Well, random question of the day to get us started. Potato chips. Everybody's favorite.
I'm just going to say it's everybody's favorite. Do you guys have a favorite flavor? I'm going
to come in right now and say due to food intolerances. I have a love-hate relationship
with potato chips, so flavors are kind of off the table. But I'll put it over to you
too.
Salt. Salty flavor.
So, like original, are you like a ruffles, like a ridges, or like a straight, like,
classical ways?
It would probably be the Cape Cod potato chips. They're a game changer, but just the saltiness
of them. If I had to pick a flavor outside of standard potato chips, it would be sour
cream and onion.
I'd probably have to go like harvest cheddar from like the like sun chips. I don't know
if they're like considered chips.
That means they're chips.
Are they a potato chip though?
Potato chips.
They are not made from potatoes.
Like cheddar and sour cream ruffles are, I had to choose.
And you got to get the extra little salt within like the texture of it. Yeah, these like flat
potato chips don't know what those are.
Nope.
Well, on the vein of potato chips, which is a perfect segue to what we're talking about
today, total sarcasm, we are following up on an episode that was published back at the
end of January of the season that was AJ, myself and Matthew talking about using technology
for employee engagement.
Once we wrapped that episode, we were like, it would be great to take Todd's time because
he loves to talk and ask him questions about all of his views from a leadership perspective
on technology and employee engagement.
A lot of big words there, but it's the Tech of Business podcast. I'm Kelsey, a member
of our marketing team moderating. Todd is our COO and CISO and then AJ is a customer
strategy advisor.
I got that one right.
CSA, there's a lot of acronyms in tech.
But we're all sitting down. AJ and I are also members of our employee engagement committee.
We're also working on a CEC, another acronym. But AJ, I'll pass it off to you to put our
first question to Todd this morning.
Yeah. So kind of how have you seen, like obviously, like with employee engagement, we've had to
change how we're interacting with each other with our workforce being primarily remote
now. How has that changed, if anything, how you think about what you want to see us accomplishing?
Sure. Thanks. So from my perspective, just kind of backing up a little bit. When we did
not have a strategic, I'm sorry, how much strategic engagement we didn't have employee
engagement team, we were very much Central Minnesota, Western Wisconsin team and everybody
was in person on site all the time. And we had a tendency to do the same things over
and over again, whether it was convenient or a few people liked it or whatever the case
may be. We kind of went through a process and I was kind of looking at it and I go,
how do we know our employees even like what we're doing? Did we even ask? And the answer
was no, we didn't. And so why so? Why not? We've probably do that. And so that was kind
of how things started originally. But to answer the question that you asked just now is, I
feel it's incredibly important. We have employees that are across the country. So we have them
everywhere. And when we used to be the traditional company that we were, we've been around for
30 years, it was easy to say, hey, we're going to meet up at whatever baseball field, whatever
the case may be, we're going to go to an amusement park and everybody just gathered if they wanted
to. And now you're like, well, that's not all inclusive. We've got half our staff in
various places from Florida to Alaska and everything in between. When you look at that,
you go, how do we make sure that we try to keep everybody engaged? How do they feel like
they're included? I know from my perspective, if you see so much about people quitting and
not being able to go to their jobs and if they can work remote, that's what they're going
to default to. And while I think that's fantastic, I think you lose pieces of what traditional
bonding human culture is based on social interactions. And if you don't have any capabilities of
doing that in any form, they're automatically excluded. Now, obviously, there's introverts
that would much rather prefer to be completely left alone. However, even they do like some
interaction and feel like they're part of a team as well.
As I see it for everybody listening here as I just kind of rolled my eyes because I'm
like, yeah, I'm that person that I was onboarded remotely. So for me, I'm like, I've heard
of these things, never experienced that part. So that's been an interesting to go. Yeah,
for me, it's just normal to go, I'm going to chat my work bestie who's in Anchorage schedule,
like never going to probably meet this person in person, maybe someday in the future, but
that's fine. And that's not odd to me. So that's an interesting point just to put forward
to talk on that just a little bit. But AJ, I totally talked over you. So go ahead.
No, that's okay. And I think part of it is like Matthew is in, you know, a remote look.
