Jessica Zwaan: I think a lot of people know deep down It's like an Emperor's New Clothes thing. That not everyone is coming to work for the company mission, purpose, and they're getting fulfillment out of something else. But they feel uncomfortable saying that because they don't know who else is on the same side as them. so I think as if companies just got more comfortable coming out and saying, We know that you're all motivated by different things. Some of you are gonna be motivated by very structural, clear, leveling frameworks and clear benefits and understanding what your next promotion may look like and what they may be and how to have a relationship with work that is transactional and that's great. We want we want to be able to serve you. How can you receive generous pay increases from solid performance without having to be structured on some like career ladder? Some of you are going to be really motivated by a company mission. That's really wonderful. Same as our founders. They love the work that we're doing for our customers. I mentioned a list of five things I asked people to stack rank in my interviews, what's most important to you at work. One of them was feeling a sense of connection to your customers or the your colleagues, people around you. One of them was a sense of creativity, so being able to be creative in the things that you're making. actually being able to create something that's new or innovative or novel. The other one was being able to have autonomy. So you might not be creating new novel things, but you have autonomy in how you do the work. So yeah, I'm just creating the same kind of like reporting spreadsheets month on month, but actually I have flexibility of how I do that, I have flexibility in the ways I do it, I can change the the format. and then the last one was company purpose and Almost every single person put connection with colleagues and customers as the most fulfilling part of their work at the top. And almost every single person put company purpose at the very, very bottom, unless it was evil, in which case they said, Well, if the company's purpose was evil, that would be the most important thing to me, I wouldn't want to work there. But as a as long as your company purpose isn't evil, that's the last thing people are thinking about at work. They're much more thinking about how can I be connecting with customers, how can I be understanding the impact I'm having as a person on other people, my colleagues, how can I be autonomous was the next. one by and large how can I be doing work where I'm not being dictated to or micromanaged and being able to do stuff that works in the way that my life works that might be being able to go pick up your kids after school or just using software and tools that make sense for you. How can I be creative? How can I do things in a way that I feel like I'm contributing something net new to the world, And if you're put supplying that to most people, actually you're going to make them so much happier and more engaged than almost any other thing that just compensating people more or giving people more structure is going to ever do.
James: Hello and welcome to another episode of As Discussed. My guest today is the wonderful Jesse Zwan. author of Built for People and more recently Purpose and Work. Jesse is also the VP. of people strategy and operations at LeapsumHR. Jesse's first book made the case for... the people function the same way. A product manager treats a product. This book goes a layer deeper. into what we're actually designing work for. and into the gap between the purpose that companies advertise and the work that people live. It's clearly a very personal book and it runs close to many of questions that I raise. in my own work. As always, if you find this interesting, please rate it on whatever platform you use and please do share it with a friend that goes a long way to helping to share these new ideas with as big an audience as possible and to help get more interesting guests like Jesse on the show. I've also recently started a Substack. So if you'd to hear more about these ideas, you can find that on Substack. please subscribe to that. And on that sub stack, also be including shortened, tightened up transcripts of these discussions that I have on the podcast. So without further ado, I give you Jesse Zwaan, author of Purpose and Work, and I hope you enjoy it. Jesse, welcome to the podcast. and thanks for joining me. How are you doing?
Jessica Zwaan: Really good. We the the audience doesn't know this, but we just spent a nice little ten minute introduction talking about our both of our love for cycling. So I just got back from a really lovely long weekend cycling upstate New York. So I'm feeling great, ready to talk about compensation and performance and purpose at work and books and everything else we got on the agenda.
James: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. nice low resting heart rate, I g I assume, like from a few days of riding. I've I see you've got your bike in the background. You can't my I've got a wheel in the other side of this, but you can't quite see that. and you've also been travelling as well. So I wanna actually wanted to ask you about that. You started off in Seattle, is that right? Or was it Vancouver? Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Cobbed up. Yeah. No, no, very close to Seattle. about th three, four hours inland across the Cascade Mountains, and then went all the way down to California and then across the US and then back up to New York. So I've done nineteen states in almost as many days, twenty th three days or something like that.
James: That's impressive. And how many states have you done across the US at this point? Do you keep track?
Jessica Zwaan: I actually don't keep track. Yeah, no, I'm so full disclosure, before this road trip I was probab I was a terrible American immigrant in I like barely leave Manhattan when I'm in the US. and I wanted to put an end to that. It like a kind of a dream for me for a really long time to do like a road trip across America and to see things from the ground. I actually would love to one day love to do the transam on my bike and actually ride across the US would be really fun. But this was the interim step and it was so good. It was really fun. I feel like I saw so many amazing landscapes and ate a lot of really good food and
James: Yeah. And you got and you you're okay for eating as well? Because we're both vegan, right? And traveling across America. Certain parts of America is more difficult than others. I have a go to restaurant by the way. I d I'm just curious d what yeah, what what what did you find do you were you able to eat okay on this trip?
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. yeah? Okay, so Yeah, I was able to eat fine. I mean, I think if you've been vegan for a long time, there's a part of you that just gets used to sometimes eating fries and side salad, and you'll kind of have to just be happy with that. I'm like pretty easy to please. I also discovered dill pickle flavoured things, which was like such a big boon for me for the first half of the trip. So there's a lot of like dill pickled crisps, dill pickle cashews, dill pickle corn nuts, everything like that. That was fun. and then I was clued into Waffle House. And if you don't know this, Wa Waffle House
James: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Okay.
Jessica Zwaan: Does a build your own hash brown bowl 24 hours a day, or pretty much all of the waffle houses are. And you can go in and get a hash brown bowl, which is just potato with like mush brown mushrooms and tomatoes and all these different like pickles and jalapenos, and you get like basically it's like there's no to protein in there, but like it's delicious and it was really fun. Mmm.
James: Yeah. Interesting. But I'm about to add that to the rotation. So our go to is Subway, because you can always get a sandwich with fresh stuff in it. And Olive Garden turns out to be a pretty handy option, especially if you're cycling or running or anything like that, because you get all you can eat breadsticks. So you can really carve up on a a fairly low price point at Olive Garden. And it's got this whole sort of nineties midwestern American vibe to it as well, which I kinda like.
Jessica Zwaan: yeah. Mm-hmm. Mmm. Love. Okay, great. Well I I can do a swap in. I'll it. I'll go and if you do a waffle house. We next time we do a podcast we can we can fanotes.
James: All right, done. Yeah, we'll compare those. so let's talk about let's talk about a few things. So I've got a lot to talk about. well you've got a lot to talk about, I've got a lot to ask you about. So first of all, you have a new book, newish at this point, Purpose and Work, which I enjoyed reading on my on my vacation, which is why it's a bit grubby, I'm afraid. no disrespect to the author, but it's a little bit it's got a bit of my sun lotion. Yeah, right.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Wow. Thank you. You should see my books, they're all in a state. Like I think that's how books should be.
James: Yeah, it's also quite doggyed as well. And I I still like every time I dog air a page, I hear Sean Connery's voice from Finding Forester telling me to respect the author. So if I had to do because I had nowhere else to mark the pages. so I actually wanted to start though, going back a step to your previous book, Built for People, because you introduced the concept of work as a product. And I've had a few guests who talk about this concept of work as a product, but for a lot of people it's actually a fairly new concept.
Jessica Zwaan: Huh. Good for it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
James: in the HR space. So for the uninitiated, I'd love you to talk about before we move on to purpose and work, what does work as a product mean to you?
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. great. I I do actually think that the second book is very connected to the first. This is like a helpful step through. So in 2019, I wrote a blog basically making the argument, slash putting out the position that HR leaders should see the work they're building, like product managers. I said that your company's building three products. One of them is your consumer-facing product, which is bikes if you're specialized, or laptops if you're Apple, whatever it may be. Most of your company. company spends most of their time thinking about the consumer facing product. the second one is a fiscal product, which broadly your kind of executive team, your founders, your CEO will be thinking about. And that is like the value of your business for either acquisition for PE or your venture capitalist or shareholder value of your public company. And then the third product is your employee experience. And these three products are symbiotic. They need to work well together in order to be successful as a company. If you have a really, really strong consumer-facing product, hopefully. Hopefully then you'll be getting really great investment and have a really strong fiscal product, which means that you can spend more and have a high quality employee experience product, have very, very aligned employees that feel like they truly understand the value that they're bringing to the company. And then in turn, hopefully they also continue to build a really fantastic consumer-facing product. So these things kind of have a relationship together. The employee experience product, I argue, is a subscription. So it's something that employees subscribe to every month and then they hand in their resignation. Which is the terminating of their subscription. And it's your job in HR to make sure that that funnel, exactly the same as a product funnel, from awareness all the way through to churn, is really optimized to make sure that you've got really high quality subscribers who love their subscription, who you're getting mutual value from, so high return on investment from what you're spending with each other, and that that is being built in a way that is like iterative and evolving to your company strategy rather than this like fixed employee value proposition.
James: Interesting, okay, so the consumer product, the financial product, and the employee experience product. And it's that last one that I think challenges most people because there's this kind of overarching assumption that you have work and people choose whether or not to do it. Yeah, but that's kind of the end of it. But the idea that you can shape that product kind of escapes so many people. And the more you start to think about it, the more surprising it is that how little attention gets paid to the nature of the work. And how little recognition to your point employees have a choice. And the question is are you giving them something they want to choose or not? And the better that choice is, the higher quality the people are. And it amazes me how quickly people jump past that problem to incentives and systems of control and equity and retention and this idea that while you can financially retain and financially incentivize, then we don't need to worry about the work once we've done that. The work is just something you either do or they don't do it. But we've got them now, so it doesn't matter.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm. Yeah, it's interesting. It makes me think about there's a pr friend of mine, Professor Peter Fader, who's a pro professor at Wharton, and he has written a book called The Customer Base Audit, which is a title that I've gratefully, like many things in the world, stolen, an employee-based audit. and in there he talks, he has a really, really interesting example from a customer base, which I think is a really useful one for us to think about, which is he works with a company that has huge acquisition in Q4 over Christmas. They do some kind of discount campaign. Or some like buy for Christmas and you get a free month, that kind of thing campaign. So the acquisition is fantastic. But then those consumers churn really, really quickly, all of them. They don't seem to return. They're not big advocates. They're not strong customers. And I think it's a great example of the kind of place where he's like pulling out from the customer base. Like, where are the cohorts or groups of customers or type of customers, profiles of customers who are actually not a great investment for us? And then how can we instead try to build higher quality customer? Cohorts from where we know, even if they may but may not grow as quickly, they're more high quality customers. and I think that's a these kinds of learnings that you can apply to the employee experience product are really interesting because it like to your point shifts you away from just this idea of like, well, it's engagement on a whole or it's retention on a whole. It's like those things don't actually really mean very much if you've got members of the team who are, for example, massively strategically misaligned and refuse to adopt the ways of working that you want them to for as your company or are really focused on. metrics but very rarely achieve their output metrics. how do you change their behavior or try to look for higher quality employee segments that can hopefully grow better with your team.
James: Yeah. That's another one we could spend a lot of time on this, the idea of employee segmentation. And if you think about the effort, Stefan Meyer writes a lot about this actually. the effort that gets put into customer segmentation over the years has got more and more and more advanced and now is incredibly advanced in the way that companies think about the customers, but employee segmentation it largely doesn't really exist. It's all built around
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Hmm. Yeah.
James: the the kind of horrible ugly cousin is kind of like job architecture. We're gonna split the work out of all these different jobs, then we're gonna find people to fit into those boxes that we've created. But this idea that well if we applied that kind of intellectual curiosity to our employees the same way we apply it to our customers, we can really, really change the quality of the work we offer people. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a it's like such a big area of like I mean I think about this so much when it comes to employee user research, which we're no we'll get into. Like I think this is like one of the most fundamental ideas that hopefully changes changes HL leaders to become better at talking strategically and better at being taken seriously in the boardroom, which is something that I know so many of us desire.
James: Yeah, we hear it a lot, a seat of the table, don't we, that phrase. so, on purpose and work then. So I'm gonna hold it up so people can see it. I I first of I really I really like the the colors. There you go. Snap. So I I like I like the colour palette. this this sort of I don't even know what you call this bluey-gray thing, but I really like that with the combined with the yellow. so you open with something I think a lot of people in HR will recognize, which is having to sell a purpose, sell a purpose.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Yeah.
James: And you mentioned at one point, I think you mentioned that it was post-COVID, was that you were kind of crafting purpose statements in the morning and processing terminations in the afternoon. And this tension between these kind of lofty statements that you often hear in the world of HR and the EVP, the employee value proposition, and then the business reality, this tension kind of runs through that book and concludes with some nice illustrations at the end, which we'll come to. So I'd love to hear you a bit more about the journey to get to this book and the connection. So you put it as, and I get this right, if Built for People was about designing better work environments, then this book is about rethinking what we're designing them for. So I'd love to hear a bit more from you about how you got from the concept of work as a product to purpose and work and what you wanted to what your thesis was, what you wanted to solve with the second book.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Mm. Yeah. It's so funny. I finished the first book and I kind of very publicly was like, I'm never writing another book again.
James: I did the same thing.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's like such the first one's so much h it's so hard and by the end I'm like, No. but then of course you start your brain starts ticking, you start thinking, I really like this idea and I'm kinda person that c I get s I get so nosy into these things that feel un incomplete or like I really want to know the answer to this or have have a better opinion just for myself. Like I started all of my writing, and I started my like blog I think maybe even like fifteen years ago now. when I was a little squirt and barely had anything to talk about, but I was I thought that clear writing leads to clear Thinking. And if I'm writing down what I think, even if no one's reading it, there's like an accountability to that, there's an expectation that I know what I'm talking about, that I've got an opinion. And it served me very well over time. So with all of that in mind, it's become like a really important part of like my personal growth and practice. That I'm like, if I have a big meaty question that I think is important to answer for myself and my team and my work, I want to have a go at doing that. Now, of course, sometimes that ends in a book, which is I think one of the joys of my career, both of them. But When I wrote built for people, there was so many ideas that I was having. Like I'd this has been a way of working that I had been doing at this point for probably five or six years, maybe even more kind of unofficially, and I'd never really fully written down. And there's a lot of extra ideas that weren't so operational but much more kind of like theoretical or philosophical about work and why we do it and what what good looks like at work and what happy, engaged employees look like. But I didn't really have the space to do that. And every time I tried to write it, it kind of got a bit tangly and spidery, and I had to kind of rein back in and cut the chapter. and one of them was about this idea of like why? Like what's what's the reason if if work is a product then why are we buying it? and Dart Lindsley, who's a friend of both of ours, friend of the pod, at the end of his podcast, as you know, asks you the question, what job is your job doing for you? it's a great question.
James: Yeah, it's a good question, isn't it? It's a real real head scratch of that one, yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: and it's so funny, James. Like I had written a whole book about your job being a product, and I really struggled with the answer. Like I couldn't, I wasn't really happy with my answer in the end. I really still felt a little unclear about it. And I was like, well, I hate that. So I want to go away and try to answer this question for myself. So I wrote I started thinking about the Joseph Fine Joseph Pine framework, the experiential economy, which is all about this idea you've Further you move from a commodity, the more valuable your product gets. And we can talk a bit about that later if we think that's helpful. and started really feeling like there's a lot of research that backed up that maybe there the product of work actually does fit very similarly to this economic kind of spectrum. and I believed at this time that work was like for most people going to be this transformative experience. Everyone's at work as it transforms you in some way and makes you a better person. and that means better as in not just virtuously, but makes you smarter or learn something or you know, proves your life because you're contributing to some company mission. and actually what I started finding when I started speaking to people was that was just not the case at all. so it was a really eye opening experience to write and ended with me I think getting to a point where I'm very, very comfortable undermining I think some like much long held truths in the HR community and long held practices that I actually think should probably be almost completely thrown away.
