Podcasts

Episode 23 - Decoding AQ with Ross Thornley Feat. Matt Burns - Making the BIG decisions

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Intro

Hi, and welcome to Decoding AQ, helping you to learn the tools, mindsets, and actions to thrive in an ever-changing world.

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Ross  

Hi, and welcome to our next episode I've got today with me, Matt burns. And he is the founder and Chief Innovation Officer of BentoHR. We got to meet each other through Hacking HR. And we've started our journey and relationship together and supporting each other's ambitions and impacting growth that we want. So welcome. 

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Matt  

Thanks for having me.

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Ross  

Cool. Why don't we start with a little bit of just your background from your eyes, I've done my bit of internet stalking as I always do. To look at one ledge of awards of HR teams of the years, most innovative use of HR, and give us a little kind of snapshot of where you've come from.

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Matt  

You’d almost think it was intentional. And it kind of was, I'll be honest. At early in my 20’s I had an inflection point where I was staring at a job bulletin board where there was an HR job and a marketing job side by side. And I applied for both. I really wanted that marketing job, but the HR job got back. So here we are. And I've always tried to blend an element of both into the profession. Because as I grew into the profession itself, I understood that marketing and HR really are the same function. It's inside voice, outside voice, but they get different treatment because marketing is a profit-driving function. And HR is a cost center.

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So when you apply a broader methodology to the HR profession, you open up so many opportunities in terms of how you look at your business. And throughout the course of my time in the HR profession, I spent about 15 years in HR, 20 years total in the corporate world. And the last five as an HR executive, I focus mostly on technology transformation, data transformation, and restructuring projects, which are complex, cross-functional, high pressure. And I got, unfortunately, I guess quite good at it at being able to suspend the business interests but also the human interests. And there's a lot of complexity that goes into any of those activities, they're very personal. We start talking about individual people and opportunities and organizational growth, you have to make some tough decisions. And I ultimately found that to be really wearing on me as a leader. In the organizations I worked in, the reward for doing those well, we get to keep doing them. So it was a constant churn of just restructure, restructure, restructure and ultimately in service to the business interests. But as I look back, I really wanted to impact organizations outside the four walls of a single entity. And I wanted to have broader impact. And I had some experiences with my MBA that contributed to me wanting to do that. I also wanted to dispel the myth that technology and data and humanity itself are at odds with each other. That's a bit of a misnomer in the HR profession. And one that I've always struggled with, because again view them in symbiosis. I don't think that we should, all hail the machines and only make decisions with data. And I also think that you need to have quantifiable decision-making justification in a business environment where that's where the majority of results are measured. And but the blend of those two, the qualitative and the quantitative, it's a really powerful combination. And if HR can pull that together, it gives them a really nice one-two punch. And that's kind of the approach that I applied to my interest.

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So now what I do is I run a business called BentoHR, we simplify digital transformation. So Ross, it's the same thing I did inside the corporate world for the Fortune 1000. But now I do it for other organizations. And the cool thing is, I'm not constrained by internal resources, I'm not constrained by time and pressure, I can co-design a transformation plan with a client. And I guess the positive thing of working for so many companies that are cost-conscious is, I'm used to doing things on a shoestring budget and used to having to self-fund transformations. And we work with clients to do that.

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And ultimately, what we do isn't terribly romantic. When you look back at an organization, no one asked who built that structure or who implemented that technology. But we build foundational elements of organizations through HR that allow the HR leaders and ultimately the organization to layer on top of that their strategy, their culture, their purpose. But you need to have a foundation, especially today when we're oscillating back and forth between the virtual world and the physical office space. You just need to have that foundational element within HR. Or you're really struggling to maintain competitiveness, to be efficient with your costs, and just to have the functionality and features that you need to operate in this new normal.

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Ross  

I find it fascinating people's, career paths and what they went through. Was it an intentional design that at 18 you wrote down your future, an Arnold Schwarzenegger style of this is going to happen, this is going to happen, this is going to happen and it becomes or is it a happenstance of set what you say yes to or what others say yes to and then you're given an applause? You know your moment in time of the marketing and HR role, which returned, set you off on a path. And then you either repeat it or you change it. And in terms of that shaping, all of these experiences is there a story that really shaped your thinking about all of these aspects that you covered there, whether it was technology and people like “Oh it's not at odds,” and that was shaped by this experience or HR is really marketing and that was shaped by this experience? Give us a story of what might have shaped some of your thinking. In sort of more practical terms?