He's in Alaska. And he did it, you know, he's one of the people who is just like, Hey, cool,
I want to be part of it. But I could see like Todd, from your perspective, like trying to
like, elicit more of the remote feedback of like, Okay, let's make sure we have somebody,
it already happened. So that conversation didn't need to happen. But I can see how, as you know,
from the leadership perspective, it's like, Hey, somebody who is on all these meetings
should be not in not capable of going to everything because they're remote. And so I could see,
you know, you obviously didn't have to have that conversation. But I can see that conversation
coming through and being like, Hey, this is really change. Let's make sure we're including
these people. So I think that's important too. We kind of just had that dynamic already because
Matthew was outgoing enough and wanted to be part of it. And we've gotten more, you know,
remote employees who join. So that's, you know, it's nice just to be able to throw stuff to him.
Has the your thought of the number of events changed? Or like that you want to like see
because like we we do the traditional like, I think everybody has like the end of year or
like the once a year, like bigger kind of event. Is there other things that you like to see,
you know, with these remote capabilities? I think for us, and this may not apply to most
organizations, although I think it is relatively common from a lot of the places that I've worked
on the past, we try to do two things a year. So we try to do something in the summertime,
and then we also try to do our end of year celebration in some shape, manner or form.
And that number feels pretty good. There are things that I just feel like you kind of got to
keep things going, otherwise people don't feel like they're included. It's, you know,
I never talked to those people or I don't get the opportunity to see people or whatever the
case may be. So I think it's important to do it more than once a year, at least that's my
perspective on it. I did want to kind of expand on the working remote thing and trying to get
those in people in the engagement. Especially if you have a committee, I think it's incredibly
important, right? If you don't have that, how do you know you're getting what you need? Now,
Kelsey said she's been remote, she works remote, that's kind of the way things are for her, but I
do see her from time to time in person. So she has the opportunity to get together that they
don't want. And so you kind of look at that and you go, what? Again, I don't know how I include
them unless I ask. And one thing, and I know I'm completely off the topic that you asked originally,
but I'll try to get back, I swear. I may not. I don't know what that would feel like. I'm not
that person, I'm a little more social, I like to talk, I want to be in person, I like shaking hands
and kissing babies, that's kind of my thing. Well, it's winter here, you get sick when you kiss
babies, so don't do that. Anyways, so as we go through that, sorry, I want to make sure that
we're talking to them. So actually, for what it's worth, when we do our onboarding process, I talk
about the employee engagement committee to every employee that we bring on and saying, we've got
this team, they're doing a lot of really great things, whether it's trying to do book clubs or
how to engage things throughout the year, whatever the case may be, they're doing a lot of those things,
they're always open to having people join too. So if it's something that you're interested,
it's easy enough to figure out how to move forward on it. But then I did, I do remember very specifically
encouraging Matthew to join, I was like, I don't know how to engage you, you're in Alaska, I love
your feedback. From a leader's perspective, one of the biggest concerns I had with it, and I've
shared this with you guys in the past, is I don't want to be the guy that shows up and says, hey,
have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? And the reason is, I don't want to be the
influence that says, well, Todd mentioned it, he clearly wants to do it. We should figure out how
to make that happen. And I just want it to be like, it was just an idea, you don't have to do anything
with it. But I want that team to not have that top down influence that says, you got to think about
this, and you got to think about that, that team knows much better what's important and meaningful
than I do. I tend to get a little disconnected, because like I said, I want to be in person,
I want to shake hands, I want to go do the thing.
How has your thought about like spend change? Because it's, we have the
things that didn't cost money at the office. When we were in the office, we would play basketball
or bags, or it was a minimal cost, or we'd do a grill out, which was maybe a couple hundred bucks.
But there's a lot of different spends that we have now. Thankfully, we've found a ways to not
do it of like the book club. It's just creating a regular meeting that reoccurs third Thursday.
Okay, everybody knows. And encouraging other people to do that. But when it comes to
other outreach for remote employees, has it changed kind of how you think about the spend
per employee? Or what's that kind of thought process like? I think the answer is yes.
It just naturally had to happen. There are things that definitely come up in just thinking about
spend in general. Kelsey had mentioned it earlier, it was, I mean, I never see that individual aside
from video. What would that be like? And it often comes up and says, what would it be like if we
had some sort of outreach where we had people have the capability of meeting us someplace?