James: Yeah, this really interested me actually. so you mentioned Pine. So this is the service experience transformation type sort of trilogy. And in the same breath, I'll mention that I think a researcher and writer we both like, Amy Resnievsky, she framed it as a job and a career and a calling. And there's a sort of parallel in that in terms of how we think about the market and how we think about an individual, which I really, really like that throughout the book. And
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
James: So and and actually you mentioned we could go into it. Let's get let's dig into this this transformations experience. But you use an example of a cup of coffee, I think, to illustrate this in the book. tell us about that
Jessica Zwaan: Let's do it. Mm. Yeah, absolutely. So let's start just thinking purely about the a product, a commodity, and then we can talk a little about workplaces. So at one end of Joe Pine's spectrum you have the a commodity, which is in this case a coffee bean. And a coffee bean from Columbia or Rwanda is like broadly within the same kind of price point. There are differences, of course, but they're kind of in the same price point. Let's just say about $2.50 a kilo, right? someone bags it up, ships it to Brooklyn or East London, some very Very cool guy with a beanie and lots of tattoos, roast set, they stick some artisanal sticker on the front of it, and all of a sudden you're now paying $17.50 for this good. It's gone from a commodity to now it's a good. Someone buys ground coffee, takes it to a local coffee place that you just walk past the window and pick up a coffee. That coffee is now $45 a kilo. You're buying a very, very, very small amount of coffee, 14 grams. I think if you're a coffee enthusiast, should be about one shot. And all of a sudden you're paying a lot more money per gram. For the same commodity. And that's because you've now got a service attached. Someone's turning that into a coffee for you. The next step is the experiential economy where you're walking into your favorite cafe, they know your name, they're playing some really cool music, the Wi-Fi's on, you're kind of feeling vibey, you're working, you feel like you're part of a community. And then all of a sudden, that same coffee that you may have just grabbed through the service window is now becoming more expensive. You're now tipping, you're now adding on extra layers of that. And that's because you're now paying for an experience, right? And then the final stage is the transformation economy. And that is the idea that you aren't just buying a product and having an experience, but you're actually, in fact, being transformed by this experience. You're participating with the product you're buying. So gyms buy into this a lot. If you're if you know Equinox in the US, you probably know this branding extremely well, which is not just if you buy this gym membership, you're going to have access to all of these amazing machines and equipment, and the community is great around you. The trainers are really high quality. It is, you will literally be a better person if you come to Equinox. the coffee version of that might be
James: Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Be like an artisanal coffee course that you go and learn how to taste different coffees and your similar of coffee is that kind of thing. And you're paying a lot more for the same kind of thing, then you're still getting coffee like grams of coffee. And you wouldn't go to the, you know, say this to some people in my team is like, you can't just advertise a transformational experience without having the fundamental strong product underneath it. So I go to a yoga studio in New York. it's a hot yoga studio. It's very expensive, but I love it. It is like a dark y dark room, hot yoga, great instructors. I come out genuinely feeling like I am like more meditative and like fitter and stronger and balanced. But if the yoga wasn't there, I wouldn't go. I'm not just going for the dark room and the cool trainer and the hot yoga. I'm the hot environment. I'm also going for the yoga. Same with the coffee thing, same with the gym, right? so my argument is that work is on the same spectrum. Now, for the sake of Argument. I don't even touch commodity because work as a commodity is literally just like a legally binding contract that pays you not even worth thinking about. and we go straight to the services one, which is your employer offering you a service above and beyond just the good of a job or the commodity of a job. and for a lot of people that would look like you know reasonable working conditions that allow for clear progression and increases in pay. It would be maybe a structured schedule that you can like balance your life around. It's basically an exchange of goods for sorry. So time for money with a a service attached to that work, benefits, those kinds of things. Then on the way other end of the spectrum, let's skip one for a second, you go to transformation, and that would be you are being changed by the job that you are doing. And that can come in multiple different forms. It may be that you are genuinely changing the world. You're working for a Patagonia, United Nation, and you're it's your your vocation. This this work you're contributing to is making the world a better place. You are being transformed by the work you're doing, and the world is being transformed by that. Or it may be that you are just growing and changing so quickly from this work in a way that you so deeply align with. So working for an artist in An artist studio where you may be an aspiring artist yourself, or working on a piece of technology that you have studied your entire life, and it's you know best in class coming out groundbreaking technology. That might be a transformational workplace. And in the middle, the vast majority of us are at an experiential workplace where what we're into it, what we're into it for, and what our purpose comes from this is. We're gonna get a great experience from this, either through career progression, access to opportunities, access to other really smart people, really interesting intellectual challenges that give us like reasons to be in a flow state and take us home excited about the work we're doing. or it could just be like a great office environment and really great perks around us. And what you're kind of getting out of it there is like the work itself and how you do it is more about the experience of the work and less actually about the aspiration, the the transformative nature of it, as long as it isn't evil, was basically the one subset. So that's like the the economic spectrum. And then Amy Ross's newski's re research, as you mentioned, says people broadly aligned to the same kind of groups, which is job, career, and calling. and I kind of argue that you should almost look at it like a nine-box grid, and most of your team. Should be broadly aligned with where the work is. So if you are pretty much always in an experiential based company, and there are some situations which it may be more transformative, right? You might have an innovation lab that's working on very, very transformative pieces of work, or you might have a team that's working on you know, directly working with customers on the front lines with something that they really do feel like they're changing the world. Sure. But if the majority of your company is genuinely like people are getting their purpose and their fulfillment out of the experience of work, then we should be looking for people that are really satisfied. By the career and the experience of work and not people that are satisfied by the transformation aspects of it, because we can't always offer that.
James: Right. Yeah, that that th thanks for breaking that all down because I I really like the how how that runs through the book. So the service experience transformation, those three first of all, I love things in three. Everything should be in three. It's I it's appealing to understand things that way. Yeah, it could be. I'm just an LLM. This this this is a whole this whole thing is just a fuss. yeah, so that so that really helps rethink and again, it's just a new lens to look at the same thing. And a lot of what this book is, is a new lens to look at something that's already there.
Jessica Zwaan: Are you an LLM? Is that what you are right now? Yeah.
James: And in particular this Reshnievsky aspect of the job, career and calling, if I remember correctly, from her research, she found that all work or all people in all industries fit into roughly three-thirds. So
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
James: About a third of your people will see their work as a calling, about a third of your people will see their work as a career, and about a third of people will just see it as a job. And I think your point and her point and my point is that that's fine. Not everyone has to believe in this grand mission for them to be valuable or even for them to enjoy their work. And it's okay that some people see their work as a job. And I think if I tie back to your kind of initial framing, if we frame this this grand mission.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: then two-thirds of your people are gonna be disillusioned by that probably because they don't see their work as part of a grand mission, they see it as a job or a career. So so that that was really interesting. So I I haven't really got a question at the end of that. I I planned that I planned that very poorly as a as a host. But any any thought any thoughts, any additional thoughts on that?
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Great. No, I think that's a great like kicking off point for a conversation that yeah, I think this idea of like people split broadly in thirds is a thing that comes up a lot when I talk about this work. Is like one thing that I actually do advocate in the book is to try and make your workplace workplace a little bit more like try to hire people that fit more broadly along with the way that you strategically want to build your company. And I think maybe the reason people kind of broadly fit in thirds and then like kind of w in aggregate on multiple companies is because HR teams haven't been specifically looking for what motivates people as part of this like relationship between how do we make people successfully use our product. Now I'm not going to say you're always going to find people that are aligned only with experience, but if you're actively trying to look for people that will probably be more motivated by the things we can offer than the things we cannot, hopefully you're going to be able to have that kind of selection bias and have a team that are more likely to be motivated by the things you're offering. And I think The other thing as well is that it's really important that we I think you would say and me and say and I Amy would say is that there's no difference in performance between these people. And I think this is another really important point that frustrates folks or confuses folks probably a little. Is like how can that possibly be? How can it possibly be that someone who's lives and dies by the company mission can be a as equal performer as someone who's just doing the job because they want to feed their children or just doing this job because they want to be able to afford to travel in three years' time and and do a sabbatical? And the answer to that question, in my opinion, is kind of like It's always a little insulting to the virtue that we have assigned to really caring about work. People can care about things outside of work and work have be a be a means to that end. And I'll give you an example of this. It's super anecdotal. It's obviously just like specific to me. But when I was in my university, I worked multiple jobs while studying because my biggest dream in life was to be able to be self-sufficient, move overseas, and experience the world as freely as I possibly could. I was not doing those multiple jobs and studying my university degree because it was the thing that drove me. But I did very, very well. The thing that was driving me to be super disciplined every day was this other purpose that the only way I could achieve it was by doing the very, very best I could at the work I was doing and the study I was undertaking at that time. And I think all of us probably have examples of this in our life where we're like, well, yeah, I don't love going to the gym, but I was really motivated to look great at my holiday, so I was able to make that happen. and that's obviously a bit of a silly example, but also like thinking about something slightly more serious here is like, who are you to tell a mother that she is as less virtuous or less capable of doing her job because she's motivated by giving a great lifestyle to her children than you are to the engineer that just happens to love cloud accounting. Like I think it's a I think I think it's a very kind of presumptuous and almost patronizing way to view what motivates people and I think that leads to what we talked about you just started with your introduction which is this purpose washing selling a company purpose because we feel like people couldn't possibly handle the reality of the fact that some people are just at work for other reasons.
James: So you're so you're saying that when you worked that checkout job at a supermarket, you weren't fully bought into the mission statement of that supermarket chain? That's unbelievable.
Jessica Zwaan: I would say I haven't been fully brought into the mission statement of fifty percent of the companies I've worked for, but that's okay. I did a damn good job.
James: Yeah. It's that's I mean it's so true, isn't it? I think that that's a really, really powerful example. the parent that obviously obviously their purpose is their children to think less of them because they've got that purpose. I wanna ask you about the fun house mirror. you described the the you talked about the anti-work subreddit and this sort of reaction, I think, to this challenge of work of people out there saying, I I don't really care. It's just not, you know, it's it's like they're telling me to do all this stuff, they're telling me to care. I don't care. I just want to go out and do my work. And you've got this whole community now with social media and things like Fishbowl and Tik TikTok and Work Talk and and you described
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.
James: That community of people, this anti work community, is like a funhouse mirror version of HR. So talk me through that.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, my goodness. I spent some time in some very fun places of the internet in the writing of this book. Yes, if you've never spent time, I mean I'm proudly I've never actually downloaded TikTok. I watched everything through like a TikTok web-based, like illegal watcher or whatever I had to do to see a lot of this content. but I did spend some time on the anti-work subreddit, which I'm you know active on sub I'm active on Reddit. and then just reading a lot of anti-work Twitter and other things as well. And I think it's interesting because what What it basically does, I think, is when you're this fun house mirror idea. By not being honest about the realities of what motivates people and what works to motivate people. So like go back to this idea of like some people are motivated by raising children and they see their job as a means to an end to have high quality pay, stability, and to be able to have time with their children because they've got regular s schedule and great benefits, right? That would be, I would say, like someone who's probably in a job So let's think about the job orientation that we just mentioned with a parent who has a job where their main priority is to have regular pay, stability, benefits, a schedule they understand and can predict because they really, really love spending time with their children and they want to give their children the best opportunities they can. That's someone in a job orientation and that is a a role, a career serving as a services career type or a workplace type for this person. Very aligned. Both sides are probably quite happy with that agreement. but what happens that goes wrong that I think leads to these kind of anti-work subreddits, or anti-work sentiment, really more broadly, is when a workplace is coming out and saying everyone should live the company purpose, we live the company purpose, we love the company purpose, this is what motivates everybody, making everybody answer questions that aren't even used or genuine or relevant during the job interview process, making people answer questions during a performance evaluation and self-review process that are about whether or not you love the company purpose. Well we know research says it doesn't actually do anything different about your job performance. And then going out and talking about company decisions and progress, like trying to squeeze things into the shape of a company purpose or mission or some kind of greater good that the company is doing. And that is what should be motivating you as an individual, completely ignoring the fact that people are just looking for different things, as we talked about before, those different job orientations. What happens is this big sense of dissonance starts existing, right? People and culture teams are saying 1% of the story they should be talking about, or just like completely kind of disassociating from the reality, in my opinion, sometimes. And employees are also kind of parroting the same thing back to themselves, saying, Yeah, I love the company purpose when they get up at the all hands, but actually really going home and being like rolling their eyes about it. and I think what's interesting is these anti work subreddits and anti work movements are pretty comfortable just saying the way that they think what is really happening behind the scenes, because all they're seeing is what to them looks a little bit Like manipulation or just stupidity, right? So they're very comfortable kind of projecting it back at us as a mirror. And it looks horrible. Like it looks awful for us, right? Like my company's asking me to do this horrifying four-day-long purpose initiative where I have to fill in a bunch of paperwork and forms, but I've been hitting all my goals for the last three quarters, and if I don't do this well, then I'm not going to get my bonus this quarter. Sounds pretty rough when you hear those kinds of things, but those things exist out there. Or like my company is saying to us how imp how fantastic it is that we've reached all these customer milestones, we've made all this a fantastic impact towards our company purpose, and yet they're cut cutting our benefits for reasons that we can't explain. and again, those you know, those things I think a lot of changes from HR teams, if they're not coming from a place of like research and reality, just end up getting distorted when they get presented back to us. And I think it's uncomfortable for us to see that d distortion, but it's also kind of necessary because I don't think it's getting better at the moment.
James: Yeah. It does. I mean, I think there are come I think the the br the big picture is it probably is. If you take work a hundred years ago and w take work now, there's definitely been movements and a lot of what we're talking about, putting employees forward, it's been around for so long. Like it really emerged in like the early part of the last century with commentators talking about like Rentis Lyckert was the first person I think that coined participative workplace culture and there's th there's been it's been there for a while, but it's starting to take hold.
Jessica Zwaan: Mmm yes. Yeah. Mm.
James: And I think competition will take care of the rest. The good employees will go to the places where they are viewed as a person who can who can do the work they do. But I want to go back to that. The Finance Mirror is such a good analogy because think a lot of people will will empathize with that. and you talked about the parroting, it almost reminds you a little bit 1984, with people parroting how much they love the party. And you're kind of you kind of all have to, you're all kind of you're all kind of in on this joke, you're all kind of in on this lie. You know it's nonsensical, it doesn't mean anything. because you've got this gap between what you believe the purpose is and what it really is, which brings me to the gap you mentioned towards the end of your book and you had an illustration of this. The example used was very close to my heart, because it was accounting, which I which I was. And in accounting, the idea of selling a greater purpose is is a bit of a stretch. You know, you're really just fundamentally doing something quite administrative.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
James: but let me let me ask you about that,
Jessica Zwaan: a chap called Andy Whitlock, who I interviewed for this book, who had such incredible if anyone needs any kind of comms design around your brand purpose or your brand messaging or your values, he's created values for me in the past and previous companies. He's brilliant. he runs a consultancy called The Human Half and he's very, very good at human half of brand messaging. anyway, I interviewed him and I largely wanted to talk to him about his work that he'd done in crafting and creating company purposes and mission statements, brand purpose statements, and what we could learn in employee land from that work he'd done out in more of the consumer side of things. and he talked about this this kind of like brand purpose gap that we turned to like the kind of employee purpose gap or work purpose gap, which is That's You want what your company actually does and your company purpose or like where you're going, your big aspirational statement, to be separate. You don't want them to be exactly the same, because there's nothing really like competitively compelling about that or aspirational about that. But you also don't want them to be so far apart, so so astronomically unaligned that a person could not even see the horizon that they're actually trying to get to. And the example he or that we talked about in the book and that he he kind of helped craft was you're a company making software that makes accounting easier on the cloud. Well, what you're really doing is very straightforward. It would be a massive purpose gap for you to go out and say, we're revolutionizing the financial incentives of accountants within the cloud atmospheric. But it's like, you don't need to do all that. You can just say we're making accounting more delightful and simple for accountants that really need it. There's a nice purpose there. We're being specific about who it is. It's accounts that really need it. Maybe it's teams of one or those that have, you know, running small businesses themselves and making it more simple and delightful. We're not making some big world-changing financial infrastructure. and that's just all we're trying to do for the time being. And that's actually going to probably hold back quite a lot of this like disassociating or like disengagement with a company purpose if people just feel like, well, that feels like something I am doing every day. This feels like a thing we are doing. Yeah.
James: then you you're not being deceived at that point. Like yeah, all right. It's that deception that people don't like, isn't it? Like being sold one thing and given another. It actually reminds me, Intuit,
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
James: is actually a really interesting case study, specifically to your point, because they don't really promise a greater purpose, but they do promise the opportunity to innovate and try things. So even though there's no grand purpose here beyond the purpose of your clients, so you're trying to help in this process, they do offer people space to try things out. And all all the great innovators offer their employees roam and space to try things out. And so Intuit are actually a pretty good example of finding a purpose within the very constrained walls of their mission, accounting.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Yeah. Yeah.
