully virtual and they were just struggling. So to keep up the engagement we thought of a plan, me and my fellow lecturers, we have to do extra things for them. So I thought I will bring out the bass guitar and then in the breaks I would play some tunes. And of course, if you play the bass, hang on let me play something like this. Next round, I would invite students for next week's lecture, would you do something in the break? And you know, if we as lecturers go first, then the next rounds the students will go. So we had singing students, guitar students, drum playing. So, yeah, it is always handy to have it here just in case.

David Green: Well, we are approaching about a hundred episodes on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast and we have never had a musical interlude yet, so Thimon, thank you very much for being the first one to do that.

 But seriously, it is a serious topic, as you said. I have got two young children and I know during lockdown, at times they were really struggling to do their lessons online because the interaction is completely different to what it is like in person and I guess that is exactly the same in your experience. So, if you can liven it up a little bit and engage people and give them a more positive sense of wellbeing about it a) it's good for mental health, but it is also good for learning as well.  


Thimon De Jong: Yes. And what is puzzling to me, is that not more of this is being picked up by leaders for their workers. Not to say that they should play a musical instrument, but to think more of an extra element or extra layer they should bring in addressing their team members or even salespeople, in how they actually build up a human connection, because so much is lost as it is virtual. I thought with being one and a half, two years into this pandemic, we would see it be a lot more advanced than what it is. I still have the feeling that 99% of all the Zoom’s and Team’s I am doing, it is just standard laptop open and it is a standard microphone and the camera. I don't know how that is with, with your experience? But that puzzles me.  


David Green: It is similar. We try and mix it up, but yeah, it is challenging. It is hard I think because people, particularly in a business perspective, they are on a Zoom meeting, but they are answering emails, they are doing work. They are being pinged on Slack. So it is hard to get people's attention like you would do perhaps, if someone was in the room with you.

Well, we are going to talk a lot today about change. What do you need to be aware of, in terms of employee perceptions of change or the impact on employees? You have talked a bit about mental health, so I guess that is part of it.

Thimon De Jong: Yeah. So the mental health perspective. If we look at the statistics, everyone will have read this in the news, that the mental health statistics all indicators are pointing in the wrong direction. Whether it is stress, anxiety, anti-depressant uses, suicidal thoughts, the working from home burnouts, all indicators are pointing in the wrong direction. So, most countries see a doubling of people for example, reporting stress and anxieties, and it is especially the teens and our youngsters in their twenties who are overrepresented, who are suffering even more. And then you have the group who reports they are doing fine. But my experience having one-on-ones with leaders and business professionals is that they are not, especially now that we are going into the second winter of this pandemic. What I hear more and more often, and I am waiting for the big research report to show that, but people are just tired. What I get back most is that people say, “I am just so tired”, “I am just hanging in there”

 And what you get is with people who are just barely hanging in there, so they haven’t had burnout yet, they haven't reported sick, they are hanging in there, is that you need mental energy for change. So if, for example, you are changing because you are going back to the office or the employer asks you to go hybrid. You need energy for that. And most people, their energy batteries are completely drained and this is not a good time to ask for behavioural change, whether it is from an employer's perspective, but also if you are a business and you have a great new product or service that you want to sell, and a behavioural change is needed for that, this is not the time.

David Green: Obviously, as we talked about the start, we have gone through the biggest forced experiment in human history, certainly around when it comes to working from home and everything else. The workforce, as you have alluded to, is experiencing some massive disruption and change around that. 


What do we have to be cognisant of as we ask employees, how to shift to either hybrid work models or returning to office. It does seem that there is a growing disconnect, for example, between leaders and their workforces around these topics.

Thimon De Jong: Yes. So there are a few things at play here. One is that most of the organisations I work with, and these are the larger corporations like Ikea, Vodafone, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, these big ones, they ask their employees what they want. How are you doing? They do employee engagement surveys. And what do you think of just remote working? When we go back to the office, how much would you like?