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Matt  

That’s a good question, I think the best piece of advice I was ever given, took place in my very first HR role. So after that infamous decision of which one or the other, I had a great mentor who sat me down and said that, ultimately, my career and my success will be determined by the experiences that I can collect. So in this context, it was to be really open to cross-functional opportunities, lateral moves, broad exposure to the business, that those collections of experiences would ultimately have a lot of currency in the market that was going to increasingly require people to step up and do more. 

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This was at a time I think late 90’s, early 2000’s era where there was still very much this halo effect over the economy that was still quite quality, was still quite good. There was definitely a lot of optimism about that. But there was a sense that the old model that we all held with such high esteem wasn't starting to work anymore. So acquiring the experiences was really around being thoughtful about where I would spend my time so that I can build out my toolbox. 

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So I put myself in a number of situations that were not pleasant from a personal perspective or required me to move and relocate. I mean, I went to six cities in 10 years for my job because I was chasing an opportunity because the experience was there. It wasn't the salary. It wasn't the title. It wasn't the prestige, it was, I knew I had an opportunity to jump on something like that, that I would get the experiences you're just not going to find in a textbook. And I love to learn, but I've always resisted education. So for me, anytime I saw an opportunity, I was like, “I want to learn through that.” 

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A couple of examples in terms of sort of my thought process, and I had a number of roles in my career that required me to manage stakeholders. And I think one that I think about most often is a large restructuring project that ultimately affected 3,000 people in a single day. 2,000 Receive promotions and 1,000 individuals have left the organization on a single day. The activity of having to design the new structure for that business to operate under, to architect the town exercise with which we assessed people knowing that people who did not assesswell we're not going to continue with us, so that was a lot of pressure.

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To think about the team necessary, to execute an activity where 3,000 People need to have 3,000 individual conversations with 3,000 individual letters and all the complexities, 400 individual work sites in messaging these conversations. So really complex logistical activity, in addition to the fact that each of these people are hearing for the first time that there's some significant impacts to their employment. 

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And so when I say HR needs the foundation and to blend the empathy with the structure, that's what I mean. So I could run a very structured exercise where it's very project management-oriented, where it's about checking the boxes, having the meetings, and it can feel very calloused. And I think we've seen examples of that Ross in COVID-19, were companies that had to make swift actions and just made really quick decisions. And I think in that sense, they prioritize legality and risk mitigation and making sure they check boxes. Whereas I think while it takes a bit more time and intention, you can layer in humanity on that. 

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So I'll give you an example. We found a way in our budget to save enough money to give every single employee outplacement services. So they had career coaching, they had counseling, they had resume support, which wasn't a traditional practice of the organization. But we put it into place because we knew with a thousand people leaving the business, that is a thousand potential customers, a thousand previous colleagues that we want to look after, and that investment would pay us back. 

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But if I'd ask other people on the project team, they would say that was a waste of money, because it wasn't necessary to execute the activity. But I think it's necessary to create and sustain a culture in the organization. Because after that people can look back and say, “Yeah, it didn't work, it wasn't about me, it was business circumstances. And the organization respected my contribution and treated me well, even though it didn't work out.” Not everyone's gonna leave with the best of feelings, but the majority do. And they understand when time kind of settles. And I want their lasting memories of our time working together in the organization to be positive, and to not think that they were discarded and just had value until they didn't.

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So I think that's the piece where I'm always struggling with that tension. At the same time, Ross, you can go the other way too. You can get so focused on people's feelings, that you miss the business imperative, and ultimately that ends up hurting more people. So when I think about people that are not willing to take tough decisions, you ultimately are mortgaging the pain and ultimately could be causing you more of an issue as well. So it's a delicate balance to strike. And I think every leader now is playing with that tension.