James: software and offering something that people can enjoy about their work.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. it's a funny thing I'm actually kind of grappling with at the moment as well because I mean another one of the people I interviewed in the book, Hugh Slater, who runs a company called Oli, now is he's founding a new business as well within that same kind of space. But he talks about why people the the big gap between founders' ideas of purpose and then the actual employees' ideas of purpose and in particular as it relates to employment and the job that they're doing. and he talks about how it can be really, really challenging actually to have team members
James: Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Who are so bought into if you give some big lofty company purpose or a company purpose that is really genuinely close to people's hearts, and for him it was it's employee mental health, right? That was the company did. He found it really challenging to get the team to feel bought in and engaged because that is it's something that ambiguity around or business sense becomes difficult to metabolize if your passion in life is mental health and mental well-being, and all of a sudden you're now having to optimize. for net revenue retention of a customer that is unhappy, that's a really difficult headspace to be in. And I think that goes back to the conversation we were having just previously or just before is around How could it possibly be that people that are aligned with seeing their job as a career are going to be less strong performers than those that see it as a calling? Is like, well, actually, how you craft that company purpose statement, how you talk about your employees are here to do, is actually going to also really help motivate whichever group of people you're you're optimizing for to the point with Intuit. If you're focusing on we're here to create a world in which everybody has access to insert some big illustrious thing versus Our company is here to do this very specific thing, but you as an employee are here because we're able to offer you incredible access to opportunity beyond what you would get in another employer. Great. That's fine. Yeah.
James: Hmm. Yeah. Simple as that. I've been guilty of making this mistake, assuming everyone needs to share in this grand purpose. And I think where you see it and where a lot of listeners I think might see it is in leveling guides. Because a leveling guide assumes that there is one path for everyone, and the values, this EVP, this grand purpose, filters into the leveling guide and ignores the three broad categories of employees that you have. And it kind of implies that if you're not bought in, if you're not selling the values, if you're not living and breathing our culture, you're not going to progress through the leveling guide. And I'm a I no leveling guides are a very risky thing to do. I know they're ubiquitous, but they also are essentially a system of control, which invariably creates challenges.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Mm-hmm.
James: But it's interesting when you see that language filter into leveling guides. If you are an im if you are, let's say go back to your example, the mother looking after their family, and you see that you're in this level, and you see that implicitly in the wording is that you should be looking for the next level. And that if you are looking for the next level, you should be doing more of X, Y, Z. And you think to yourself, but I don't want to do more of X, Y, and Z. I just wanna and you you kind of feel like a failure, I think, if if that's you being told that you should be caring and progressing along this chart.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm.
James: so I don't know if you noticed that as well, if you did much leveling guide work. I've I ended up doing a lot of it in my early career, but I I reflect back on that and think I was kind of propagating that issue that you're describing.
Jessica Zwaan: Hmm. It's tough. I find so many so I feel like there's always a balance between what people expect and what is actually helpful. Which is a really tough so first of all, I think leveling architecture should be as bare bones as it possibly can be and as flexible across your entire organization. The idea that you should have a different leveling guide for each different team, different descriptions of all the competencies they need, I think that is like so a so wildly unhelpful. it just makes people more confused, it just puts more things in words that then someone else can interpret in one certain way and bring out this other example. When in fact we're talking about this thing. but also it just makes it impossible to benchmark people, calibrate people, maintain all this honestly useless administrative architecture that's only used to prove and disprove minor points rather than just focusing on performance and helping people and coaching them. but there's still something funny about it, which is like people still want them. It blows my mind. It's like I have recently come into LeapSem LeapSem has is a really fantastic modern HRES tool that has all of the ability to build competencies and leveling guides and everything else in it. So I think the The knowledge that you need some kind of architecture to be able to base compensation, for example. Like we need to broadly understand what is a senior engineer, what does a senior person do across teams so we're able to broadly calibrate them, so we'll be able to broadly set expectations and give feedback where appropriate is a very different thing than we need seventy five thousand competencies, so that we have every single edge case of every single role and every single team covered. But then I think folks still see this as being really useful. work beyond just the bare bones architecture because they're being they're a the teams are asking for it. I mean our team asked for it. every team I've ever worked at in the past it's been like a huge Part of my communications have had to be around like why I'm not building a job-specific or role-specific leveling architecture, because it's just going to serve to trap you and your manager and the people team into an administrative loop that is not going to help you. It's not going to make you feel more fulfilled or enabled. It's not going to make your manager make better or more clear or more ethical decisions. And it's definitely not going to help help HR build products that are going to be helpful for you, because we're going to be spending all this time updating internal documentation.
James: Yeah. It it's really interesting, isn't it? I reflect on this quite a lot. Like there's a few forces. Like I think cognitive closure, the term that Eric Kroglansky coined, we don't like ambiguity. as a species, we like things to be done, and we will reach for the thing that demonstrates it's done before accepting the ambiguity, regardless of the value add, in either that's a job architecture for me, disamb disambigu is disambiguity the word?
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah.
James: I think it's yeah, it disambiguates, yeah. it disambiguates a very vague ethereal concept of a career.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, disambiguates. I that's right. I think it's good. Yeah.
James: And and work and it and it puts people into boxes. And we love sorting people into boxes, like it's something we do at every stage of life. So that there's that, but there's also this familiarity bias that comes with it. The whole architecture of HR is built around the assumption of leveling guides and job architecture and salary runs and things like that. So as soon you ask people to subtract from that and take it away, or not completely remove it, but simplify it, people feel they're losing their ability to control, I think. And then I also think there's a self-reinforcing circularity about all of this because.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: 'Cause we use all these tools and have conversations with people. in all kinds of companies and an employee starts saying, Well, that's the way I can get more money, because I need more money because you started me off at such a low level of pay that I have to work myself through this architecture. And then they say, well show me the leveling guide. And then they start having a conversation. But they'll use that to their own advantage. Yeah. And they'll well I'm doing that, I'm doing I'm doing that, I can do this, I can do that. And all of a sudden that leveling guide is shows its lack of worth in in real life situations. So there's a whole sort of circular set of forces involved that preserve it.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Why don't we have one? Yeah. Mm-hmm.
James: the last thing I'll say because I want to get more of your thoughts is that it doesn't mean it's doesn't have value. Like there is value to administrative solutions to things. It's just that the emphasis I think that we place on it is is far too aggressive and
Jessica Zwaan: Hmm. Mm-hmm.
James: It's almost like once we've done it, it's like, okay, sip that, we've done it now. We've solved everyone's career problem. We've solved all of the pay equity problems, we've solved all of the job description issues because we've rebuilt our job architecture. And I try and say to clients that no, you just you just begun. You created the foundation. Now the work begins. Now the real work begins on top of that.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's so f so many things that I I agree with in everything you've just said there. I think like one of the things I started thinking about was that I love the cognitive closure idea and I I it's such an uncomfortable thing to try and talk to people about that are feeling like they don't have enough that are struggling with their own cognitive closure, right? F for them to come to me and ask, Well, I feel like if we just have one more document or one more piece of information or one more like policy or framework, and I have to say like no. I actually think that there's like almost a reductivity in that kind of work to beyond a certain point. You mentioned there's a minimum you need. Or like there's like a kind of there's a level that is useful is the way I think you described it, which I agree with. I think there is having a If it was if it was my ideal workplace, right, I think what you've got is a very, very bare bones. These are the kind of broad levels you're probably seeing the company, and this is broadly what you can expect from each other. How much reach you're going to have in terms of budget, how many heads you might probably be managing, but may not be fully firm. maybe what kind of impact or size of projects you're launching or working on, like how how long or big of a per quarter are they, how many people are involved in them. but outside of that, probably I'm not gonna build anything else, really. It's gonna be something very, very simple. Then from there, like a compensation framework that broadly says we're gonna pay with this philosophy in mind, we're gonna be mostly targeting towards 90th percentile, we're not gonna be doing cost of living adjustments, we will have reasons to have some exceptional discretion being applied, and this is broadly the reasons we do it. But I'm not gonna go into like every single job architecture name on our back end system being mapped against a job in our company perfectly shared, but like no, it's just it's unnecessary. and then when it comes to even things like. Job descriptions. Like, I will write one when I need to advertise a job so we can understand how to assess someone's performance. But then beyond that, I'm not going to be doing that. It's going to be based on the goals we're asking you to achieve, the feedback you receive from others, and the company performance as a whole. That's like really the best we can do. but what's so challenging, I think, with these things is this like this cognitive closure thing you mentioned is HR teams particularly get themselves in this like feedback gap. So taking this back to like Built for people kind of land, people as a product. Customers give you a lot of feedback about all the things they'd like to see. If you're building a consumer-facing product, you if you're building laptops at Apple, someone has asked you for a drink holder on the app, the laptop. Does that mean that every single one of these requests should be something you should be thinking about? No. You should be looking at them and understanding the value of them and why groups of your customers might be misaligned with your strategy or where you're going as a business, and maybe even consider them and say, like, is our strategy Wrong. but the idea that just doing extra work because people are asking for it is somehow value creating is to me a really dangerous that just leads you directly down the path of your CEO or CFO asking, like, what's the value of all this money that we're spending on HR? If all we really see is more and more and more policy documentations and people are still leaving. We still have attrition, we still have unhappy employees, we're still struggling to hire in key regions.
James: Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: I can tell you right now, you're not going to solve an attrition problem with a job by job leveling framework.
James: Mm-hmm. No. It doesn't mean it's not useful, but it's not gonna fix your attrition. It's not gonna make people happy. There's no research to show a lot of these systems help anything. And again, it doesn't mean they're not useful. It can help us organize and administer and it can do, you know, there's still back office requirements. But there is research to show that there is a type of work that people enjoy. And when you look at the research and whether it's self self-determination theory is my favorite body of research, but there's also the progress principle of Theresa Ramaboli and
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Yeah.
James: all kinds of things that they all basically say give people more autonomy, give people challenging tasks, just write tasks, as well I've heard it described, and give people pe teams they want to work with. That none of that has to do with architecture or any of the infrastructure or administration of it, but we know that helps, we know that engages people, so we know where we should be investing our time and energy.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
James: But the frustrating thing for me is how willing we are to invest our time and energy and money in all these systems that have no evidence around whether they're going to improve things, but a lack of it into what we might call the people experience. So that's the the shift in mindset that I hope more HR leaders start to think about. Where is e where is it worth investing each dollar? Where is it going to generate actual, if difficult, measurable returns on the way people want to stay and and the value they bring to the organization?
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And how can you be honest with people about it? Like I think being able to say very candidly to people like l let's t take it back to purpose of work, 'cause I think it's it's it's it's still like a very relevant message here. It's like I think a lot of people know deep down It's like an Emperor's New Clothes thing. That not everyone is coming to work for the company mission, purpose, and they're getting fulfillment out of something else. But they feel uncomfortable saying that because they don't know who else is on the same side as them. so I think as if companies just got more comfortable coming out and saying, We know that you're all motivated by different things. Some of you are gonna be motivated by very structural, clear, like leveling frameworks and clear benefits and understanding what your next promotion may look like and what they may be and how to have a relationship with work that is transactional and that's great. We want we want to be able to serve you. How can we you receive generous pay increases from solid performance without having to be structured on some like career ladder? Some of you are going to be really motivated by a company mission. That's really wonderful. Same as our founders. They love the work that we're doing for our customers. And then a lot of you are going to be really motivated by that. I think hopefully you remember from the the book, I mentioned a list of five things I asked people to stack rank in my interviews, what's most important to you at work. One of them was feeling a sense of connection to your customers or the your colleagues, people around you. One of them was a sense of creativity, so being able to be creative in the things that you're making. So not just having directional information about this is what you need to make, but actually being able to create something that's new or innovative or novel. The other one was being able to have autonomy. So you might not be creating new novel things, but you have autonomy in how you do the work. So yeah, I'm just creating the same kind of like reporting spreadsheets month on month, but actually I have flexibility of how I do that, I have flexibility in the ways I do it, I can change the the format. and then the last one was company purpose and Almost every single person put connection with colleagues and customers as the most fulfilling part of their work at the top. And almost every single person put company purpose at the very, very bottom, unless again I say it was evil, in which case they said, Well, if the company's purpose was evil, that would be the most important thing to me, and I'd need to I wouldn't want to work there. But as a as long as your company purpose isn't evil, that's the last thing people are thinking about at work. They're much more thinking about how can I be connecting with customers, how can I be understanding the impact I'm having as a person on other people, my colleagues, how can I be autonomous was the next. one by and large how can I be doing work where I'm not being dictated to or micromanaged and being able to do stuff that works in the way that my life works that might be being able to go pick up your kids after school or just using software and tools that make sense for you. How can I be creative? How can I do things in a way that I feel like I'm contributing something net new to the world, not just cutting copy cutting like ticket systems or whatever it may be, but actually making projects and thinking about new ideas and having innovative challenges. And if you're put supplying that to most people, actually you're going to make them so much happier than almost and more engaged than almost any other thing that just compensating people more or giving people more structure is going to ever do.
James: Yeah, I love that. And that another theme that that this theme obviously carries through the whole book. And one of the sections, I can't remember who you referred to, but you mentioned Ikigai, this one beautiful Japanese term. And related to that, you made the point that all those things that people look for, we need to respect that again, this is a kind of the same theme, but w not all of it needs to come from work. We probably need all of it in some capacity.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: But that purpose, to go back to our our mother with children, the purpose comes from the children, it doesn't come from the work. So the purpose box is kind of taken out of work and moved into the personal life, and that's fine. So I I'd love this idea that like you don't need all of that from work. And if work's flexible enough, you can offer the things that people do need from their work without trying to solve the things that they don't need from their work because they're getting it from other aspects of their of their life. And this like
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
James: This idea that if you're not getting your purpose from a company, that's wrong. It's I it again, it just sounds so ridiculous when you when you put it that way. And I do think it's an issue with founder led companies. Everyone th a lot of founders believe that everyone should care as much about this mission as as they do. Whereas in reality, no one's gonna care as much about that mission as they do. Someone c might care a lot about it, but it basically goes down from the founder at that point, so they're gonna be very disappointed if they expect anyone to care as much.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Yeah. It's a it's a really funny so one of the things I noticed when I was writing this book is people would ask me like, How's work? How's work going? and I would kind of made a point to to start being honest about how I was finding work, which would be like, Yeah, it's going well, it's fine, I'm happy with everything that's happening at the moment, but the things that I'm not really that motivated by like the Whatever the company's doing this month, like the things I'm really interested in is this problem I'm having with this person, or this other thing I'm doing outside of work that work's been really flexible around. and it's so funny how often people would respond with, well, you need to look for a new job. And it's like, well, no, I've just said I'm perfectly happy. I like my job, I'm having a nice time, but I'm not really that I'm like not massively motivated by work at the moment. The things that are motivating me are other things.
James: Right. Yeah, that's true.
Jessica Zwaan: Well, that means that you must be really unhappy. And it's like, well, is that how you feel? Do you feel so motivated by your work every day? And I I talk about this this person quite a lot, but I was doing a workshop at the Troop HR Summit in Florida while I was writing the book. and I was talking about this this idea, the the research around job career calling orientations, and this lady raised her hand and said, You know, for my whole career I have thought I was broken, that I was like the one person that just hadn't found the whole holy grail of like loving work and getting it and like not just company purpose but also just like loving the job I was doing. Everyone seemed to be like, yeah, I'm having the best time. I love yeah, this is so great. And she's like, and I kept I'd quit a company and I'd started a new one. I started working in an ethical tech company that wasn't really the same it didn't give me the same thing. When I worked at a big corporate, still didn't feel it. She's like, and I was like, maybe I just like don't have this thing everyone else has. And I think it's like such a let's like just park all of the company efficiency side of it for one second and all the fact it can make you build a better HR team. What a sad world it is that we're all walking around where some people are feeling broken and incapable because they don't have this feeling that you yourself may not have. And we're all sitting there saying like we should define a new job. If this isn't your passion, if this isn't the thing driving you. It's actually okay and I would say probably even a good thing for a lot of us. Like I talk a lot about like how depression that comes from like work, life over connectivity and a lot of other psychological challenges that can come from someone completely being entangled with their their job and their career. But I think we'd actually just have a better world if people could be more comfortable saying like, yeah, I love my job. I really love my colleagues, have a really great time, but it's not the thing that drives me day to day. It's actually much more about my passion for cycling, which it allows me to be in a town that has great cycling around it, or it's my children, or it's the fact that it's actually allowed me to study my master's part time. Like that's fine.
James: Yeah. It it's so true, isn't it? I think that and this whole work talk sort of movement, I think, is opening the eyes of a of n another generation to take that healthier approach. It's okay. It's okay if you don't obsess over your work. It's this this kind of strange lie that unfortunately I think corporate America is sold quite aggressively. I do think I think like continental Europe, for example, very few people take their work as seriously. which is good and bad. It means you get you kinda get less of that engagement, but also perhaps a slightly healthier.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: work-life balance. so there's another phrase I wanted to move on to. This is backing up a bit, getting bit more philosophical. You mentioned that we are terrible accountants when it comes to measuring the value of our choices. And I really like this, but I'll let you expand on it first because I I thought a lot about this and it related to a few other things. So what what did you mean by that?