So there have been things that we've done that are somewhat creative. I don't think they've been
formalized. But I'll use an example is from time to time, we'll bring people to conferences that may
or may not have had an opportunity to do that in the past. So for example, our security team said,
I'm going to be at this conference if you'd like to join us, we can figure out how to meet up and
get together for dinners or whatever the case may be. Those were very easy to do because it was
already business related. And it wasn't like, well, what I'm really going to do is I'm going to fly you
to Minnesota, and then we're going to put you in a hotel and you have to come into the office and
you have to meet all these people. Kind of a different experience, but it was something that
you consciously look at and say, what does the budget look like for that? But then kind of expanding
on it, there are a lot of other things that I think are great too. And again, this is where I think
the power of the employee engagement committee comes from is they have the capability of going
and thinking outside of the box and says, what would be fun? What if we did Dungeons and Dragons?
What if we did Book Club? What if we did? And most of those things you can do remote.
As Kelsey mentioned, I have the CISO title, so I know that my security team does this. And this is
maybe a little nod to an organization that's free. So there's no, no costs associated with it. But
there is a group called Black Hills Information Security, and they have a card game which somebody
has turned into a web tool called Backdoors and Breaches. And our security team has got a schedule
on a Friday evening, where we're going to like four o'clock at night, we're just basically shutting
it down. We'll be on call. We'll be shutting it down and just kind of going, all right, we're going
to work through this as a game. And the intent is to have fun, team building, etc. But there's no
cost to it other than our employees are there. So kind of like you said, with the bags and the
basketball hoops, there's creative ways to still get that engagement, still have things that are
very team building type things. And then also, it is important to do the additional spend on
things that do matter. Like when we do our in-person events, this is something that maybe is obvious.
I don't think it is, but maybe it is. When we do our in-person events, we kind of say, you know,
we think that cost is whatever, I'll just use a random number. Please don't put anything on this,
it's just a number. It's going to cost us about $500 an employee to have that event. We want to then
take that dollar amount and say, we're going to make that available for the people that Lado can't
make it. So we'll just do something that's in a similar vein that may be a gift, it may be a party,
whatever the case may be. There was a conversation that said, what if we had a group, hypothetically,
we had four employees that were in a single city, and they could easily get together. What if we
funded the dinner? What if we funded the party, whatever the case may be, those are absolutely
things we want to consider and find ways to make happen so we can still celebrate our organization
amongst ourselves. Well, this is a little bit of a tangent of what you're talking about. Maybe think
of it as right before everybody was in the same spot, and now we've not only gone remote, but we've
also gotten bigger. So right previously, if we were saying, oh yeah, there's 50 people, that's
easier to work with and to budget for than right now, you're saying, okay, the security team does this,
and they do that, and they do these things, which is great. But then how do you look at it and say,
what does that look like? I'm part of a two-person department, spoilers. So right, that's a little
bit different than I'm like, yeah, Darren, I talked for five hours yesterday, casual, that's just
getting work done. But right as teams grow, there's so many different dynamics. How do you look at
that? And how do you kind of prioritize and foster that? Well, the fostering is being supportive,
at least from the leadership aspect of it. I want teams to feel like they're empowered to do the
things they need, and then if they need funding, if they need encouragement, whatever the case may
be, that's typically what I expect them to come back and say, we're thinking this, what are your
thoughts? How can we make that happen? There are times when, as you mentioned, there's budget
concerns, and we go, yeah, no, but let's think about how we can make that happen next year.
There is our accounting team actually did a team gathering, and they're all local,
but they all went out to lunch the other day, and they managed to take their lunch time and
do their team building and had a meeting during lunch, etc. So there are ways of doing some of
those things, but again, I'm not necessarily fostering it as much as I'm encouraging it and
saying, yeah, do what you need to do. I'll happily pay for lunch. That's no problem.