The big mistake they make is that you should never ask people in a crisis situation, what they want when the crisis is over. And if you would compare this to let’s say a flooding or an earthquake, you should not ask people right after the earthquake or the flooding, what they would want when all the mess is cleaned up and we are a year ahead. So the thing is that with most of these surveys that people get in front of them, they overestimate their own desire to work from home. So with most of my clients, the engagement surveys show, well we would like to do 50/50, or I would like to be for three or four days, for the majority of my work, I would like to do it from home.

While from a mental health perspective the social psychologists like myself, would advise the opposite, we advise you do the majority of your work at an office to have a healthy work situation and your private situation, and a clear distinction between that. A commute, as we know from research, is great for your mental wellbeing. No commute is not a good thing. It is good to be with colleagues. Yes, there might be a traffic jam. Yes, you might be in that open office that is hard to concentrate in, but for your mental wellbeing as a whole, it is a good thing. But then you have the engagement surveys, which show the opposite and they give the leaders the impression that their workers actually would like to do 50/50, or would like to spend most of their time working from home. Great, now we can close half of our office space.

I have a client in the US, they closed down 80% of all their office space and they say, well, we are only going to do 20% of work, post-pandemic will be at the office, we asked our employees and they are fine with that.

I think that that's very much not a wise thing to do. I think the best thing to do is to take the coming months and maybe even years as an experiment and say, right, we are going to experiment with hybrid work and we will go on to ask you what you think. But I seriously think that leaders should nudge their people back to the office, get them in there and then only after a few weeks or a few months ask them, all right, so now what is your experience? What would you like now? And not ask them in a crisis situation where they have been working from home for 18, 19, 20, months.  


David Green: It is interesting, isn’t it, because some organisations have publicly come out and basically said they don't believe in the hybrid work. A couple of big investment banks…

Thimon De Jong: Yes, Goldman Sachs.  


David Green: And they get absolutely lambasted by the media and I guess that has two effects. Number one, no big company likes negative press, and two, what impact does that have on the people that work for them already? Do they start voting with their feet because they think that they want to be working virtually?
It is a real conundrum for leaders. Isn't it? Because as you said, if you ask people in a crisis and they are working from home at the moment, and maybe there is all this news about health and new variants going on, they will say well actually, I quite like to work from home because it is a bit safer.

Thimon De Jong: Yes, the people are scared. We have the new Omicron variant for just a week now and everyone is super scared again. So it feels safer to work from home, but it doesn't tell you anything how you would feel in a year or two years’ time. It is a common fallacy that you overestimate the crisis while you are in a crisis. 


So remember 2007, 2008, when the financial and economic crisis happened we said, oh, the banking system is going. Wall Street is going upside down and it is never going to be the same anymore and we thought that the whole banking, financial system, it would be a revolution. It will be the enlightenment for the whole sector and if we look at where we are today, we are back where we were. That feeling of change in the whole world of financial institutions and banks and what they could do, and how creative they could get, and the regulation of that. 


So that is where we are today. And do people vote with their feet? Yes, they do. Have you heard of the great resignation?  


David Green: Oh, I might have heard a few things about it. 


Thimon De Jong: The big quit. It is not necessarily because employers are forcing the people to come back to the office, it is also the opposite. What if you want to go back to the office, but your employer says, I am going to close 80% of our offices.

So, what we know is that many people have, because they were scared and afraid, have not switched jobs, they stayed where they were. And they have had a lot of time to think, contemplate, chat with a partner, look out of the window, and when the moment is there and we see the numbers in China, for example, in Asia where they are a little bit ahead of us, we see that there is quite a lot of change coming into the world of HR, where people are going to switch jobs.  


David Green: I mean, it happened in the last crisis and the financial crisis as well. And interestingly it is how a lot of the area we work in, in people analytics, it almost gave a bit of a boost to some people analytics things and companies that had already established them because they were able to start using data to understand who might leave and if they happen to be in business critical roles or in the high-performance roles, that maybe the company can do something about it prior to them leaving. 


Thimon De Jong: And this is an interesting one, because you might work for Goldman Sachs, a corporate banker, would you then leave and go to JP Morgan? And the answer is no. So the instinct thing is, what we know from the research, that after a crisis or when the pandemic is truly over, we will see that a group of people will develop what's called PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. So actually, their mental health will get worse when the crisis is over.