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. yeah. Yeah. So in this chapter of the book I talk about this this actually happened by the way. I genuinely did this. I for for fun and games kind of, but I I made a spreadsheet where I tried to tally the approximate amount of money I'd spent in my eighteenth year to thirtieth year of my life. Like how much have I spent on pubs and karaoke nights and going out with my friends and drinking and wine and all of that. Just to broadly get a feel. It was a lot of money that I'd spent on like I think really things that I would now if I would love to have the money, obviously. But like also I I kind of argue in the book like, but that's how I learned about some like that's how I met some of my best friends. It's how I learned some of the funniest things about living in the UK that I still really love. It's how I
James: Mm-hmm.
Jessica Zwaan: Grow surf ro surf crowd surfed at Gross Rock and got into cycling and all these other things, right? My life would be yes, fiscally poorer, but also enrichment poorer if I had spent that money on investing in property or something else. and and what I then go on to talk about is this idea that like we're actually really bad accountants, as I just mentioned there, when it comes to the value of the choices that we're making. Some people choose to work at a company because they think it's gonna make More money during an IPO. Some people do it because they want to spend more time with their family, and this gives them an opportunity to do that. And there's no point really going back and try to calculate the return on investment for the decisions you've made in your career, except what is fulfilling for you in that moment, what is genuinely giving you a sense of purpose, direction, and fulfillment. And I write this as the introduction to this chapter because I'm largely talking about the fact that people change their orientations through their lives. Someone who may have seen their job as a career might later decide that they actually. actually maybe they have children and Abby Pugh is a great example of this who I interviewed for the book. they have children and they realize that actually I want to go and work at a climate tech company because I want the world to be a better place for the children I have. Therefore, my whole orientation about work has now become much more about a calling than it has been about a career. and I kind of make the argument that you should be a little bit first of all, expect and be gentle with yourself and your team members as they go through these transitions in their lives and set up established routes for that to happen. And yes, they will be ambiguous. It might be unclear how someone can have an internal move or take a sabbatical but that's okay and then also it's about the idea of like you know be be gentle with yourself as well I think was another kind of takeaway from it like be okay that you yourself won't really know what's going to motivate you now and what the right choices are. It's ultimately going to be about the thing that motivates you not in the the the long term but in in the day-to-day
James: Mm. Yeah. And it's that again it kinda comes back to cognitive closure. Like we like a lot of the decisions I think I can't remember who it was that said this, so it might been on the podcast, but they said that kind of a similar point to that. We're very bad at this making decisions. Like if you really look at it objectively, and it said if you think you're a rational decision maker, then why do you have a watch when you've got a better phone better clock on your phone? And why do you have kids when it's a terrible return on investment? Okay, th these are irrational decisions to make if you look at it by any economic
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah.
James: metric, it's just a w a waste of money, but we do it because it brings us joy. You can't measure that joy. and I think Barry Schwartz wrote a bit about this as well, but I haven't read much of his his work. But he you know he critiques this rational choice theory. We can't make rational choices and we shouldn't attempt to. And it's okay if you can't. Like just make the choice that feels right in the moment.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
James: and again, like that that sort of plays into our career choices. Like it's you know, the choices aren't always gonna be financially motivated, they're gonna suit one aspect of our life. And as a company, as as HR leaders, we need to respect that and and not expect everyone to constantly make rational choices about how and when and where they get their work done.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, I think there's just a lot of like I mean there's so much in this and also in just in ways of working that I think is really important is like, you know, I think I I'm I'm gonna we're gonna dip a little bit into AI now, I'm sorry to do this, but like I feel like it's helpful.
James: It's okay. It's okay. As long I've got a quote as long as it's no more than ten percent of the podcast, then it's okay. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Okay, it's very short. I think with the introduction of LLMs being able to synthesize and and deliver better decision making packages in to us really quickly, we've got this idea that like, well, if we only just work on something enough, if we only just like refine something more now, we'll get we'll get to this like kind of golden hand from the sky telling us what decision to to be made. And I actually see this you know, I didn't really write about it from this perspective in the book, but I I think that this is like actually a theme that carries on from the chapter you're talking about. Is like Sometimes what your culture needs is just a decisive point of view on where you want to be in the market and why, and then the frameworks that enable that to thrive. You do not need every decision to have Tick boxes across every board, sign off from every person, complete lack of legal risk, long-term l longevity without scaling issues. Like, again, you're optimizing for a return on investment for a thing that is just like completely unpredictable. but I think we've gotten ourselves into the trap going back to that yeah, cognitive closure again. It's like, well, now that we have an LLM to help us like synthesize huge volumes of information, surely we'll be so much better at making decisions. And
James: Mm. Yeah. Now we'll do it. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, and I think we will to a point. I think we are bet I'm definitely quicker at making decisions, but I don't necessarily think I'm like materially better in terms of my success. The thing that I'm aiming for is like be mostly right about the decisions I'm making. And that is my personal life as well as is at work. And as long as I'm mostly right and making decisions that are mostly important, I'm moving in the right direction. And as long as I'm doing that, anything else that I do by stagnating or having you know inability to make decisions is just going to hold me back from what really needs to happen, which is make a lot of decisions, be mostly right and make them important ones.
James: Yeah. Yeah, well said. I I think that there is a lot of hope that LLMs will save like I think performance management is a good example. It's such a fundamentally flawed process it with knowledge work. Like it will never work because we just don't we aren't equipped to measure.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Yeah.
James: individuals in the context of collaborative work. It just doesn't work. There's so many problems with this. Like there's so many psychological barriers. And I do think there's a sort of expectation that we've got it wrong for a long time. Everyone hates performance management almost ubiquitously. It's kind of funny how common performance management is and also how commonly despised it is by HR and leaders and the people on the receiving end. But there's almost like we just haven't quite got it right yet. If we've if we get with now now we've got AI, now we can finally get it right. Now we can measure individual performance.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: And I fundamentally think that's just a fool's errand. Like it's not about individual performance anymore. It's about collective performance.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, I definitely think AI has the g like, you know, as as a team building, like an AI enabled HRES, I do think that what this does do is help surface really valuable conversations between people. and that's I think what we're really leaning into at Leapsum is like building a tool that helps not say like, okay, well we're gonna have some algorithm that identifies these are the three people that perform the best, but rather here's a bunch of things that you should probably think about and have a conversation with this person to help them be successful based on
James: Right. More of co it's more like coaching, right? Rather than doing it for you, it's it's helping you be a better person. Yeah, yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Ex Exactly. And also surfacing information from like things like surveys and how often s you know you how frequently groups of people have generally been promoted and has this person always been? Like maybe there's something here you can follow up. Like these are actually such much more valuable things to kind of help address what it's really about is addressing performance. It's almost never about assessing performance in my opinion. It's like if you're seeing a gap with someone, what are the things that you can do from the context, from the history, from what this person's good at, what this person's had good feedback on, to help them be successful, and much less around like well how do we know if someone's a three or a three point seven?
James: Hm. Yeah. Right. Yeah. that's a rabbit hole. We probably haven't got time to go down the performance racing, but yeah, don't get me started on that. There was a particular illustration that you gave in the book, the T-shaped role. so I wonder if you could talk me through what the T-shaped role is and why that's a a useful framing again of a problem.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Yes, this is something I talk about in Built for People as being I think necessary for people teams, now. Which is the idea of a T-shaped people partner or a T-shaped member of your people of team. but now I kind of in our in purpose and work make the argument that basically everyone should be broadly T-shaped, especially in the way that the world is changing now. and T-shaped is that you have one area of like pretty deep expertise that you've been kind of focusing on your career, and that could be something as specific as comp and ben, right? Or it could be something that's a little bit more broad. Like I've always worked in SaaS businesses, so I really understand like the SaaS model. But you've got one, maybe two. There's also the discussion of pie-shaped people with two areas of expertise. But then what you have on top is it's kind of like broad application of those skills. So my one, for example, maybe I'm very, very strong at companies where there's a big piece of cultural change that needs to happen. and size is kind of irrelevant. I've done it at 2,000 people company, I've done 500 people company, done 110 people company, 40 people company. Big amount of change that's going to happen. In which there are both fiscal outcomes, commercial outcomes, and people outcomes that need to both be taken care of at the same time. We can't thrash the culture, but we also need to make sure that we're being much more efficient in how we do things. that's like been something that I've been doing now for like 15 years. Pretty much every company I've worked at has had the same challenge or the same thing that I've needed to focus on. But my application of it can be very, very broad. I can apply that to org design, I can apply that to how we do leadership off-sites and how we communicate things. I can get down and build something with my team if we're getting. necessary to make that skill useful. and that T-shaped application of a set of experience or set of expertise is I think the thing that is going to both give people a much greater career opportunities in this new world of AI. I've been talking about this already, but I won't take we won't take it more than 10%, I promise. it's going to I think really significantly change what what an expert can do and also ex have a broader expectation of the way you can apply that knowledge or that skill. So yeah I talk about T-shape in this in this book as being something that's highly fulfilling for people and give people a lot more opportunity but also help people work together better and also be able to face the future of work more optimistically.
James: Sorry. To be clear, it's not a hard quota of 10% for talking about AI. It's I just feel like all I all I hear about is AI at this point. So I I kind of like just getting away from it sometimes. But that's a really good, I think it's a really useful framing. I think it's a really good example. And again, another way to reframe a problem that maybe people hadn't really thought about. then there's another area that you get into, which we agree very strongly on based on your writing, is and you you characterized it in one phrase, which is these dang lazy kids.
Jessica Zwaan: We're nowhere near. Yeah, I know. I agree.
James: And and made the point that every generation throughout history has been saying in some different combination of words, these dang lazy kids. And one of my favorite ways you make this point about the perception of laziness is that Charles Dickens, obviously the great joke Charles Dickens, wrote 15 books, 200 short stories, and edited his weekly publication, and he didn't work afternoons. So and so in if he wasn't in an office, we'd look at a person that walked off at midday.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah.
James: And call them lazy. So tell me a bit more about this perception of hard work and the perception of laziness and your views on that.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, I talk in the book about there's so many things that they come in into this bit. I think this is like I think this again I'm gonna reframe this about myself because I don't want to it to feel like I'm like pointing fingers at anyone specifically and I also wanna lead from the front, which is something that I talk about in the book a lot, about how important it is to to have open conversations about how you're going. I work very hard at my job. I Wake up every morning, I diligently work, I prepare for meetings, I am on time for the meetings 90% of the time. At least my old Sana bot used to tell me ninety f ninety-nine point nine nine seven or something like that. and I will do my follow-ups, but I try very hard to log off at five. I have a lot of passions outside of work that I'm very excited about. The things on my SMART goals list, if I had that for my life, are not Broadly work related. A large portion of them are things like paint and oil painting. and I wake up every morning and drink coffee in my bed for an hour, read nonfiction books. I'm not sitting there reading you know, behavioral economics most of the time. and on the weekends, very often I go out till four or five in the morning, sometimes later, because I'm still young enough to do that. I I'm very happy to say that I think all of those things in connectivity, and I know by the way, this is not a life that everyone can live, right? For you for someone out there who's like, well, that's just easy for you. I I have three kids and all these like maybe your version of how you spread your life is different to mine, again, it should be focused around giving you a sense of fulfillment. Mine is built that way because it gives me a huge sense of fulfillment. It makes me really, really happy when I'm working. when I'm working, I am like switched on intellectually, I know what I'm doing, I'm capable of delivering things, I have what I feel like are pretty good ideas. but then at that that time that I'm done I'm done I'm happy to be done and I go off and I live the other parts of my life that I'm excited about I think we have this idea and I think actually you know Claude and everything else with this like very quick serotonin kind of feedback loop Even if you're really, really tired, there are still more things that you can do of high quality now that you've got all these tools available to you. So there's this like never-ending feeling like, well, I could be infinitely efficient. We talk so much about productivity. I don't think just being productive, and actually, there's really great book called Leverage, which I forget the name of the chap who wrote it. I'll try and send it to you after the podcast.
James: I'll add it into the show notes in case anyone's looking for it. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, it's really great. He talks about the idea of like actually what your job is to it your your job is just to be endlessly productive and create endless content for other people. It is to make the things that you're making work really well so that when other people need them, they know where to come and they know how to use them and they can use them efficiently. It's not just your job to like just spurt productivity into the world. and I think Being a company that is more aligned with well, how can we help people get in a feeling of flow and create useful things and not just feel they have to send like status reports and AI generated documentation and pre-reads. Work theater, I call it. I hate the idea of like work theater being impact. there are lots of things that you can do to do that, which is like, for example, turn your comp your performance reviews to team achievement of impact-related goals, rather than have them be focused around individual productivity. input metrics. Things like that just nudge people in a direction that makes them feel like, okay, well I know what I need to achieve, I know what I can do, having some flexibility and again okay and autonomy on how they do that, having some creativity about how to solve the problem. You'll probably see long-term higher quality outputs and impact and way less noise and burnout and frustration.
James: Yeah. That that the the in I do think that a lot of people struggle with moving away from the individual, because so much of management theory, still still a hangover really from the factory era, where you could measure how many things widgets a person made and how many hours they came in for and you can go to the individual. And there's still this desperation to measure people at the individual level.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: And the idea if you don't do that, it's not fair and you're not rewarding people sufficiently, right? If you don't measure people in the individual. But the fact is work isn't individual, it's collective. So to your point, you can't measure output at the individual level because there is none. The output happens at a level above that and sometimes multiple levels above that, but you're all working together towards the same goals. I I think this is a big obstacle for a lot of people. The idea that maybe you don't need to measure by the individual. Maybe what you do need to do is figure out what the team can achieve. And all the research points towards it. Like the idea of superordinate goals, it aligns people towards a purpose. If you give people individual goals, you create
Jessica Zwaan: Mm.
James: So many opportunities for gaming, and then you see the politicians rise to the top. And as someone that's worked in big companies, I've seen this in the real world so many times now, if you give people individual objectives, they will optimize for those individual objectives at the expense of everything else because you've coached them to do that. You've literally told them to do that. And then people complain about the lack of collaboration and the lack of thinking. So I think this is a big a big challenge for a lot of companies getting away from this individualistic aspect of people.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Uh-huh. I th I completely agree and I think that one like really important thing to to tack onto this is going back f like I really l think I'm so glad that the cognitive closure is a big part of this is like there is no system that you're going to implement, no matter how research backed, that is just going to magically solve all of your problems and no one is upset about it. This is the thing that I feel is A real challenge for HR leaders and something that's held us back is this feeling well we have to make as many people happy as we possible. We have to like r reduce the amount of like like I it's kind of a reason I hate EMPS sometimes, if I'm honest with you, is or at least like I I like asking very specific feedback questions about HR work, but I'm not gonna ask you abroad like what do you think of the HR team because honestly, like I actually think a lot of what we do should be a little disruptive and actually probably feel a little abrasive, particularly if we're out there telling managers like, I need you to go to your team and tell them we're doing these this new goal structure.
James: Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: It's going to be a bit more ambiguous because it kind of needs to be. That's how research states said. And yes, I they're used to having a leveling framework, but it's not going to be good for them. Well, then all the second the HR team got an ENP, like an NPS of four. Yeah, what did you like? How you could you possibly measure us against wanting to the incentives aren't aligned there to get people to feel comfortable. Anyway, there's a whole bunch of stuff there around like measuring a HR team. But there's nothing you're going to launch which is just going to make everything better. If you launch Team goals, you will still have individuals come to you and say, I feel like I've been hard done by here because the team didn't pull through and I really felt like I did this, like did X, Y, Z. So yes, you can build some mitigating functions in that, maybe like an individual accelerator, where if somebody achieves X or there's like some kind of level of like peer feedback, or I don't know, some kind of incentive compatible. I think that's very important, incentive compatible framework, then sure, you can also have incentive help with your individual. Design a thing that you feel broadly moves you a in the right direction, again going back, you're making mostly good decisions about important decisions most of the time. and just know that that also means you've got to be making some bad decisions about some important decisions some of the time. And that's okay as well. That's okay.
James: Yeah. And that's fine. Yeah. Yeah. well, Jesse, we've got through an hour and a half. so I know. And that time go. So I'll finish by saying, Well, first of all, if anyone's listening, I highly recommend picking up a copy of the book, which is available at all good retailers, I think. I think you've gone to the fancy ones as well.
Jessica Zwaan: Where? I think I mean the fancy ones.
James: You're in the fancy ones, I'm on the fancy ones. so you're at Barnes and Noble and things like that. So I highly recommend picking up a copy. But where can people hear more about what you say, what you think? where can they look for you?