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Ross  

I think something many people are now being forced to do that on a timescale that is unnatural. And in a context, where it's reaching every pocket and part of the world, it's not just one industry, or the finance industry or this piece. So that's a unique situation. It's interesting, as you were talking, I had a flashback to a Suits episode, I don't know if you ever watched Suits, where they had all of their sort of associates. And a lady's job was to get rid of a number of them. And so she created this elegant algorithm that will give them the data to say, who is most productive performing all of these things? And it is that tension point, and that balance.

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And I was advised many years ago, this phrase of “Be ruthless in decision making, but humane in execution.” And I think that's a little bit of what you were talking about. Often, we're so humane in the decision-making, we end up being ruthless in the actual execution. And it's that just balance, how do we do that. And I think the fascinating thing at the moment of reskilling and restructuring is huge.

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So from the lessons that you learned there, when it was initiated, it was a complex plan. What advice would you give companies and people, if they're still facing that, because we're recognizing, we're recording this episode at the end of June, it's going to be out in a little bit in the future. But there's going to be many organizations that might have held on, held on, held on, thought it was going to be okay. And maybe now they're facing a decision that they've put off. What would you advise on how to deal with that.

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Matt  

And here's the complex part, you mentioned this, Ross. Every company is in a unique situation. So I know companies that are going through exponential growth right now, they can't hire fast enough to staff for it. And I know organizations that have seen the revenue cut by two-thirds, and they're scrambling to hold on, and pay and manage cash flow. So it's all over the map 

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Ross  

Both are restructures.

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Matt  

Both the restructures. So I think what you have to look at is, be really honest and realistic about where you are, that's a tough thing to do. And then be really honest and realistic about where you want to be in very defined increments of time. So this involves a complex conversation, right? One have obviously every member of the senior management team or the board in the room talking about what are the scenarios? And what are the milestones around what we're looking at, to deploy different scenarios. 

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So I would create a couple different options, call it your best case option. And then you build to that. And that would look like a budget, that would look like a structure, that would look like a series of strategic objectives. To achieve that, in the short term, it would be very tactical in the short term, if especially if it's exponential growth or rapid deceleration, I would get really, really small and be looking at month to month or week to week increments to move on things. And then from there, I layer in what again, what milestones for success you're looking at to trigger other scenarios. 

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So if you're not realizing this as you'd hoped, then what is your fallback option, so that you can make again, quick and decisive decisions to potentially reduce other aspects of your business, to make other strategic decisions around programs that will continue or not, to make decisions around real estate or other assets that you want to liquidate. Like there's different decisions and scenarios. And then in the inverse, when you're going through rapid acceleration, it's again talking about prioritizing your product workflows and customer experience and not taking on too much too soon. And trying to achieve economies of scale and make sure your processes are really tight. 

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So it depends, but I think for the folks, I would encourage them to be again, to me, it starts with being really honest about where you're at. The executives listening to this, they know their business better than you and I do, they know what triggers to pull and levers to make happen. It's just they need to be realistic about where they're at. And they need to consider that what we're operating in is not going to change at any point in 2020. It's just not, like we're not going back to the new normal. So if this is news for people, I'm sorry. But like everyone I've talked to whether it's epidemiologists or executives at airlines, or banking officials or government officials, we are going to oscillate back and forth between phases of lockdown and opening things up. In domestic markets, we might see some opening up of regional bubbles with countries and jurisdictions that seem to have things under control. But for countries that are at high risk of infection or they're seeing rising infection rates, you're not going to open up borders, countries won't accept the risk of that.

So business either it's gonna have to evolve in that new normal, which is a whole different conversation around how do you do business in a world where you can't see people face to face? Or you're going to have to you have to accept that's kind of where we're going. And you have to build to that and not have a overly optimistic view of where things are. And I think you have to accept that in whatever our new normal becomes, it's going to be very different than what it was when we started this journey. And you need to have a plan on how you're going directionally, towards that. And that may require some again, some really tough decisions.

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I mentioned before Ross, like we did restructuring decisions. The decisions were never difficult around performance, like the performance decisions weren't hard. It was the ones where people were incredible cultural ambassadors, and had been with the organization many, many years, and were just great, amazing people. And no one could say a bad word about them. But the function they were performing was no longer relevant for the future of the business. Those ones are hard. And that was the ones we have to deal with today.