But you will have twice as many people who would develop PTG, post-traumatic growth, which people are less familiar with. Post-traumatic growth is, people might know it from when you have experienced a life-threatening illness and you survive it. So people who have survived the life-threatening illness, many of them experienced post traumatic growth and they say, I have survived this and now suddenly I cherish every moment that I have with my loved ones. I cherish looking outside and the sound of the birds. And they do career switches, but they do a complete switch, not only switch careers but switch to different industries. So a corporate banker will become a ski teacher in the Dolomites, or they will become a teacher and really say, I am going to align my career with my personal values and my purpose.

So, this is a big opportunity. For example in the Netherlands, we have a big shortage of teachers in any schools and there is a shortage of medical personnel, nurses etc. This is a huge opportunity to get all these people from, if we take the UK as example, from the city of London to get these bankers out of there and put them in front of the classroom and not the other way around. 


So if I was the head of some sort of educational, schooling, faculty, I would say, all right, that is where I put all my HR strategy to pick up the talents who are going to vote with their feet.  


David Green: Interesting. So with the big companies, it's interesting because a lot of criticism of big companies is that they don’t listen enough to their employees. What you are saying is maybe on this particular matter, they are listening too much to their employees and probably shaping whole hybrid work strategies around that.

I like what you said about that communication that, we are going to do a number of experiments around hybrid work over the next few months, next couple of years, and we are going to speak to you as employees and understand which ones work from your perspective, but also maybe what works from the company's perspective around productivity, innovation, and all these things that we could look at.

Have you seen any companies that are actually doing that? And if so, how are they communicating that message to their workforce?

Thimon De Jong: So, yeah, I have a client, a very big IT firm and they have said, we don't know yet because the research is not there. And if the answer was there with what the perfect hybrid balance would be, we wouldn't be discussing it because it would be a well-known fact. So, we are going to experiment and we are going to check in all the time. We are going to set up a digital forum where the leaders can actually share best practices because this is very much trial and error.

Leaders have to be vulnerable and say, we don't know it either. So every team, let's say the programmers, things will be different than for the marketeers and things will be different from the marketing or the sales team. So it is not like there is a one size fits all, that they can implement.

They have said, and we discussed this, we are going to experiment for six months and then we are going to do a big survey where we put everything together and we are going to see, are we going to continue this for another six months or is it then our new HR strategy that we are going to formulate, put new pillars in place, and that is the way forward for the coming years. 


So I think it is a good time to not say let's experiment and when the answer comes, it comes, but say, all right, we are going to take six months. Lots of knowledge sharing. Let’s all fail. Let's all have fun. Let's all succeed and share. And in six months’ time, of course it could be 12 months with the new virus variants and the winter ahead of us, who knows that might be pushed forward. But it is good to have a fixed time and an experimentation culture. And for the leaders to say, we don't know, we don't know, but they should be a little bit like parents saying to their children, we kind of know what is best for you. Get back to the office. I know you don't want to, but we want you in here for a few months and then if you really don’t want to, and if the research shows, then you can decide. So yeah, not listen to the people too much.  


David Green: So, to sort of summarise that, on this particular topic around the change and disruption, that is already happening, but is likely to happen in 2022. What would be your number one piece of advice for organisations?

Thimon De Jong: Oh well, very much track the mental health would be most important. And what we do know is that the more of a social bond you can create, the more of a community feeling you can create, there is less chance that people will actually fall through the ice and get the burnout.

So for leaders, it is simple things like, not checking in weekly with your team members but daily, and preferably for a few minutes. Little things like this. Practice active, reflective, listening more than you normally would. Use words like experimentation.

Get them back to the office, but focus on mental health and not so much on, are we as productive in hybrid as we were fully remote. Because when we switched to remote, it was like, oh we are so productive or even more for them. It wasn't productivity. And were the numbers up? Were we making all the performance reviews and targets and KPIs, and did they translate well to the virtual.

I would say in this phase, it is getting people through the end of the COVID tunnel and if we are there, we come out of and then everything production, innovation, everything will pick up again. But if you lose half of your team or yourself as a leader, you have lost the game.