Jessica Zwaan: So yeah. Yeah, absolutely. you can always come to my LinkedIn. I post pretty regularly there. I'm also very regularly in Leap Sims community People Over Parks. We do a lot of events, particularly in New York and Berlin. so if you want to come chat to me face to face and tell me how wrong I am about performance incentives, please do. and then the other final place is I have a substack with the chaps from Modern People Leader and PL Build, it's called, where we talk a lot about how to build great workplaces in a really practical way. So come and follow along.
James: So I just joined Substack. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm writing things on it, so I need to follow the MPL team as well. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jesse. Again, congratulations on getting the book. I mean, just getting a book out at all is a pretty difficult thing to do. So well done. I'm getting your there is your second, right? If I remember correctly. Yeah, I'm getting two books. And we will speak again soon. Enjoy the writing. All right. Take care. Bye.
Jessica Zwaan: Great. That's probably it. Thanks, James. Yeah, mm-hmm, second. Yeah. Thank you, you too. Fine.
James: Hello and welcome to another episode of As Discussed. My guest today is the wonderful Jesse Zwan. author of Built for People and more recently Purpose and Work. Jesse is also the VP. of people strategy and operations at LeapsumHR. Jesse's first book made the case for... the people function the same way. A product manager treats a product. This book goes a layer deeper. into what we're actually designing work for. and into the gap between the purpose that companies advertise and the work that people live. It's clearly a very personal book and it runs close to many of questions that I raise. in my own work. As always, if you find this interesting, please rate it on whatever platform you use and please do share it with a friend that goes a long way to helping to share these new ideas with as big an audience as possible and to help get more interesting guests like Jesse on the show. I've also recently started a Substack. So if you'd to hear more about these ideas, you can find that on Substack. please subscribe to that. And on that sub stack, also be including shortened, tightened up transcripts of these discussions that I have on the podcast. So without further ado, I give you Jesse Zwaan, author of Purpose and Work, and I hope you enjoy it. Jesse, welcome to the podcast. and thanks for joining me. How are you doing?
Jessica Zwaan: Really good. We the the audience doesn't know this, but we just spent a nice little ten minute introduction talking about our both of our love for cycling. So I just got back from a really lovely long weekend cycling upstate New York. So I'm feeling great, ready to talk about compensation and performance and purpose at work and books and everything else we got on the agenda.
James: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. nice low resting heart rate, I g I assume, like from a few days of riding. I've I see you've got your bike in the background. You can't my I've got a wheel in the other side of this, but you can't quite see that. and you've also been travelling as well. So I wanna actually wanted to ask you about that. You started off in Seattle, is that right? Or was it Vancouver? Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Cobbed up. Yeah. No, no, very close to Seattle. about th three, four hours inland across the Cascade Mountains, and then went all the way down to California and then across the US and then back up to New York. So I've done nineteen states in almost as many days, twenty th three days or something like that.
James: That's impressive. And how many states have you done across the US at this point? Do you keep track?
Jessica Zwaan: I actually don't keep track. Yeah, no, I'm so full disclosure, before this road trip I was probab I was a terrible American immigrant in I like barely leave Manhattan when I'm in the US. and I wanted to put an end to that. It like a kind of a dream for me for a really long time to do like a road trip across America and to see things from the ground. I actually would love to one day love to do the transam on my bike and actually ride across the US would be really fun. But this was the interim step and it was so good. It was really fun. I feel like I saw so many amazing landscapes and ate a lot of really good food and
James: Yeah. And you got and you you're okay for eating as well? Because we're both vegan, right? And traveling across America. Certain parts of America is more difficult than others. I have a go to restaurant by the way. I d I'm just curious d what yeah, what what what did you find do you were you able to eat okay on this trip?
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. yeah? Okay, so Yeah, I was able to eat fine. I mean, I think if you've been vegan for a long time, there's a part of you that just gets used to sometimes eating fries and side salad, and you'll kind of have to just be happy with that. I'm like pretty easy to please. I also discovered dill pickle flavoured things, which was like such a big boon for me for the first half of the trip. So there's a lot of like dill pickled crisps, dill pickle cashews, dill pickle corn nuts, everything like that. That was fun. and then I was clued into Waffle House. And if you don't know this, Wa Waffle House
James: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Okay.
Jessica Zwaan: Does a build your own hash brown bowl 24 hours a day, or pretty much all of the waffle houses are. And you can go in and get a hash brown bowl, which is just potato with like mush brown mushrooms and tomatoes and all these different like pickles and jalapenos, and you get like basically it's like there's no to protein in there, but like it's delicious and it was really fun. Mmm.
James: Yeah. Interesting. But I'm about to add that to the rotation. So our go to is Subway, because you can always get a sandwich with fresh stuff in it. And Olive Garden turns out to be a pretty handy option, especially if you're cycling or running or anything like that, because you get all you can eat breadsticks. So you can really carve up on a a fairly low price point at Olive Garden. And it's got this whole sort of nineties midwestern American vibe to it as well, which I kinda like.
Jessica Zwaan: yeah. Mm-hmm. Mmm. Love. Okay, great. Well I I can do a swap in. I'll it. I'll go and if you do a waffle house. We next time we do a podcast we can we can fanotes.
James: All right, done. Yeah, we'll compare those. so let's talk about let's talk about a few things. So I've got a lot to talk about. well you've got a lot to talk about, I've got a lot to ask you about. So first of all, you have a new book, newish at this point, Purpose and Work, which I enjoyed reading on my on my vacation, which is why it's a bit grubby, I'm afraid. no disrespect to the author, but it's a little bit it's got a bit of my sun lotion. Yeah, right.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Wow. Thank you. You should see my books, they're all in a state. Like I think that's how books should be.
James: Yeah, it's also quite doggyed as well. And I I still like every time I dog air a page, I hear Sean Connery's voice from Finding Forester telling me to respect the author. So if I had to do because I had nowhere else to mark the pages. so I actually wanted to start though, going back a step to your previous book, Built for People, because you introduced the concept of work as a product. And I've had a few guests who talk about this concept of work as a product, but for a lot of people it's actually a fairly new concept.
Jessica Zwaan: Huh. Good for it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
James: in the HR space. So for the uninitiated, I'd love you to talk about before we move on to purpose and work, what does work as a product mean to you?
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. great. I I do actually think that the second book is very connected to the first. This is like a helpful step through. So in 2019, I wrote a blog basically making the argument, slash putting out the position that HR leaders should see the work they're building, like product managers. I said that your company's building three products. One of them is your consumer-facing product, which is bikes if you're specialized, or laptops if you're Apple, whatever it may be. Most of your company. company spends most of their time thinking about the consumer facing product. the second one is a fiscal product, which broadly your kind of executive team, your founders, your CEO will be thinking about. And that is like the value of your business for either acquisition for PE or your venture capitalist or shareholder value of your public company. And then the third product is your employee experience. And these three products are symbiotic. They need to work well together in order to be successful as a company. If you have a really, really strong consumer-facing product, hopefully. Hopefully then you'll be getting really great investment and have a really strong fiscal product, which means that you can spend more and have a high quality employee experience product, have very, very aligned employees that feel like they truly understand the value that they're bringing to the company. And then in turn, hopefully they also continue to build a really fantastic consumer-facing product. So these things kind of have a relationship together. The employee experience product, I argue, is a subscription. So it's something that employees subscribe to every month and then they hand in their resignation. Which is the terminating of their subscription. And it's your job in HR to make sure that that funnel, exactly the same as a product funnel, from awareness all the way through to churn, is really optimized to make sure that you've got really high quality subscribers who love their subscription, who you're getting mutual value from, so high return on investment from what you're spending with each other, and that that is being built in a way that is like iterative and evolving to your company strategy rather than this like fixed employee value proposition.
James: Interesting, okay, so the consumer product, the financial product, and the employee experience product. And it's that last one that I think challenges most people because there's this kind of overarching assumption that you have work and people choose whether or not to do it. Yeah, but that's kind of the end of it. But the idea that you can shape that product kind of escapes so many people. And the more you start to think about it, the more surprising it is that how little attention gets paid to the nature of the work. And how little recognition to your point employees have a choice. And the question is are you giving them something they want to choose or not? And the better that choice is, the higher quality the people are. And it amazes me how quickly people jump past that problem to incentives and systems of control and equity and retention and this idea that while you can financially retain and financially incentivize, then we don't need to worry about the work once we've done that. The work is just something you either do or they don't do it. But we've got them now, so it doesn't matter.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm. Yeah, it's interesting. It makes me think about there's a pr friend of mine, Professor Peter Fader, who's a pro professor at Wharton, and he has written a book called The Customer Base Audit, which is a title that I've gratefully, like many things in the world, stolen, an employee-based audit. and in there he talks, he has a really, really interesting example from a customer base, which I think is a really useful one for us to think about, which is he works with a company that has huge acquisition in Q4 over Christmas. They do some kind of discount campaign. Or some like buy for Christmas and you get a free month, that kind of thing campaign. So the acquisition is fantastic. But then those consumers churn really, really quickly, all of them. They don't seem to return. They're not big advocates. They're not strong customers. And I think it's a great example of the kind of place where he's like pulling out from the customer base. Like, where are the cohorts or groups of customers or type of customers, profiles of customers who are actually not a great investment for us? And then how can we instead try to build higher quality customer? Cohorts from where we know, even if they may but may not grow as quickly, they're more high quality customers. and I think that's a these kinds of learnings that you can apply to the employee experience product are really interesting because it like to your point shifts you away from just this idea of like, well, it's engagement on a whole or it's retention on a whole. It's like those things don't actually really mean very much if you've got members of the team who are, for example, massively strategically misaligned and refuse to adopt the ways of working that you want them to for as your company or are really focused on. metrics but very rarely achieve their output metrics. how do you change their behavior or try to look for higher quality employee segments that can hopefully grow better with your team.
James: Yeah. That's another one we could spend a lot of time on this, the idea of employee segmentation. And if you think about the effort, Stefan Meyer writes a lot about this actually. the effort that gets put into customer segmentation over the years has got more and more and more advanced and now is incredibly advanced in the way that companies think about the customers, but employee segmentation it largely doesn't really exist. It's all built around
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Hmm. Yeah.
James: the the kind of horrible ugly cousin is kind of like job architecture. We're gonna split the work out of all these different jobs, then we're gonna find people to fit into those boxes that we've created. But this idea that well if we applied that kind of intellectual curiosity to our employees the same way we apply it to our customers, we can really, really change the quality of the work we offer people. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a it's like such a big area of like I mean I think about this so much when it comes to employee user research, which we're no we'll get into. Like I think this is like one of the most fundamental ideas that hopefully changes changes HL leaders to become better at talking strategically and better at being taken seriously in the boardroom, which is something that I know so many of us desire.
James: Yeah, we hear it a lot, a seat of the table, don't we, that phrase. so, on purpose and work then. So I'm gonna hold it up so people can see it. I I first of I really I really like the the colors. There you go. Snap. So I I like I like the colour palette. this this sort of I don't even know what you call this bluey-gray thing, but I really like that with the combined with the yellow. so you open with something I think a lot of people in HR will recognize, which is having to sell a purpose, sell a purpose.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Yeah.
James: And you mentioned at one point, I think you mentioned that it was post-COVID, was that you were kind of crafting purpose statements in the morning and processing terminations in the afternoon. And this tension between these kind of lofty statements that you often hear in the world of HR and the EVP, the employee value proposition, and then the business reality, this tension kind of runs through that book and concludes with some nice illustrations at the end, which we'll come to. So I'd love to hear you a bit more about the journey to get to this book and the connection. So you put it as, and I get this right, if Built for People was about designing better work environments, then this book is about rethinking what we're designing them for. So I'd love to hear a bit more from you about how you got from the concept of work as a product to purpose and work and what you wanted to what your thesis was, what you wanted to solve with the second book.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Mm. Yeah. It's so funny. I finished the first book and I kind of very publicly was like, I'm never writing another book again.
James: I did the same thing.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's like such the first one's so much h it's so hard and by the end I'm like, No. but then of course you start your brain starts ticking, you start thinking, I really like this idea and I'm kinda person that c I get s I get so nosy into these things that feel un incomplete or like I really want to know the answer to this or have have a better opinion just for myself. Like I started all of my writing, and I started my like blog I think maybe even like fifteen years ago now. when I was a little squirt and barely had anything to talk about, but I was I thought that clear writing leads to clear Thinking. And if I'm writing down what I think, even if no one's reading it, there's like an accountability to that, there's an expectation that I know what I'm talking about, that I've got an opinion. And it served me very well over time. So with all of that in mind, it's become like a really important part of like my personal growth and practice. That I'm like, if I have a big meaty question that I think is important to answer for myself and my team and my work, I want to have a go at doing that. Now, of course, sometimes that ends in a book, which is I think one of the joys of my career, both of them. But When I wrote built for people, there was so many ideas that I was having. Like I'd this has been a way of working that I had been doing at this point for probably five or six years, maybe even more kind of unofficially, and I'd never really fully written down. And there's a lot of extra ideas that weren't so operational but much more kind of like theoretical or philosophical about work and why we do it and what what good looks like at work and what happy, engaged employees look like. But I didn't really have the space to do that. And every time I tried to write it, it kind of got a bit tangly and spidery, and I had to kind of rein back in and cut the chapter. and one of them was about this idea of like why? Like what's what's the reason if if work is a product then why are we buying it? and Dart Lindsley, who's a friend of both of ours, friend of the pod, at the end of his podcast, as you know, asks you the question, what job is your job doing for you? it's a great question.
James: Yeah, it's a good question, isn't it? It's a real real head scratch of that one, yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: and it's so funny, James. Like I had written a whole book about your job being a product, and I really struggled with the answer. Like I couldn't, I wasn't really happy with my answer in the end. I really still felt a little unclear about it. And I was like, well, I hate that. So I want to go away and try to answer this question for myself. So I wrote I started thinking about the Joseph Fine Joseph Pine framework, the experiential economy, which is all about this idea you've Further you move from a commodity, the more valuable your product gets. And we can talk a bit about that later if we think that's helpful. and started really feeling like there's a lot of research that backed up that maybe there the product of work actually does fit very similarly to this economic kind of spectrum. and I believed at this time that work was like for most people going to be this transformative experience. Everyone's at work as it transforms you in some way and makes you a better person. and that means better as in not just virtuously, but makes you smarter or learn something or you know, proves your life because you're contributing to some company mission. and actually what I started finding when I started speaking to people was that was just not the case at all. so it was a really eye opening experience to write and ended with me I think getting to a point where I'm very, very comfortable undermining I think some like much long held truths in the HR community and long held practices that I actually think should probably be almost completely thrown away.