Saying choose your adventure. I like it. And this is a little bit maybe off topic, but because I'm
on social media too often, I just saw something that was like, right, don't expect your employees to
spend their evening time or their weekend time because we didn't see that as an EC that we were
like, oh, we'll get together on a Sunday and watch football. And everybody was like, I don't really
want to drive to Woodbury and watch it when I can watch it at home on my couch with my family. And
I was like, I get it. We still put it out there as a thing. And people were like, nah, and we were
like, well, that's the answer. We'd rather have you say no than say yes and then not like it.
Granted, that wasn't a forced thing. But right, we've all, I've never been to one of those things,
but there's certain right that we could easily fall into that bracket of going,
we're spending the money, you got to be there. It's important for you to be there.
How do you kind of walk that fine line of saying, hey, you don't have to just use your lunch. You
don't have to use your Friday night. What are your thoughts on using work time for team building?
Yeah. Yeah. So again, my point of what I was saying is they happen to do it over lunch, but
it could have been at three o'clock in the afternoon. I'd have been completely fine with that. I mean,
again, one thing I think people forget is we used to do a lot of that in person.
When I worked in other organizations, they always called it the flypaper meeting, right?
Somebody walked by and they kind of got sucked into a meeting. And a lot of times it's just
a casual conversation. There's nothing to it. Those happen. And those, in my opinion,
are important conversations. You're having them today in a modern world with the new tools,
et cetera. You're typically having them via chat or, hey, can you jump on a quick call or whatever
the case may be. They're still happening. They just don't tend to happen in groups as much.
But going back to where I was originally trying to make my point is it's what you expect is an
organization has a certain amount of time that isn't expected to be. You must be at your keyboard for
nine straight hours. That is not the intent. Organizations don't actually expect that of you.
I shouldn't say that. There may be some organizations that expect that out of you,
but most organizations don't, right? They understand that people get up, they stretch,
they go to the bathroom, they get coffee. All of that matters. And in fact, there's
tons of studies out there that say if you get up and you walk around, your mind works differently,
and you can actually solve problems better by doing those kinds of things. So in my opinion,
those things are very, very important. And again, kind of getting back to where I was
intended to say this is there are times that I would anticipate that there is an extra,
if you're not in video, you can't see me doing the quotes, productive periods of time where people
are pounding away on the keyboard. That is not what it should have to look like. The security one,
it's at the end of the day, and it could potentially go an hour past to the end of the day for work.
If it does, people can drop off. It's totally fine. But it was intended to be during the workday.
So we were carving out a portion of the workday saying this is what we're making time for. Now,
in that particular case, that group does potentially have to be on call and could
potentially get pulled over for an emergency of, hey, we need you to work on this or,
you know, drop off for 10 minutes while they look at something. All of that is perfectly
acceptable. But the intent was still to get the engagement, the team building,
doing all the things that are important. Not every team is like that, though, or there are
emergencies popping up all the time. No, and I wasn't. That sounded like I was poking on those
going, they were at lunch. That was thereafter. Not what I was saying, but, right, I mean,
that's kind of a good point of it's a Friday afternoon. There's probably less
emergencies coming through on a Friday afternoon. So you're being strategic about the timeframe
that you're picking instead of Monday morning when everybody's forgot their password. I'm pointing
it myself when I say that. Not anybody else, but just side notes there. But I think too,
where was I going with that? I was going with, even right from marketing, we're not customer facing.
So Tara and I one day literally went and just painted pottery because we were like,
it's creativity. We also did an event venue tour and other things layered in those days
that we were like, because we're going to be here. Let's do that because there's two of us.
And that's kind of the getting up and walking around thing. Because as you say that, I'm going,
yeah, do I take those breaks? It's easy. It's easy to forget to take them, right? When you're at
the computer and you're chatting and whatever, it's hard sometimes. Yeah, I agree. I don't want
to tangent off too much, but it's like, even just getting a cup of coffee in the office,
or water or whatever beverage you indulge in, it's easy to tangent sometimes and be able to
talk to somebody when you don't have that. So I think fully utilizing the tools and being able to
enable the teams to be like, hey, here's the tools in order to work together better.
I know that that's something that we're working on in the C is like kind of having that like kit
that like on that onboarding that you talk to people, Todd, is that you can give that, hey,
if you really want to have a Frisbee golf group, here's how you set it up. Here's a basic toolkit.