David Green: Yeah. And of course, productivity so difficult to measure anyway, and most companies are measuring it by asking people if they feel more productive? Which maybe in a crisis, they may feel more productive, but at what cost? Like you said. Long hours, potential risk of burnout, mental health challenges.  


Thimon De Jong: People are doing more longer hours because it is so easy to open up the laptop on the couch when the kids are in bed.  


David Green: It is Netflix or the laptop, isn't it, most of the time. Another thing I think you have got a really interesting view on is, there has been lots of talk about how COVID-19 has accelerated digitalisation and enabled virtual working, you have got a slightly different view on the topic of digitalisation, which I think would be great for our listeners to hear.

Thimon De Jong: We have seen acceleration with everything virtual, the Zooming, the Teaming, remote everything, hybrids now, yes, yes, yes. But with many of my clients, I have also seen a digital deceleration in other parts of their digital transformation journey. 


For example, I worked for a large telco and I have worked at somewhere with their legal team. The big project that we were working on when it came to digital before COVID, was a legal AI, artificial intelligence, project. And this was a piece of software that helped them with scanning all the legislation regulation around telecommunications around the globe, help them make decisions connecting to policy makers. When COVID hit, this whole legal AI project completely stopped.

So I had a chat with the leader of this legal department and I asked them, why did it stop? And he said, well, two things. One is our IT personnel resources fully went to do this connecting virtually, connecting digitally. We suddenly had to switch to, how does Teams work? How do you set up a home office? How do you connect remotely to a policy maker, to our stakeholders? So that is where all the effort went and when we got used to that and we wanted to restart it again people said, really? No. They were just too tired.

So the mental energy for this new project, for this future focused artificial intelligence that they were experimenting with, which was very new, he said we kept it in the fridge and we are waiting to open up the fridge again to give this another go when COVID disappears and the energy of our people returns and the IT resources come back.

The interesting thing is that I expect when we come out of COVID, a lot of these things that we were working on will come back because, I have heard this from quite a few clients, we stopped frictionless shopping. We stopped this AI project. We stopped this, because all our energy and our resources and our IT staff had to go into this. Many older leaders I still see them struggling with muting and un-muting their microphones.

So definitely a deceleration and you can reverse this. We are going to see an acceleration when we come out of COVID, especially because there is a lot of budgets that will become available. What we will see after the crisis is that there are a lot of risk taking, because organisations do not want to take risks this is not a risk taking time, so what we will see is them start to take risks. Budgets will become available. Old projects that were put in the fridge, we will open up the fridges.

So it is going to be a brilliant time when we come out of this, because all these forces are going to stack on top of each other and it is going to be a great, perfect storm, for some true digital acceleration. 


David Green: So on that thing, let’s hope we are coming out of the COVID tunnel as you described it, at some point next year. Please, can we come out of the COVID tunnel.

How can organisations get back those digital transformation programs that may have been decelerated during COVID?  


Thimon De Jong: Wow, that is a good one. Well, there is not a one size fits all solution because it depends a little bit. So preferably, you will have a few team members who come out with post-traumatic growth and do not leave your organisation. So these are the people that will have plenty of energy, that are the most happy to be at the organisation, and they are the ones that say, I am back at the office. This is so great. I have so much energy. This is brilliant. So try, as a leader, to identify the people who have or are experiencing post traumatic growth because they have extra energy. Give them the old product and say, all right, now, here is this old, new thing. This is your baby. Now go ahead and you'll be in charge and you can lead this one. Don't give it to people who will take longer actually to recover from the COVID pandemic.  


David Green: And I suppose there is an element as well of, let's look at the things that we were doing that we de-prioritised during COVID. Are they still relevant for our customers, for our employees, for products and services that we produce? Is there anything else that we need to be thinking of, given that it is going to be over two years. Let’s reprioritise the ones that we need to reprioritise. Let’s bring in new projects that we need to do as part of that digital transformation. And as you said, let's get the right people involved, who have still got some energy left.  