James: Yeah, this really interested me actually. so you mentioned Pine. So this is the service experience transformation type sort of trilogy. And in the same breath, I'll mention that I think a researcher and writer we both like, Amy Resnievsky, she framed it as a job and a career and a calling. And there's a sort of parallel in that in terms of how we think about the market and how we think about an individual, which I really, really like that throughout the book. And
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
James: So and and actually you mentioned we could go into it. Let's get let's dig into this this transformations experience. But you use an example of a cup of coffee, I think, to illustrate this in the book. tell us about that
Jessica Zwaan: Let's do it. Mm. Yeah, absolutely. So let's start just thinking purely about the a product, a commodity, and then we can talk a little about workplaces. So at one end of Joe Pine's spectrum you have the a commodity, which is in this case a coffee bean. And a coffee bean from Columbia or Rwanda is like broadly within the same kind of price point. There are differences, of course, but they're kind of in the same price point. Let's just say about $2.50 a kilo, right? someone bags it up, ships it to Brooklyn or East London, some very Very cool guy with a beanie and lots of tattoos, roast set, they stick some artisanal sticker on the front of it, and all of a sudden you're now paying $17.50 for this good. It's gone from a commodity to now it's a good. Someone buys ground coffee, takes it to a local coffee place that you just walk past the window and pick up a coffee. That coffee is now $45 a kilo. You're buying a very, very, very small amount of coffee, 14 grams. I think if you're a coffee enthusiast, should be about one shot. And all of a sudden you're paying a lot more money per gram. For the same commodity. And that's because you've now got a service attached. Someone's turning that into a coffee for you. The next step is the experiential economy where you're walking into your favorite cafe, they know your name, they're playing some really cool music, the Wi-Fi's on, you're kind of feeling vibey, you're working, you feel like you're part of a community. And then all of a sudden, that same coffee that you may have just grabbed through the service window is now becoming more expensive. You're now tipping, you're now adding on extra layers of that. And that's because you're now paying for an experience, right? And then the final stage is the transformation economy. And that is the idea that you aren't just buying a product and having an experience, but you're actually, in fact, being transformed by this experience. You're participating with the product you're buying. So gyms buy into this a lot. If you're if you know Equinox in the US, you probably know this branding extremely well, which is not just if you buy this gym membership, you're going to have access to all of these amazing machines and equipment, and the community is great around you. The trainers are really high quality. It is, you will literally be a better person if you come to Equinox. the coffee version of that might be
James: Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Be like an artisanal coffee course that you go and learn how to taste different coffees and your similar of coffee is that kind of thing. And you're paying a lot more for the same kind of thing, then you're still getting coffee like grams of coffee. And you wouldn't go to the, you know, say this to some people in my team is like, you can't just advertise a transformational experience without having the fundamental strong product underneath it. So I go to a yoga studio in New York. it's a hot yoga studio. It's very expensive, but I love it. It is like a dark y dark room, hot yoga, great instructors. I come out genuinely feeling like I am like more meditative and like fitter and stronger and balanced. But if the yoga wasn't there, I wouldn't go. I'm not just going for the dark room and the cool trainer and the hot yoga. I'm the hot environment. I'm also going for the yoga. Same with the coffee thing, same with the gym, right? so my argument is that work is on the same spectrum. Now, for the sake of Argument. I don't even touch commodity because work as a commodity is literally just like a legally binding contract that pays you not even worth thinking about. and we go straight to the services one, which is your employer offering you a service above and beyond just the good of a job or the commodity of a job. and for a lot of people that would look like you know reasonable working conditions that allow for clear progression and increases in pay. It would be maybe a structured schedule that you can like balance your life around. It's basically an exchange of goods for sorry. So time for money with a a service attached to that work, benefits, those kinds of things. Then on the way other end of the spectrum, let's skip one for a second, you go to transformation, and that would be you are being changed by the job that you are doing. And that can come in multiple different forms. It may be that you are genuinely changing the world. You're working for a Patagonia, United Nation, and you're it's your your vocation. This this work you're contributing to is making the world a better place. You are being transformed by the work you're doing, and the world is being transformed by that. Or it may be that you are just growing and changing so quickly from this work in a way that you so deeply align with. So working for an artist in An artist studio where you may be an aspiring artist yourself, or working on a piece of technology that you have studied your entire life, and it's you know best in class coming out groundbreaking technology. That might be a transformational workplace. And in the middle, the vast majority of us are at an experiential workplace where what we're into it, what we're into it for, and what our purpose comes from this is. We're gonna get a great experience from this, either through career progression, access to opportunities, access to other really smart people, really interesting intellectual challenges that give us like reasons to be in a flow state and take us home excited about the work we're doing. or it could just be like a great office environment and really great perks around us. And what you're kind of getting out of it there is like the work itself and how you do it is more about the experience of the work and less actually about the aspiration, the the transformative nature of it, as long as it isn't evil, was basically the one subset. So that's like the the economic spectrum. And then Amy Ross's newski's re research, as you mentioned, says people broadly aligned to the same kind of groups, which is job, career, and calling. and I kind of argue that you should almost look at it like a nine-box grid, and most of your team. Should be broadly aligned with where the work is. So if you are pretty much always in an experiential based company, and there are some situations which it may be more transformative, right? You might have an innovation lab that's working on very, very transformative pieces of work, or you might have a team that's working on you know, directly working with customers on the front lines with something that they really do feel like they're changing the world. Sure. But if the majority of your company is genuinely like people are getting their purpose and their fulfillment out of the experience of work, then we should be looking for people that are really satisfied. By the career and the experience of work and not people that are satisfied by the transformation aspects of it, because we can't always offer that.
James: Right. Yeah, that that th thanks for breaking that all down because I I really like the how how that runs through the book. So the service experience transformation, those three first of all, I love things in three. Everything should be in three. It's I it's appealing to understand things that way. Yeah, it could be. I'm just an LLM. This this this is a whole this whole thing is just a fuss. yeah, so that so that really helps rethink and again, it's just a new lens to look at the same thing. And a lot of what this book is, is a new lens to look at something that's already there.
Jessica Zwaan: Are you an LLM? Is that what you are right now? Yeah.
James: And in particular this Reshnievsky aspect of the job, career and calling, if I remember correctly, from her research, she found that all work or all people in all industries fit into roughly three-thirds. So
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
James: About a third of your people will see their work as a calling, about a third of your people will see their work as a career, and about a third of people will just see it as a job. And I think your point and her point and my point is that that's fine. Not everyone has to believe in this grand mission for them to be valuable or even for them to enjoy their work. And it's okay that some people see their work as a job. And I think if I tie back to your kind of initial framing, if we frame this this grand mission.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: then two-thirds of your people are gonna be disillusioned by that probably because they don't see their work as part of a grand mission, they see it as a job or a career. So so that that was really interesting. So I I haven't really got a question at the end of that. I I planned that I planned that very poorly as a as a host. But any any thought any thoughts, any additional thoughts on that?
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Great. No, I think that's a great like kicking off point for a conversation that yeah, I think this idea of like people split broadly in thirds is a thing that comes up a lot when I talk about this work. Is like one thing that I actually do advocate in the book is to try and make your workplace workplace a little bit more like try to hire people that fit more broadly along with the way that you strategically want to build your company. And I think maybe the reason people kind of broadly fit in thirds and then like kind of w in aggregate on multiple companies is because HR teams haven't been specifically looking for what motivates people as part of this like relationship between how do we make people successfully use our product. Now I'm not going to say you're always going to find people that are aligned only with experience, but if you're actively trying to look for people that will probably be more motivated by the things we can offer than the things we cannot, hopefully you're going to be able to have that kind of selection bias and have a team that are more likely to be motivated by the things you're offering. And I think The other thing as well is that it's really important that we I think you would say and me and say and I Amy would say is that there's no difference in performance between these people. And I think this is another really important point that frustrates folks or confuses folks probably a little. Is like how can that possibly be? How can it possibly be that someone who's lives and dies by the company mission can be a as equal performer as someone who's just doing the job because they want to feed their children or just doing this job because they want to be able to afford to travel in three years' time and and do a sabbatical? And the answer to that question, in my opinion, is kind of like It's always a little insulting to the virtue that we have assigned to really caring about work. People can care about things outside of work and work have be a be a means to that end. And I'll give you an example of this. It's super anecdotal. It's obviously just like specific to me. But when I was in my university, I worked multiple jobs while studying because my biggest dream in life was to be able to be self-sufficient, move overseas, and experience the world as freely as I possibly could. I was not doing those multiple jobs and studying my university degree because it was the thing that drove me. But I did very, very well. The thing that was driving me to be super disciplined every day was this other purpose that the only way I could achieve it was by doing the very, very best I could at the work I was doing and the study I was undertaking at that time. And I think all of us probably have examples of this in our life where we're like, well, yeah, I don't love going to the gym, but I was really motivated to look great at my holiday, so I was able to make that happen. and that's obviously a bit of a silly example, but also like thinking about something slightly more serious here is like, who are you to tell a mother that she is as less virtuous or less capable of doing her job because she's motivated by giving a great lifestyle to her children than you are to the engineer that just happens to love cloud accounting. Like I think it's a I think I think it's a very kind of presumptuous and almost patronizing way to view what motivates people and I think that leads to what we talked about you just started with your introduction which is this purpose washing selling a company purpose because we feel like people couldn't possibly handle the reality of the fact that some people are just at work for other reasons.
James: So you're so you're saying that when you worked that checkout job at a supermarket, you weren't fully bought into the mission statement of that supermarket chain? That's unbelievable.
Jessica Zwaan: I would say I haven't been fully brought into the mission statement of fifty percent of the companies I've worked for, but that's okay. I did a damn good job.
James: Yeah. It's that's I mean it's so true, isn't it? I think that that's a really, really powerful example. the parent that obviously obviously their purpose is their children to think less of them because they've got that purpose. I wanna ask you about the fun house mirror. you described the the you talked about the anti-work subreddit and this sort of reaction, I think, to this challenge of work of people out there saying, I I don't really care. It's just not, you know, it's it's like they're telling me to do all this stuff, they're telling me to care. I don't care. I just want to go out and do my work. And you've got this whole community now with social media and things like Fishbowl and Tik TikTok and Work Talk and and you described
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.
James: That community of people, this anti work community, is like a funhouse mirror version of HR. So talk me through that.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, my goodness. I spent some time in some very fun places of the internet in the writing of this book. Yes, if you've never spent time, I mean I'm proudly I've never actually downloaded TikTok. I watched everything through like a TikTok web-based, like illegal watcher or whatever I had to do to see a lot of this content. but I did spend some time on the anti-work subreddit, which I'm you know active on sub I'm active on Reddit. and then just reading a lot of anti-work Twitter and other things as well. And I think it's interesting because what What it basically does, I think, is when you're this fun house mirror idea. By not being honest about the realities of what motivates people and what works to motivate people. So like go back to this idea of like some people are motivated by raising children and they see their job as a means to an end to have high quality pay, stability, and to be able to have time with their children because they've got regular s schedule and great benefits, right? That would be, I would say, like someone who's probably in a job So let's think about the job orientation that we just mentioned with a parent who has a job where their main priority is to have regular pay, stability, benefits, a schedule they understand and can predict because they really, really love spending time with their children and they want to give their children the best opportunities they can. That's someone in a job orientation and that is a a role, a career serving as a services career type or a workplace type for this person. Very aligned. Both sides are probably quite happy with that agreement. but what happens that goes wrong that I think leads to these kind of anti-work subreddits, or anti-work sentiment, really more broadly, is when a workplace is coming out and saying everyone should live the company purpose, we live the company purpose, we love the company purpose, this is what motivates everybody, making everybody answer questions that aren't even used or genuine or relevant during the job interview process, making people answer questions during a performance evaluation and self-review process that are about whether or not you love the company purpose. Well we know research says it doesn't actually do anything different about your job performance. And then going out and talking about company decisions and progress, like trying to squeeze things into the shape of a company purpose or mission or some kind of greater good that the company is doing. And that is what should be motivating you as an individual, completely ignoring the fact that people are just looking for different things, as we talked about before, those different job orientations. What happens is this big sense of dissonance starts existing, right? People and culture teams are saying 1% of the story they should be talking about, or just like completely kind of disassociating from the reality, in my opinion, sometimes. And employees are also kind of parroting the same thing back to themselves, saying, Yeah, I love the company purpose when they get up at the all hands, but actually really going home and being like rolling their eyes about it. and I think what's interesting is these anti work subreddits and anti work movements are pretty comfortable just saying the way that they think what is really happening behind the scenes, because all they're seeing is what to them looks a little bit Like manipulation or just stupidity, right? So they're very comfortable kind of projecting it back at us as a mirror. And it looks horrible. Like it looks awful for us, right? Like my company's asking me to do this horrifying four-day-long purpose initiative where I have to fill in a bunch of paperwork and forms, but I've been hitting all my goals for the last three quarters, and if I don't do this well, then I'm not going to get my bonus this quarter. Sounds pretty rough when you hear those kinds of things, but those things exist out there. Or like my company is saying to us how imp how fantastic it is that we've reached all these customer milestones, we've made all this a fantastic impact towards our company purpose, and yet they're cut cutting our benefits for reasons that we can't explain. and again, those you know, those things I think a lot of changes from HR teams, if they're not coming from a place of like research and reality, just end up getting distorted when they get presented back to us. And I think it's uncomfortable for us to see that d distortion, but it's also kind of necessary because I don't think it's getting better at the moment.
James: Yeah. It does. I mean, I think there are come I think the the br the big picture is it probably is. If you take work a hundred years ago and w take work now, there's definitely been movements and a lot of what we're talking about, putting employees forward, it's been around for so long. Like it really emerged in like the early part of the last century with commentators talking about like Rentis Lyckert was the first person I think that coined participative workplace culture and there's th there's been it's been there for a while, but it's starting to take hold.
Jessica Zwaan: Mmm yes. Yeah. Mm.
James: And I think competition will take care of the rest. The good employees will go to the places where they are viewed as a person who can who can do the work they do. But I want to go back to that. The Finance Mirror is such a good analogy because think a lot of people will will empathize with that. and you talked about the parroting, it almost reminds you a little bit 1984, with people parroting how much they love the party. And you're kind of you kind of all have to, you're all kind of you're all kind of in on this joke, you're all kind of in on this lie. You know it's nonsensical, it doesn't mean anything. because you've got this gap between what you believe the purpose is and what it really is, which brings me to the gap you mentioned towards the end of your book and you had an illustration of this. The example used was very close to my heart, because it was accounting, which I which I was. And in accounting, the idea of selling a greater purpose is is a bit of a stretch. You know, you're really just fundamentally doing something quite administrative.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
James: but let me let me ask you about that,
Jessica Zwaan: a chap called Andy Whitlock, who I interviewed for this book, who had such incredible if anyone needs any kind of comms design around your brand purpose or your brand messaging or your values, he's created values for me in the past and previous companies. He's brilliant. he runs a consultancy called The Human Half and he's very, very good at human half of brand messaging. anyway, I interviewed him and I largely wanted to talk to him about his work that he'd done in crafting and creating company purposes and mission statements, brand purpose statements, and what we could learn in employee land from that work he'd done out in more of the consumer side of things. and he talked about this this kind of like brand purpose gap that we turned to like the kind of employee purpose gap or work purpose gap, which is That's You want what your company actually does and your company purpose or like where you're going, your big aspirational statement, to be separate. You don't want them to be exactly the same, because there's nothing really like competitively compelling about that or aspirational about that. But you also don't want them to be so far apart, so so astronomically unaligned that a person could not even see the horizon that they're actually trying to get to. And the example he or that we talked about in the book and that he he kind of helped craft was you're a company making software that makes accounting easier on the cloud. Well, what you're really doing is very straightforward. It would be a massive purpose gap for you to go out and say, we're revolutionizing the financial incentives of accountants within the cloud atmospheric. But it's like, you don't need to do all that. You can just say we're making accounting more delightful and simple for accountants that really need it. There's a nice purpose there. We're being specific about who it is. It's accounts that really need it. Maybe it's teams of one or those that have, you know, running small businesses themselves and making it more simple and delightful. We're not making some big world-changing financial infrastructure. and that's just all we're trying to do for the time being. And that's actually going to probably hold back quite a lot of this like disassociating or like disengagement with a company purpose if people just feel like, well, that feels like something I am doing every day. This feels like a thing we are doing. Yeah.
James: then you you're not being deceived at that point. Like yeah, all right. It's that deception that people don't like, isn't it? Like being sold one thing and given another. It actually reminds me, Intuit,
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
James: is actually a really interesting case study, specifically to your point, because they don't really promise a greater purpose, but they do promise the opportunity to innovate and try things. So even though there's no grand purpose here beyond the purpose of your clients, so you're trying to help in this process, they do offer people space to try things out. And all all the great innovators offer their employees roam and space to try things out. And so Intuit are actually a pretty good example of finding a purpose within the very constrained walls of their mission, accounting.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Yeah. Yeah.
James: software and offering something that people can enjoy about their work.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. it's a funny thing I'm actually kind of grappling with at the moment as well because I mean another one of the people I interviewed in the book, Hugh Slater, who runs a company called Oli, now is he's founding a new business as well within that same kind of space. But he talks about why people the the big gap between founders' ideas of purpose and then the actual employees' ideas of purpose and in particular as it relates to employment and the job that they're doing. and he talks about how it can be really, really challenging actually to have team members
James: Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Who are so bought into if you give some big lofty company purpose or a company purpose that is really genuinely close to people's hearts, and for him it was it's employee mental health, right? That was the company did. He found it really challenging to get the team to feel bought in and engaged because that is it's something that ambiguity around or business sense becomes difficult to metabolize if your passion in life is mental health and mental well-being, and all of a sudden you're now having to optimize. for net revenue retention of a customer that is unhappy, that's a really difficult headspace to be in. And I think that goes back to the conversation we were having just previously or just before is around How could it possibly be that people that are aligned with seeing their job as a career are going to be less strong performers than those that see it as a calling? Is like, well, actually, how you craft that company purpose statement, how you talk about your employees are here to do, is actually going to also really help motivate whichever group of people you're you're optimizing for to the point with Intuit. If you're focusing on we're here to create a world in which everybody has access to insert some big illustrious thing versus Our company is here to do this very specific thing, but you as an employee are here because we're able to offer you incredible access to opportunity beyond what you would get in another employer. Great. That's fine. Yeah.