I'm like, what we're hoping for. Or if you want to start a little knitting club and you want to
meet remotely and do that, here's how you do it. So I know that that's something that we're working
on that we'd like to provide to you, but I feel like that is kind of a toolkit that I would like,
you know, that I feel like is important for the organization. So.
Yeah, I think that's fantastic. Again, I love Kelsey's comment too, which I think wasn't exactly
designed to tie to what you just said, but the creativity of doing something that helps you
think of new things and go through a process that kind of goes, well, what if, what if this,
what if I had a toolkit, etc. I think it's outstanding. I love it.
Is there anything else on that vein that you either have like, I don't want this to be like a critique
of EC, but like something that like we've done or implemented that you like, or something that you
haven't liked or something that we can like learn from, you know, like, oh, that event didn't go
how we wanted it to kind of thing. Any examples like that?
No, from my perspective, there aren't any negatives that went with it. Again,
so you'll bear with me as I go tangent across the country. But just what I do.
Some of the most amazing productive,
efficient, effective teams are the ones that are self forming. So again, if anybody knows me,
some of them that I really enjoy listening to is assignment cynic. Self forming teams are
amazing and our EC team is a self forming team, right? All we said is, here's a concept. What
would you do with it? The team got themselves together. They invited people. They expanded.
They pulled in an additional people as needed. It's an incredibly powerful process. And I've
purposely kept my fingers out of it. Like I said, I don't want to influence it, but it's doing exactly
what I would have dreamt of. If you in a perfect world, what would it look like? It looks like this.
I didn't have anything to do with it. Other than let's see what this looks like and start to move
it along and hopefully it goes. So from that perspective, I think that if anybody's out there,
that's interested in what it potentially looks like. We can certainly have conversations about
it because we have one. And in my opinion, it's an incredibly powerful, effective process.
But ultimately, from my perspective, the fact that it's self designed, it's bringing it stuff up,
it's creating ideas, even when things don't go right. The football example that you mentioned
earlier is a great one, right? We think this is a good idea. We're going to throw it out to the
world and the world says, no, that was terrible. We're not doing that. Great. We still tried,
but we learned, right? We understand that Kelsey's point, maybe afternoons, evenings, and weekends
aren't the time that people want to put their work hats back on or even gather. So if that's
true, let's pivot and change. And I think that group has been tremendously adapt at doing that.
Adapt, adapt. They've been adept at adapting. Any of the eight words? All of them. All of them.
Jeno, we're kind of getting close on time as much as I could open up a whole other tangent,
but AJ, do you have anything else that you'd like to kind of comment on?
No. We've obviously outside of podcast format. We've heard Todd's feedback and we appreciate that.
But just having that open conversation between the leadership and whatever group that is is
really paramount of just being like, hey, you're doing a great job and having that feedback.
We had a recent employee survey that had that culture and involvement. So getting that feedback
as well, being like, are we doing the right thing? Because it's easy to see other people
other metrics work related, close tickets, hours worked, response times. You can see other processes
coming through, but employee engagement is a little harder to kind of get a grasp on.
So having some sort of survey was really nice for us to have some of that feedback
and know that as an EEC, Todd appreciates what we're doing. He likes how we're doing it on a
leadership side, but also on an organization side. That feedback was nice as well. And honestly,
we've been doing this over a year and a half, two years.
It's a year and a half, yeah.
And it's taken a while to get it going, but I feel like we're in a good spot as well. So
if anybody is out there and they want to create this committee, it's not going to hit right away.
You're going to hit some spots where it's, okay, that didn't work or this is working.
Stick with it. In the end, you get the things that work for your organization
and what worked for your organization may not be what works for other organizations. So
keep trying things, keep people engaged and just continue working through it.
That's the best way to close it out. I'm like, I could keep on going, but that was so beautiful
that there's nothing else I could say beyond, yeah, you can always connect with us on LinkedIn or
via email if you want to talk to us. But right, that's kind of a whole separate, but I will wrap
us out. But thank you, Todd. Thank you, AJ, so much for sitting down and chatting today. If anybody
does have questions for any one of us, you can reach out at info at cit-net.com. We'll give you
our LinkedIn right through there, so send us an email. Or else you can always go out to our website
at www.cit-net.com backslash podcast and we'll be back next week with another episode.