Thimon De Jong: Yes, yes, and this might be different people than before the pandemic. It is hard to predict, these are the people who are going to experience PTG and these are the ones who’s mental health will get worse. So, for leaders this is not a thing to be easily measured in an Excel sheet, this is very much tracking how your people are doing and you need your EQ for this, not only your IQ.

David Green: And as you said, checking in regularly with your employees is a good way to do that. Particularly if you have got good EQ and you can pick it up. 


Thimon De Jong: Yeah. So the thing is with leaders I have worked with, they say, yeah, but I have done that. I have asked them, how are you doing and they just say, oh, I am doing fine now I don't need your help. It is like I don't get anything back. But the thing is, that is completely fine, that is great because then they are doing fine, but keep checking in because it means the door is open. It's still open. It is always open, because if something does happen, you are the one they turn to and you will hear it first. 

So it is not that if you open up and start checking that everyone will spill all their emotions, no. We are actually asking for time and energy investment from leaders to keep track of their teams. Yes. So don't be disappointed or stop checking in if you don't get anything back. This is an encouragement for the leaders out there who have struggled with this.

David Green: Yeah and I think we have certainly seen during the crisis, or maybe coming out of the crisis, that emotional intelligence element, or that EQ element, of a leader is so important. Hopefully the leaders we produce in the future will start to have higher EQ than maybe some of those in the past. Anyway, perhaps that is a bit controversial. 

Thimon De Jong: Can I say, I am middle-aged, I'm 44. If I discuss mental health with my peers, men between 40 and 50, it is always a struggle. If I break my arm and I shared it with a group of friends, everyone would start sharing their experience and physiotherapist and bragging and I had this. But if I share I am anxious and I can’t sleep it is like okay, here is a beer. Let's go for a bike ride. That's it.  

So, what I advise is to actually find some younger people to have a chat with, if you are like me a bit older and struggle with this in your peer group, and to do some reverse mentoring. To get a reverse mentor when it comes to mental health and actually find a youngster in their early twenties, who are completely at ease talking about their mental health, have the language, and can actually help older leaders to find the right ways and language to help their team members. So find a reverse mentor, if you struggle with this.

David Green: That is a really good piece of advice. I am a similar age group to you, maybe a few years older, but I know exactly that. Particularly in the UK, which is quite repressive about talking about their emotions, particularly men. So yeah, talking about it actually helps.

The last topic we are going to talk about today, centres on the demographic makeup of the workforce. You have been doing some really interesting work on adjusting to a multi-generational workforce, in particular meeting the expectations of Gen Z workers. 


Can you tell us a little bit more about that project? That would be fascinating to hear.

Thimon De Jong: So Gen Z is of course the big, well it is not a buzzword, but it is the new generation coming in and actually causing quite a bit of… Well, we have a few clients who came to us specifically with challenges saying, we actually have a generational clash in the workforce. We have these millennial or Gen X leaders and they struggle leading Gen Z. It is hard to summarise it briefly. There are various things, mental health to bridge the gap from the previous topic is one.

So again, we work for a large IT firm on this and they did interviews with their youngest workers, so Gen Z workers, and they asked them what do you expect from your leader? And one of the big red threads coming out of these interviews was, I want my leader to have a high EQ, to be emotionally intelligent. To ask me how I am doing. To ask me about my family situation. I want my leader to understand me.

If you are in a more traditional, larger organisation, which is about KPI and performance, and this is what you should do, you know the more traditional management style, many leaders struggle with the emotional and mental health needs that Gen Z has. And I think this is, for the HR community, a wake-up call to start educating leaders on how they can actually get on par with the youngsters, when it comes to mental health.

It is not an easy one. Reverse mentoring is one of the answers or one of the practical things we actually advise. We say, we want you to find a reverse mentor and one not from within your organisation. So find a reverse mentor from outside of your organisation to help you and then report back and share best practices. We have done this with a big law firm in Scandinavia and it has worked brilliantly.


David Green: Have you published anything that people could dig in a little bit further into the research. 

Thimon De Jong: I have a book coming out next year, so then it is this year because we are listening in the new year, over the summer. That is still quite a few months ahead of us.

David Green: Okay. So look out for Thimon’s book.