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Ross

Yeah, that hit on a really interesting point is that, one of the things that is changing whether we oscillate in and out and COVID being there, there's many other accelerants that are happening. Which are technology accelerants, social accelerants, all sorts of things that the pace of change to be able to plan, what's going to be consistent, and a fixed point that you're aiming for, when all the terrain is constantly at move?

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So one of the things I'm interested about your kind of experience, and then partly then vision of the future is you talked there about the timelines. And the timelines of planning, that is getting even granular down to weekly things of setting visions and making changes at that kind of cadence can be exhausting. It can be exhausting to go, “Oh, I know where I'm going. I'm setting out here. Yes, I'm resilient, it’s a wiggly path, but we're still going there.” If your North Star changes every three months, because of the unexpected things that are going on, the rhythm and leadership that's required in those sorts of organizations to be able to let go of what you previously had as a goal to introduce a new one. What's your kind of advice in the how to manage that situation? I'd be really fascinated.

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Matt 

Yeah. So just to clarify, I don't think you should change your North Star repeatedly. I think that's a really bad idea, I think your North Star should be consistent. I think how you get to your North Star needs to change and needs to iterate. So if as an organization, your purpose was X, that purpose really shouldn't change. What the accelerant you're talking about whether it's technology, whether it's cultural, whether it's social, whether it's pandemic related, we're accelerating the modalities and the delivery methods of what we already know works. We're not talking about changing the very constructs of our human existence, we're talking about “Now we may have to have more Zoom calls than in-person meetings.” 

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Ross  

So that’s a go hierarchy in terms of “Okay, if we attribute our North Star to our purpose, that's consistent,” our sub-goals to achieve that, “Oh we do it this way.” We entertain people, we happen to do that with in person cinema experience, for example, we might need to change that but is our North Star of entertaining people still the same? Of course it is. But we alter our more short-term routes in the house. 

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Matt  

We alter our tactics. And then we have to decide if we have the skills and the competencies in house to manage those tactics. So I'll give you an example. If I'm an educational institution, I'm really scared that I have to try and sell an MBA or $200,000 undergraduate degree in the United States with Zoom calls. That's a tough sell, right? If you can't go into the classroom, you don't get that in classroom experience, that on campus experience, you're losing some of the value that they're going to try and offset and replicate, but it's not going to be the same, you're going to have to find a way to if the experience is meant to be educational plus, well how do you provide the plus in that new environment?

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So their core mission wouldn't change, but they no longer can think about lecture halls and field trips. And so it's going to be packets of things being sent by email, it's going to be Zoom meetings, it's going to be whiteboard exercises from home, it's going to be different. And I worry about that for education because that's not a great way to learn, I think it's not great. So they're gonna have to basically justify poorer, more poor education for the same price point, because they actually have to recoup the revenue they've lost during this time, because most people I'm talking to are deferring going back. Doing a PhD or doing a master's degree, they're saying, “I'm gonna play this a bit safe right now. Now's not the time to drop six figures on an educational degree that may or may not be relevant, going forward.” 

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And I think that is where, when we look at the challenges going forward, I think there's a major dissonance between the institutions that we've built in our society and what we actually need to be successful going forward. And HR is the intersection of that inside corporations, but you see it in education, you see it in healthcare, you see it in government. These models were created in the industrial era and got us to this place. And thankfully they did. Because they were able to get economies of scale and move, accelerate, very quickly. And now we're in a digital economy, and it's different, everything's flat. But if you try and operate in these long vertical silos, you end up moving too slowly, you end up not being able to adapt. And we've seen that adaptation and agility is the game. 

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So that's why I say that the North Star needs to be consistent because you can't have people readjusting their line of sight. But they have to be more okay with this idea of the agile, the scrum meetings, the three priorities of the day, it doesn't need to be overwhelming, it actually can be more incremental. I actually found that when I was in the corporate world working in more of a waterfall methodology, the amount of time that we would waste meetings before the meetings, meetings after the meetings, making sure that PowerPoints were so dialed that nobody would point out a punctuation error. And if someone found one, it was a giant deal, like who cares.

But in organizations I worked in, people did. Like if you had a PowerPoint slide that was numbered incorrectly, it was like, “Well, that was a real clear career limiting move.” But that's the culture in some organizations. And we spend so much time kind of inventing things to focus in on. Whereas I think in an agile methodology, what's maybe less comfortable is that you can't plan the specific work, you just plan the short-term goals, and the work will evolve from there. And that is a much better position to be in today when you require that agility moving back and forth.