James: Hmm. Yeah. Simple as that. I've been guilty of making this mistake, assuming everyone needs to share in this grand purpose. And I think where you see it and where a lot of listeners I think might see it is in leveling guides. Because a leveling guide assumes that there is one path for everyone, and the values, this EVP, this grand purpose, filters into the leveling guide and ignores the three broad categories of employees that you have. And it kind of implies that if you're not bought in, if you're not selling the values, if you're not living and breathing our culture, you're not going to progress through the leveling guide. And I'm a I no leveling guides are a very risky thing to do. I know they're ubiquitous, but they also are essentially a system of control, which invariably creates challenges.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Mm-hmm.
James: But it's interesting when you see that language filter into leveling guides. If you are an im if you are, let's say go back to your example, the mother looking after their family, and you see that you're in this level, and you see that implicitly in the wording is that you should be looking for the next level. And that if you are looking for the next level, you should be doing more of X, Y, Z. And you think to yourself, but I don't want to do more of X, Y, and Z. I just wanna and you you kind of feel like a failure, I think, if if that's you being told that you should be caring and progressing along this chart.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm.
James: so I don't know if you noticed that as well, if you did much leveling guide work. I've I ended up doing a lot of it in my early career, but I I reflect back on that and think I was kind of propagating that issue that you're describing.
Jessica Zwaan: Hmm. It's tough. I find so many so I feel like there's always a balance between what people expect and what is actually helpful. Which is a really tough so first of all, I think leveling architecture should be as bare bones as it possibly can be and as flexible across your entire organization. The idea that you should have a different leveling guide for each different team, different descriptions of all the competencies they need, I think that is like so a so wildly unhelpful. it just makes people more confused, it just puts more things in words that then someone else can interpret in one certain way and bring out this other example. When in fact we're talking about this thing. but also it just makes it impossible to benchmark people, calibrate people, maintain all this honestly useless administrative architecture that's only used to prove and disprove minor points rather than just focusing on performance and helping people and coaching them. but there's still something funny about it, which is like people still want them. It blows my mind. It's like I have recently come into LeapSem LeapSem has is a really fantastic modern HRES tool that has all of the ability to build competencies and leveling guides and everything else in it. So I think the The knowledge that you need some kind of architecture to be able to base compensation, for example. Like we need to broadly understand what is a senior engineer, what does a senior person do across teams so we're able to broadly calibrate them, so we'll be able to broadly set expectations and give feedback where appropriate is a very different thing than we need seventy five thousand competencies, so that we have every single edge case of every single role and every single team covered. But then I think folks still see this as being really useful. work beyond just the bare bones architecture because they're being they're a the teams are asking for it. I mean our team asked for it. every team I've ever worked at in the past it's been like a huge Part of my communications have had to be around like why I'm not building a job-specific or role-specific leveling architecture, because it's just going to serve to trap you and your manager and the people team into an administrative loop that is not going to help you. It's not going to make you feel more fulfilled or enabled. It's not going to make your manager make better or more clear or more ethical decisions. And it's definitely not going to help help HR build products that are going to be helpful for you, because we're going to be spending all this time updating internal documentation.
James: Yeah. It it's really interesting, isn't it? I reflect on this quite a lot. Like there's a few forces. Like I think cognitive closure, the term that Eric Kroglansky coined, we don't like ambiguity. as a species, we like things to be done, and we will reach for the thing that demonstrates it's done before accepting the ambiguity, regardless of the value add, in either that's a job architecture for me, disamb disambigu is disambiguity the word?
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah.
James: I think it's yeah, it disambiguates, yeah. it disambiguates a very vague ethereal concept of a career.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, disambiguates. I that's right. I think it's good. Yeah.
James: And and work and it and it puts people into boxes. And we love sorting people into boxes, like it's something we do at every stage of life. So that there's that, but there's also this familiarity bias that comes with it. The whole architecture of HR is built around the assumption of leveling guides and job architecture and salary runs and things like that. So as soon you ask people to subtract from that and take it away, or not completely remove it, but simplify it, people feel they're losing their ability to control, I think. And then I also think there's a self-reinforcing circularity about all of this because.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: 'Cause we use all these tools and have conversations with people. in all kinds of companies and an employee starts saying, Well, that's the way I can get more money, because I need more money because you started me off at such a low level of pay that I have to work myself through this architecture. And then they say, well show me the leveling guide. And then they start having a conversation. But they'll use that to their own advantage. Yeah. And they'll well I'm doing that, I'm doing I'm doing that, I can do this, I can do that. And all of a sudden that leveling guide is shows its lack of worth in in real life situations. So there's a whole sort of circular set of forces involved that preserve it.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Why don't we have one? Yeah. Mm-hmm.
James: the last thing I'll say because I want to get more of your thoughts is that it doesn't mean it's doesn't have value. Like there is value to administrative solutions to things. It's just that the emphasis I think that we place on it is is far too aggressive and
Jessica Zwaan: Hmm. Mm-hmm.
James: It's almost like once we've done it, it's like, okay, sip that, we've done it now. We've solved everyone's career problem. We've solved all of the pay equity problems, we've solved all of the job description issues because we've rebuilt our job architecture. And I try and say to clients that no, you just you just begun. You created the foundation. Now the work begins. Now the real work begins on top of that.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's so f so many things that I I agree with in everything you've just said there. I think like one of the things I started thinking about was that I love the cognitive closure idea and I I it's such an uncomfortable thing to try and talk to people about that are feeling like they don't have enough that are struggling with their own cognitive closure, right? F for them to come to me and ask, Well, I feel like if we just have one more document or one more piece of information or one more like policy or framework, and I have to say like no. I actually think that there's like almost a reductivity in that kind of work to beyond a certain point. You mentioned there's a minimum you need. Or like there's like a kind of there's a level that is useful is the way I think you described it, which I agree with. I think there is having a If it was if it was my ideal workplace, right, I think what you've got is a very, very bare bones. These are the kind of broad levels you're probably seeing the company, and this is broadly what you can expect from each other. How much reach you're going to have in terms of budget, how many heads you might probably be managing, but may not be fully firm. maybe what kind of impact or size of projects you're launching or working on, like how how long or big of a per quarter are they, how many people are involved in them. but outside of that, probably I'm not gonna build anything else, really. It's gonna be something very, very simple. Then from there, like a compensation framework that broadly says we're gonna pay with this philosophy in mind, we're gonna be mostly targeting towards 90th percentile, we're not gonna be doing cost of living adjustments, we will have reasons to have some exceptional discretion being applied, and this is broadly the reasons we do it. But I'm not gonna go into like every single job architecture name on our back end system being mapped against a job in our company perfectly shared, but like no, it's just it's unnecessary. and then when it comes to even things like. Job descriptions. Like, I will write one when I need to advertise a job so we can understand how to assess someone's performance. But then beyond that, I'm not going to be doing that. It's going to be based on the goals we're asking you to achieve, the feedback you receive from others, and the company performance as a whole. That's like really the best we can do. but what's so challenging, I think, with these things is this like this cognitive closure thing you mentioned is HR teams particularly get themselves in this like feedback gap. So taking this back to like Built for people kind of land, people as a product. Customers give you a lot of feedback about all the things they'd like to see. If you're building a consumer-facing product, you if you're building laptops at Apple, someone has asked you for a drink holder on the app, the laptop. Does that mean that every single one of these requests should be something you should be thinking about? No. You should be looking at them and understanding the value of them and why groups of your customers might be misaligned with your strategy or where you're going as a business, and maybe even consider them and say, like, is our strategy Wrong. but the idea that just doing extra work because people are asking for it is somehow value creating is to me a really dangerous that just leads you directly down the path of your CEO or CFO asking, like, what's the value of all this money that we're spending on HR? If all we really see is more and more and more policy documentations and people are still leaving. We still have attrition, we still have unhappy employees, we're still struggling to hire in key regions.
James: Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: I can tell you right now, you're not going to solve an attrition problem with a job by job leveling framework.
James: Mm-hmm. No. It doesn't mean it's not useful, but it's not gonna fix your attrition. It's not gonna make people happy. There's no research to show a lot of these systems help anything. And again, it doesn't mean they're not useful. It can help us organize and administer and it can do, you know, there's still back office requirements. But there is research to show that there is a type of work that people enjoy. And when you look at the research and whether it's self self-determination theory is my favorite body of research, but there's also the progress principle of Theresa Ramaboli and
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Yeah.
James: all kinds of things that they all basically say give people more autonomy, give people challenging tasks, just write tasks, as well I've heard it described, and give people pe teams they want to work with. That none of that has to do with architecture or any of the infrastructure or administration of it, but we know that helps, we know that engages people, so we know where we should be investing our time and energy.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
James: But the frustrating thing for me is how willing we are to invest our time and energy and money in all these systems that have no evidence around whether they're going to improve things, but a lack of it into what we might call the people experience. So that's the the shift in mindset that I hope more HR leaders start to think about. Where is e where is it worth investing each dollar? Where is it going to generate actual, if difficult, measurable returns on the way people want to stay and and the value they bring to the organization?
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And how can you be honest with people about it? Like I think being able to say very candidly to people like l let's t take it back to purpose of work, 'cause I think it's it's it's it's still like a very relevant message here. It's like I think a lot of people know deep down It's like an Emperor's New Clothes thing. That not everyone is coming to work for the company mission, purpose, and they're getting fulfillment out of something else. But they feel uncomfortable saying that because they don't know who else is on the same side as them. so I think as if companies just got more comfortable coming out and saying, We know that you're all motivated by different things. Some of you are gonna be motivated by very structural, clear, like leveling frameworks and clear benefits and understanding what your next promotion may look like and what they may be and how to have a relationship with work that is transactional and that's great. We want we want to be able to serve you. How can we you receive generous pay increases from solid performance without having to be structured on some like career ladder? Some of you are going to be really motivated by a company mission. That's really wonderful. Same as our founders. They love the work that we're doing for our customers. And then a lot of you are going to be really motivated by that. I think hopefully you remember from the the book, I mentioned a list of five things I asked people to stack rank in my interviews, what's most important to you at work. One of them was feeling a sense of connection to your customers or the your colleagues, people around you. One of them was a sense of creativity, so being able to be creative in the things that you're making. So not just having directional information about this is what you need to make, but actually being able to create something that's new or innovative or novel. The other one was being able to have autonomy. So you might not be creating new novel things, but you have autonomy in how you do the work. So yeah, I'm just creating the same kind of like reporting spreadsheets month on month, but actually I have flexibility of how I do that, I have flexibility in the ways I do it, I can change the the format. and then the last one was company purpose and Almost every single person put connection with colleagues and customers as the most fulfilling part of their work at the top. And almost every single person put company purpose at the very, very bottom, unless again I say it was evil, in which case they said, Well, if the company's purpose was evil, that would be the most important thing to me, and I'd need to I wouldn't want to work there. But as a as long as your company purpose isn't evil, that's the last thing people are thinking about at work. They're much more thinking about how can I be connecting with customers, how can I be understanding the impact I'm having as a person on other people, my colleagues, how can I be autonomous was the next. one by and large how can I be doing work where I'm not being dictated to or micromanaged and being able to do stuff that works in the way that my life works that might be being able to go pick up your kids after school or just using software and tools that make sense for you. How can I be creative? How can I do things in a way that I feel like I'm contributing something net new to the world, not just cutting copy cutting like ticket systems or whatever it may be, but actually making projects and thinking about new ideas and having innovative challenges. And if you're put supplying that to most people, actually you're going to make them so much happier than almost and more engaged than almost any other thing that just compensating people more or giving people more structure is going to ever do.
James: Yeah, I love that. And that another theme that that this theme obviously carries through the whole book. And one of the sections, I can't remember who you referred to, but you mentioned Ikigai, this one beautiful Japanese term. And related to that, you made the point that all those things that people look for, we need to respect that again, this is a kind of the same theme, but w not all of it needs to come from work. We probably need all of it in some capacity.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: But that purpose, to go back to our our mother with children, the purpose comes from the children, it doesn't come from the work. So the purpose box is kind of taken out of work and moved into the personal life, and that's fine. So I I'd love this idea that like you don't need all of that from work. And if work's flexible enough, you can offer the things that people do need from their work without trying to solve the things that they don't need from their work because they're getting it from other aspects of their of their life. And this like
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
James: This idea that if you're not getting your purpose from a company, that's wrong. It's I it again, it just sounds so ridiculous when you when you put it that way. And I do think it's an issue with founder led companies. Everyone th a lot of founders believe that everyone should care as much about this mission as as they do. Whereas in reality, no one's gonna care as much about that mission as they do. Someone c might care a lot about it, but it basically goes down from the founder at that point, so they're gonna be very disappointed if they expect anyone to care as much.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm. Yeah. It's a it's a really funny so one of the things I noticed when I was writing this book is people would ask me like, How's work? How's work going? and I would kind of made a point to to start being honest about how I was finding work, which would be like, Yeah, it's going well, it's fine, I'm happy with everything that's happening at the moment, but the things that I'm not really that motivated by like the Whatever the company's doing this month, like the things I'm really interested in is this problem I'm having with this person, or this other thing I'm doing outside of work that work's been really flexible around. and it's so funny how often people would respond with, well, you need to look for a new job. And it's like, well, no, I've just said I'm perfectly happy. I like my job, I'm having a nice time, but I'm not really that I'm like not massively motivated by work at the moment. The things that are motivating me are other things.
James: Right. Yeah, that's true.
Jessica Zwaan: Well, that means that you must be really unhappy. And it's like, well, is that how you feel? Do you feel so motivated by your work every day? And I I talk about this this person quite a lot, but I was doing a workshop at the Troop HR Summit in Florida while I was writing the book. and I was talking about this this idea, the the research around job career calling orientations, and this lady raised her hand and said, You know, for my whole career I have thought I was broken, that I was like the one person that just hadn't found the whole holy grail of like loving work and getting it and like not just company purpose but also just like loving the job I was doing. Everyone seemed to be like, yeah, I'm having the best time. I love yeah, this is so great. And she's like, and I kept I'd quit a company and I'd started a new one. I started working in an ethical tech company that wasn't really the same it didn't give me the same thing. When I worked at a big corporate, still didn't feel it. She's like, and I was like, maybe I just like don't have this thing everyone else has. And I think it's like such a let's like just park all of the company efficiency side of it for one second and all the fact it can make you build a better HR team. What a sad world it is that we're all walking around where some people are feeling broken and incapable because they don't have this feeling that you yourself may not have. And we're all sitting there saying like we should define a new job. If this isn't your passion, if this isn't the thing driving you. It's actually okay and I would say probably even a good thing for a lot of us. Like I talk a lot about like how depression that comes from like work, life over connectivity and a lot of other psychological challenges that can come from someone completely being entangled with their their job and their career. But I think we'd actually just have a better world if people could be more comfortable saying like, yeah, I love my job. I really love my colleagues, have a really great time, but it's not the thing that drives me day to day. It's actually much more about my passion for cycling, which it allows me to be in a town that has great cycling around it, or it's my children, or it's the fact that it's actually allowed me to study my master's part time. Like that's fine.
James: Yeah. It it's so true, isn't it? I think that and this whole work talk sort of movement, I think, is opening the eyes of a of n another generation to take that healthier approach. It's okay. It's okay if you don't obsess over your work. It's this this kind of strange lie that unfortunately I think corporate America is sold quite aggressively. I do think I think like continental Europe, for example, very few people take their work as seriously. which is good and bad. It means you get you kinda get less of that engagement, but also perhaps a slightly healthier.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: work-life balance. so there's another phrase I wanted to move on to. This is backing up a bit, getting bit more philosophical. You mentioned that we are terrible accountants when it comes to measuring the value of our choices. And I really like this, but I'll let you expand on it first because I I thought a lot about this and it related to a few other things. So what what did you mean by that?
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. yeah. Yeah. So in this chapter of the book I talk about this this actually happened by the way. I genuinely did this. I for for fun and games kind of, but I I made a spreadsheet where I tried to tally the approximate amount of money I'd spent in my eighteenth year to thirtieth year of my life. Like how much have I spent on pubs and karaoke nights and going out with my friends and drinking and wine and all of that. Just to broadly get a feel. It was a lot of money that I'd spent on like I think really things that I would now if I would love to have the money, obviously. But like also I I kind of argue in the book like, but that's how I learned about some like that's how I met some of my best friends. It's how I learned some of the funniest things about living in the UK that I still really love. It's how I
James: Mm-hmm.