Thimon De Jong: Yes. But the mental health is one piece, then we have the whole woke, cancel culture, having a purpose, and Gen Z being activists within organisations. Then we have had discussions on pronoun usage with leaders, that is quite a big topic as well. What can you do as an organisation and as leaders because this generation is not sitting quiet in a corner, doing their chores and being silent.

David Green: And I guess another element is around climate. Employees now, maybe it is not always younger employees but a lot of time, they expect their companies to have a defined stance on climate and that they should be doing something about it, not just rhetoric. And I guess that is an opportunity for HR as well to potentially turn that rhetoric into action and take on board a little bit of what employees are saying. And communicate to employees that we are actually doing something about this, because, hey, that is a good way of stopping people leaving if it matches their purpose.

Thimon De Jong: Yeah. So climate anxiety is now, from a mental health perspective, becoming just like gaming addiction was once for the whole mental health professional spectrum, climate anxiety is now becoming a proper anxiety. Sorry for my English, not my first language, but this is really a thing.

This is not a western, higher educated, upper middle class thing. I did a project in India where we ran into a study of Gen Z in India. 90% of Indian Gen Z in the study, and there were more than 10,000 youngsters interviewed, were thinking about sustainability and global warming on a daily basis. And this is India. We think, often the older leaders in the west, think this is just like a darling subject of the Greta Thunberg’s, with the opera singer as a mum, it is this luxurious, post materialistic thing. It is not. But it is not only HR or marketing that has to be on board, this must come from the top.

So if you are struggling as an HR professional, trying to do your best, but the C-suite is not on board then good luck.


David Green: Yeah. That is a good pause on that one. So again, we are kind of circling back really nicely to that whole question of change that we started about. As different individuals enter the workforce, we can either aim to change them, to fit the organisation, good luck with that, or give them a chance to change the organisation itself. Is there merit in both approaches or is one, do you believe, distinctly advantageous to the other?

Thimon De Jong: I think there is merit in both. When it comes to sustainability and the climate crisis, what we also know from previous crises is that when one crisis is over the old challenges return. So we know that when the pandemic is over, and we assume that it will be over this year or next year, then the climate crisis will come back as a boomerang. And if you think there is already a lot of attention on the climate, just wait, “you ain't seen nothing yet”, I think is the correct English expression.

If you ask for priorities from leaders now, whether that is political leaders or business leaders, it is all hybrid working, we are opening up the office again in a few months, and this and that. Climate is in the top five, it is there, but this is not the number one priority. But when we have solved the whole hybrid, remote thing, yeah, I am going to repeat the good luck if it's not on number one, two, maybe three on your priority list as a leader.

David Green: Fascinating, well maybe part two of the podcast in a couple of years’ time, we can maybe reflect on that. And I think this links nicely with the question that we are asking everyone on this series. So this is the final question today, Thimon. What is the future of employee experience in 2022 and maybe moving forward into the next couple of years as well. 

Thimon De Jong: It is all about engagement between people. So as a leader, I said focus on mental health but with a focus on engagement. How can we get people to engage? So yes, nudge them back to the office or remote work, but at least get people physically in the same space together. And if you have to do anything virtual please go beyond just your laptop and get a proper camera, make eye contact. We haven't gone into that AV technical discussion, but there are loads of things coming and helping us to engage better via technical means and how do you set that up. But engagement between people is key because if you lose that, then we will all get depressed and tired. So engagement.

David Green: I think that is a lovely way to end it Thimon, thank you for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast.

Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media and maybe find out more about your work. 

Thimon De Jong: If they just Google my name there is only one of me, Thimon De Jong, then they will find my LinkedIn, Twitter, website or email. So if you Google me, you will be fine.  


David Green: The book, as you said, is coming out in the summer. Have you got a title yet?  


Thimon De Jong: It is called, Future Human Behaviour.  


David Green: Well, that sounds like a must read to me. Thimon, thanks very much for being on the show and thanks also for that little jam on the guitar.

Thimon De Jong: I should have prepared that better, but that is for next time, I will prepare a proper groove. Thanks, David, it has been a pleasure.