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Ross  

When we bring this down to say, individuals. So we think and we've had conversation about an organizational level, and how they structure and how they restructure. What if it's an individual that in your scenario that you said a little while back Matt, where they're a great cultural fit, they're a really good human being, they've been a great advocate, but the skills they currently have, are no longer required and valuable either in that organization or anywhere in the world anymore. 

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Their identity has been wrapped up in it, their own individual North Star was to be the best X,Y,Z. And now they have to look at being something very different in order to provide value for them and for who they engage with. How might that, what are the sort of skills or the individual can do and how can organizations support that well? For those that, as you said, the sort of ethical exits that you did, but what about before the exit? Is there a way in which we can predict and identify those roles and support them through? What's your views on that?

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Matt  

We know the roles that are gonna be affected by automation and by AI, we know the things that AI does really well, and we know the things that AI does not do well. And we're going to get to a place in the very near term where we're continuing to do things manually that AI does well, people are going to ask why you're wasting money. Because the tools are getting more accessible, they're getting easier to plug in, they're getting less expensive. So when you think about the amount of technologies a small business can aggregate together on a SAS monthly, tight month-to-month basis and run a business, the overheads are exceedingly low and they're getting lower.

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So I think the answer is you can identify the roles and specifically the work that's going to be affected and you should. And then I think the next thing is, is a tough conversation. Because this is where it turns into a giant finger-pointing exercise. Who's responsible for the reskilling? Is it the individual? Is it the organization? It’s a broader society. And when you ask depending on the scenario, the answer will change. So here's my view, I don't wait for other people to help me because I don't have faith in institutions being able to react fast enough to meet the problems that I may face. So I've always looked after my own career, like a business. And that's why I chose opportunities.

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Ross

The experience hunter, you know.

Matt  

Why I chose the opportunities, I mean it made me incredibly valuable, incredibly adaptable, as businesses ebbed and flowed, I was always part of the team that was shifting them not part of the shift. So as a function of that, being multifaceted and being able to demonstrate you actually can convert concept into practical application is exceedingly important inside business. And so that for me wasn't a huge risk and I had to evolve my skills many times over my career. 

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When I first started in HR, most of my time is spent in employment law and labor relations, so most of my time going to collective bargaining sessions, going to arbitrations, doing investigations, that's where I cut my teeth. And I thought for a long time I was going to be a labor lawyer. And then I started to see, “Hey, labor law’s fun and it's a very adversarial way to do business. And it's really bureaucratic. And we're not actually effecting change, we're just kind of pushing the rock incrementally on the board. And I'm not interested in doing that.” So then I went into more project work, and then that led through the stream of technology and then data, then engagement and then all of a sudden downloading transformational projects.

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So I think you have to evolve your skills. I think one thing I would encourage people to look at is get really clear on how you learn and what you'd like to learn about. And I think that's a real gap right now in our current education system, most of us don't know how we learn and how we can enjoy picking up new sources of knowledge. And then again, I would apply the same methodology which is if you have a North star, if you know where you want to go in your life, in your career, then you can directionally put experiences and opportunity and education and people in your network that's going to help you achieve that. So I would encourage individual responsibility.

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And I also think organizations are wise to view it at a macro to say, if we have a third or more of our workforce that has skills that are become redundant, and we need to shift to be able to become this, well then you have to from a critical dependency perspective, just business continuity, you have to be thinking about what that looks like. And if it's an easy reskill and you value your cultural alignment, then upskill your employees, I would always advocate for that. And in some cases, you may decide that you can't, and that you're better served to change maybe from a full-time workforce into a gig-based contract matrix, maybe you decide to go to project-based teams. It's gonna really depend on where you want to show up in the market.

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And that's the piece where I think what people are gonna have to come to realize is that we're gonna see an increasing democratization in the talent economy. Each of us our brands, each of us can be freelancers, and contract employees and employees when we choose, and we can pop in and out of that market whenever we want. So if you spend your time in a single entity, that's fine. But just understand that when you go back into the market again, the markets changed. And the market necessitates you, you have a personal brand, that you have a perspective that you have experiences that you have a network, and that opens up a lot more opportunities, but it certainly can be daunting for some.