Jessica Zwaan: Grow surf ro surf crowd surfed at Gross Rock and got into cycling and all these other things, right? My life would be yes, fiscally poorer, but also enrichment poorer if I had spent that money on investing in property or something else. and and what I then go on to talk about is this idea that like we're actually really bad accountants, as I just mentioned there, when it comes to the value of the choices that we're making. Some people choose to work at a company because they think it's gonna make More money during an IPO. Some people do it because they want to spend more time with their family, and this gives them an opportunity to do that. And there's no point really going back and try to calculate the return on investment for the decisions you've made in your career, except what is fulfilling for you in that moment, what is genuinely giving you a sense of purpose, direction, and fulfillment. And I write this as the introduction to this chapter because I'm largely talking about the fact that people change their orientations through their lives. Someone who may have seen their job as a career might later decide that they actually. actually maybe they have children and Abby Pugh is a great example of this who I interviewed for the book. they have children and they realize that actually I want to go and work at a climate tech company because I want the world to be a better place for the children I have. Therefore, my whole orientation about work has now become much more about a calling than it has been about a career. and I kind of make the argument that you should be a little bit first of all, expect and be gentle with yourself and your team members as they go through these transitions in their lives and set up established routes for that to happen. And yes, they will be ambiguous. It might be unclear how someone can have an internal move or take a sabbatical but that's okay and then also it's about the idea of like you know be be gentle with yourself as well I think was another kind of takeaway from it like be okay that you yourself won't really know what's going to motivate you now and what the right choices are. It's ultimately going to be about the thing that motivates you not in the the the long term but in in the day-to-day
James: Mm. Yeah. And it's that again it kinda comes back to cognitive closure. Like we like a lot of the decisions I think I can't remember who it was that said this, so it might been on the podcast, but they said that kind of a similar point to that. We're very bad at this making decisions. Like if you really look at it objectively, and it said if you think you're a rational decision maker, then why do you have a watch when you've got a better phone better clock on your phone? And why do you have kids when it's a terrible return on investment? Okay, th these are irrational decisions to make if you look at it by any economic
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah.
James: metric, it's just a w a waste of money, but we do it because it brings us joy. You can't measure that joy. and I think Barry Schwartz wrote a bit about this as well, but I haven't read much of his his work. But he you know he critiques this rational choice theory. We can't make rational choices and we shouldn't attempt to. And it's okay if you can't. Like just make the choice that feels right in the moment.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
James: and again, like that that sort of plays into our career choices. Like it's you know, the choices aren't always gonna be financially motivated, they're gonna suit one aspect of our life. And as a company, as as HR leaders, we need to respect that and and not expect everyone to constantly make rational choices about how and when and where they get their work done.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, I think there's just a lot of like I mean there's so much in this and also in just in ways of working that I think is really important is like, you know, I think I I'm I'm gonna we're gonna dip a little bit into AI now, I'm sorry to do this, but like I feel like it's helpful.
James: It's okay. It's okay. As long I've got a quote as long as it's no more than ten percent of the podcast, then it's okay. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Okay, it's very short. I think with the introduction of LLMs being able to synthesize and and deliver better decision making packages in to us really quickly, we've got this idea that like, well, if we only just work on something enough, if we only just like refine something more now, we'll get we'll get to this like kind of golden hand from the sky telling us what decision to to be made. And I actually see this you know, I didn't really write about it from this perspective in the book, but I I think that this is like actually a theme that carries on from the chapter you're talking about. Is like Sometimes what your culture needs is just a decisive point of view on where you want to be in the market and why, and then the frameworks that enable that to thrive. You do not need every decision to have Tick boxes across every board, sign off from every person, complete lack of legal risk, long-term l longevity without scaling issues. Like, again, you're optimizing for a return on investment for a thing that is just like completely unpredictable. but I think we've gotten ourselves into the trap going back to that yeah, cognitive closure again. It's like, well, now that we have an LLM to help us like synthesize huge volumes of information, surely we'll be so much better at making decisions. And
James: Mm. Yeah. Now we'll do it. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, and I think we will to a point. I think we are bet I'm definitely quicker at making decisions, but I don't necessarily think I'm like materially better in terms of my success. The thing that I'm aiming for is like be mostly right about the decisions I'm making. And that is my personal life as well as is at work. And as long as I'm mostly right and making decisions that are mostly important, I'm moving in the right direction. And as long as I'm doing that, anything else that I do by stagnating or having you know inability to make decisions is just going to hold me back from what really needs to happen, which is make a lot of decisions, be mostly right and make them important ones.
James: Yeah. Yeah, well said. I I think that there is a lot of hope that LLMs will save like I think performance management is a good example. It's such a fundamentally flawed process it with knowledge work. Like it will never work because we just don't we aren't equipped to measure.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Yeah.
James: individuals in the context of collaborative work. It just doesn't work. There's so many problems with this. Like there's so many psychological barriers. And I do think there's a sort of expectation that we've got it wrong for a long time. Everyone hates performance management almost ubiquitously. It's kind of funny how common performance management is and also how commonly despised it is by HR and leaders and the people on the receiving end. But there's almost like we just haven't quite got it right yet. If we've if we get with now now we've got AI, now we can finally get it right. Now we can measure individual performance.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: And I fundamentally think that's just a fool's errand. Like it's not about individual performance anymore. It's about collective performance.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, I definitely think AI has the g like, you know, as as a team building, like an AI enabled HRES, I do think that what this does do is help surface really valuable conversations between people. and that's I think what we're really leaning into at Leapsum is like building a tool that helps not say like, okay, well we're gonna have some algorithm that identifies these are the three people that perform the best, but rather here's a bunch of things that you should probably think about and have a conversation with this person to help them be successful based on
James: Right. More of co it's more like coaching, right? Rather than doing it for you, it's it's helping you be a better person. Yeah, yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Ex Exactly. And also surfacing information from like things like surveys and how often s you know you how frequently groups of people have generally been promoted and has this person always been? Like maybe there's something here you can follow up. Like these are actually such much more valuable things to kind of help address what it's really about is addressing performance. It's almost never about assessing performance in my opinion. It's like if you're seeing a gap with someone, what are the things that you can do from the context, from the history, from what this person's good at, what this person's had good feedback on, to help them be successful, and much less around like well how do we know if someone's a three or a three point seven?
James: Hm. Yeah. Right. Yeah. that's a rabbit hole. We probably haven't got time to go down the performance racing, but yeah, don't get me started on that. There was a particular illustration that you gave in the book, the T-shaped role. so I wonder if you could talk me through what the T-shaped role is and why that's a a useful framing again of a problem.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Yes, this is something I talk about in Built for People as being I think necessary for people teams, now. Which is the idea of a T-shaped people partner or a T-shaped member of your people of team. but now I kind of in our in purpose and work make the argument that basically everyone should be broadly T-shaped, especially in the way that the world is changing now. and T-shaped is that you have one area of like pretty deep expertise that you've been kind of focusing on your career, and that could be something as specific as comp and ben, right? Or it could be something that's a little bit more broad. Like I've always worked in SaaS businesses, so I really understand like the SaaS model. But you've got one, maybe two. There's also the discussion of pie-shaped people with two areas of expertise. But then what you have on top is it's kind of like broad application of those skills. So my one, for example, maybe I'm very, very strong at companies where there's a big piece of cultural change that needs to happen. and size is kind of irrelevant. I've done it at 2,000 people company, I've done 500 people company, done 110 people company, 40 people company. Big amount of change that's going to happen. In which there are both fiscal outcomes, commercial outcomes, and people outcomes that need to both be taken care of at the same time. We can't thrash the culture, but we also need to make sure that we're being much more efficient in how we do things. that's like been something that I've been doing now for like 15 years. Pretty much every company I've worked at has had the same challenge or the same thing that I've needed to focus on. But my application of it can be very, very broad. I can apply that to org design, I can apply that to how we do leadership off-sites and how we communicate things. I can get down and build something with my team if we're getting. necessary to make that skill useful. and that T-shaped application of a set of experience or set of expertise is I think the thing that is going to both give people a much greater career opportunities in this new world of AI. I've been talking about this already, but I won't take we won't take it more than 10%, I promise. it's going to I think really significantly change what what an expert can do and also ex have a broader expectation of the way you can apply that knowledge or that skill. So yeah I talk about T-shape in this in this book as being something that's highly fulfilling for people and give people a lot more opportunity but also help people work together better and also be able to face the future of work more optimistically.
James: Sorry. To be clear, it's not a hard quota of 10% for talking about AI. It's I just feel like all I all I hear about is AI at this point. So I I kind of like just getting away from it sometimes. But that's a really good, I think it's a really useful framing. I think it's a really good example. And again, another way to reframe a problem that maybe people hadn't really thought about. then there's another area that you get into, which we agree very strongly on based on your writing, is and you you characterized it in one phrase, which is these dang lazy kids.
Jessica Zwaan: We're nowhere near. Yeah, I know. I agree.
James: And and made the point that every generation throughout history has been saying in some different combination of words, these dang lazy kids. And one of my favorite ways you make this point about the perception of laziness is that Charles Dickens, obviously the great joke Charles Dickens, wrote 15 books, 200 short stories, and edited his weekly publication, and he didn't work afternoons. So and so in if he wasn't in an office, we'd look at a person that walked off at midday.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah.
James: And call them lazy. So tell me a bit more about this perception of hard work and the perception of laziness and your views on that.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, I talk in the book about there's so many things that they come in into this bit. I think this is like I think this again I'm gonna reframe this about myself because I don't want to it to feel like I'm like pointing fingers at anyone specifically and I also wanna lead from the front, which is something that I talk about in the book a lot, about how important it is to to have open conversations about how you're going. I work very hard at my job. I Wake up every morning, I diligently work, I prepare for meetings, I am on time for the meetings 90% of the time. At least my old Sana bot used to tell me ninety f ninety-nine point nine nine seven or something like that. and I will do my follow-ups, but I try very hard to log off at five. I have a lot of passions outside of work that I'm very excited about. The things on my SMART goals list, if I had that for my life, are not Broadly work related. A large portion of them are things like paint and oil painting. and I wake up every morning and drink coffee in my bed for an hour, read nonfiction books. I'm not sitting there reading you know, behavioral economics most of the time. and on the weekends, very often I go out till four or five in the morning, sometimes later, because I'm still young enough to do that. I I'm very happy to say that I think all of those things in connectivity, and I know by the way, this is not a life that everyone can live, right? For you for someone out there who's like, well, that's just easy for you. I I have three kids and all these like maybe your version of how you spread your life is different to mine, again, it should be focused around giving you a sense of fulfillment. Mine is built that way because it gives me a huge sense of fulfillment. It makes me really, really happy when I'm working. when I'm working, I am like switched on intellectually, I know what I'm doing, I'm capable of delivering things, I have what I feel like are pretty good ideas. but then at that that time that I'm done I'm done I'm happy to be done and I go off and I live the other parts of my life that I'm excited about I think we have this idea and I think actually you know Claude and everything else with this like very quick serotonin kind of feedback loop Even if you're really, really tired, there are still more things that you can do of high quality now that you've got all these tools available to you. So there's this like never-ending feeling like, well, I could be infinitely efficient. We talk so much about productivity. I don't think just being productive, and actually, there's really great book called Leverage, which I forget the name of the chap who wrote it. I'll try and send it to you after the podcast.
James: I'll add it into the show notes in case anyone's looking for it. Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah, it's really great. He talks about the idea of like actually what your job is to it your your job is just to be endlessly productive and create endless content for other people. It is to make the things that you're making work really well so that when other people need them, they know where to come and they know how to use them and they can use them efficiently. It's not just your job to like just spurt productivity into the world. and I think Being a company that is more aligned with well, how can we help people get in a feeling of flow and create useful things and not just feel they have to send like status reports and AI generated documentation and pre-reads. Work theater, I call it. I hate the idea of like work theater being impact. there are lots of things that you can do to do that, which is like, for example, turn your comp your performance reviews to team achievement of impact-related goals, rather than have them be focused around individual productivity. input metrics. Things like that just nudge people in a direction that makes them feel like, okay, well I know what I need to achieve, I know what I can do, having some flexibility and again okay and autonomy on how they do that, having some creativity about how to solve the problem. You'll probably see long-term higher quality outputs and impact and way less noise and burnout and frustration.
James: Yeah. That that the the in I do think that a lot of people struggle with moving away from the individual, because so much of management theory, still still a hangover really from the factory era, where you could measure how many things widgets a person made and how many hours they came in for and you can go to the individual. And there's still this desperation to measure people at the individual level.
Jessica Zwaan: Mm-hmm.
James: And the idea if you don't do that, it's not fair and you're not rewarding people sufficiently, right? If you don't measure people in the individual. But the fact is work isn't individual, it's collective. So to your point, you can't measure output at the individual level because there is none. The output happens at a level above that and sometimes multiple levels above that, but you're all working together towards the same goals. I I think this is a big obstacle for a lot of people. The idea that maybe you don't need to measure by the individual. Maybe what you do need to do is figure out what the team can achieve. And all the research points towards it. Like the idea of superordinate goals, it aligns people towards a purpose. If you give people individual goals, you create
Jessica Zwaan: Mm.
James: So many opportunities for gaming, and then you see the politicians rise to the top. And as someone that's worked in big companies, I've seen this in the real world so many times now, if you give people individual objectives, they will optimize for those individual objectives at the expense of everything else because you've coached them to do that. You've literally told them to do that. And then people complain about the lack of collaboration and the lack of thinking. So I think this is a big a big challenge for a lot of companies getting away from this individualistic aspect of people.
Jessica Zwaan: Yeah. Uh-huh. I th I completely agree and I think that one like really important thing to to tack onto this is going back f like I really l think I'm so glad that the cognitive closure is a big part of this is like there is no system that you're going to implement, no matter how research backed, that is just going to magically solve all of your problems and no one is upset about it. This is the thing that I feel is A real challenge for HR leaders and something that's held us back is this feeling well we have to make as many people happy as we possible. We have to like r reduce the amount of like like I it's kind of a reason I hate EMPS sometimes, if I'm honest with you, is or at least like I I like asking very specific feedback questions about HR work, but I'm not gonna ask you abroad like what do you think of the HR team because honestly, like I actually think a lot of what we do should be a little disruptive and actually probably feel a little abrasive, particularly if we're out there telling managers like, I need you to go to your team and tell them we're doing these this new goal structure.
James: Yeah.
Jessica Zwaan: It's going to be a bit more ambiguous because it kind of needs to be. That's how research states said. And yes, I they're used to having a leveling framework, but it's not going to be good for them. Well, then all the second the HR team got an ENP, like an NPS of four. Yeah, what did you like? How you could you possibly measure us against wanting to the incentives aren't aligned there to get people to feel comfortable. Anyway, there's a whole bunch of stuff there around like measuring a HR team. But there's nothing you're going to launch which is just going to make everything better. If you launch Team goals, you will still have individuals come to you and say, I feel like I've been hard done by here because the team didn't pull through and I really felt like I did this, like did X, Y, Z. So yes, you can build some mitigating functions in that, maybe like an individual accelerator, where if somebody achieves X or there's like some kind of level of like peer feedback, or I don't know, some kind of incentive compatible. I think that's very important, incentive compatible framework, then sure, you can also have incentive help with your individual. Design a thing that you feel broadly moves you a in the right direction, again going back, you're making mostly good decisions about important decisions most of the time. and just know that that also means you've got to be making some bad decisions about some important decisions some of the time. And that's okay as well. That's okay.
James: Yeah. And that's fine. Yeah. Yeah. well, Jesse, we've got through an hour and a half. so I know. And that time go. So I'll finish by saying, Well, first of all, if anyone's listening, I highly recommend picking up a copy of the book, which is available at all good retailers, I think. I think you've gone to the fancy ones as well.
Jessica Zwaan: Where? I think I mean the fancy ones.
James: You're in the fancy ones, I'm on the fancy ones. so you're at Barnes and Noble and things like that. So I highly recommend picking up a copy. But where can people hear more about what you say, what you think? where can they look for you?
Jessica Zwaan: So yeah. Yeah, absolutely. you can always come to my LinkedIn. I post pretty regularly there. I'm also very regularly in Leap Sims community People Over Parks. We do a lot of events, particularly in New York and Berlin. so if you want to come chat to me face to face and tell me how wrong I am about performance incentives, please do. and then the other final place is I have a substack with the chaps from Modern People Leader and PL Build, it's called, where we talk a lot about how to build great workplaces in a really practical way. So come and follow along.
James: So I just joined Substack. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm writing things on it, so I need to follow the MPL team as well. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jesse. Again, congratulations on getting the book. I mean, just getting a book out at all is a pretty difficult thing to do. So well done. I'm getting your there is your second, right? If I remember correctly. Yeah, I'm getting two books. And we will speak again soon. Enjoy the writing. All right. Take care. Bye.
Jessica Zwaan: Great. That's probably it. Thanks, James. Yeah, mm-hmm, second. Yeah. Thank you, you too. Fine.