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Ross  

Yeah, I think the aspects of career portfolio, for some that are motivated by ambition and growth and that self-initiation, allows them to expand. Many others need the kick, they need the burning platform in order to initiate that change, because they're motivated by security and you know, “I have the same shirt I wear every day, I've got six versions of it,” these types of people that aren't experienced hunters, that don't explore, that look to exploit knowledge they've gained. And I think that's where there's big challenge. I think the entrepreneurial as you've described, your whole career path is ones that thrive in change and uncertainty. And the entire world that's now changed, that says, “This is the new world, it's digital, it's all of these things,” where people were able to survive and some even thrive, now those terms of the game have changed, the rules have changed.

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In terms of the ones that aren't like you and I'm sure you've come across countless, many of them, where could they start? What are some little practical tips that could, not say, “I’ll go and compete at the Olympics of adaptability and change, but you can go and do your warmup exercises.” What would they look like for those people?

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Matt  

That’s a good question, because just to give people confidence, I was there. And it wasn't that long ago. So yes I was very intentional about throwing myself into experiences and opportunities and I've also suffered with clinical anxiety most of my life. So I did so at the expense of my health. So when I went through experiences that were complicated or had a lot of trauma involved in them, they for me just exacerbate an existing problem but I almost grew comfortable in that space. So I could kind of thrive, if you will, in the uncertainty and in the kind of the nebulous nature of more difficult environments.

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But it's not easy and it's not something that I think comes naturally to most people. I think it requires a degree of reflection and resilience and the willingness to really look at yourself as an individual and as a leader. And be willing to turn over some stones that are really uncomfortable. I think you made a really good point earlier, which is that a lot of folks are doing that now on somebody else's timeline. The difference with me is I got to do it on my own. And that was really empowering and I got a chance to say when things were getting too much, I could slow down a bit. And I never did, by the way, but I had the option to. And when things need to go faster, I can go there as well. 

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So I get it, it's difficult, it's uncomfortable, it's awkward, but if you don't work this muscle, it's never, it's gonna atrophy. And we're going into a world where now you talked about burning platform, this is the new normal, it's not going to slow down, it's going to get faster. And if it's not a pandemic this year, it’s going to be murder hornets next year, if it's not that it's going to be a major economic embargo in some part of the world or oil crisis or something, something's going to happen. And we're now in a place where big decisions are happening more quickly, and they're having global ramifications. And I think for folks that, at least this is my perspective. 

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When I was in the corporate world, most of my family are entrepreneurs, I was the only person who chose the corporate path. So when I was pursuing, higher positions and becoming an executive, most of my family running their own businesses and going like, I'm the odd duck in the family. And I did it because I actually was to your point interested in choosing career paths that were less risky, where I had security, that if I put in time with a company that I would build allegiances, and that I would be safe and have that paycheck every two weeks.

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As somebody who sat around the table for multiple restructuring activities, and watch us put names on paper that didn't deserve it, I can tell you how tenuous my career actually felt going through that multiple times. And it's not personal, it's not malicious, there's no nefarious thing going on. But unfortunately, the timings not right, and you put people's names on spreadsheets, they end up losing their roles that are crushed. And it's not their fault. And it's unfortunate. And I looked at that enough times and went, “I don't want to get pushed, I want to be the person who if I can, I can jump or if I get pushed, I feel like I have a lot of different options.”

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So actually spending all of my time in a single organization and not building my brand and not putting myself through discomfort is actually doing me a disservice and placing me at more risk, especially in today's environment. There are no more jobs where you can sign up and spend 20 years with the company, there aren't. And if there is it's in an industry right now and it’s going through the biggest disruption, healthcare, education and government. So they're getting the reckoning now that they didn't have for many, many years. So I actually think the less risky approach is a diversified approach.

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Just like with your finances and you don't have to be a freelancer and have 12 clients but you could have a side hustle, you could have a hobby, you could have an interest in a particular topic, you could have a book group that you spend your times, you could go through an online course, you could read a book, like you can do a number of different things in service to inspiring and educating and broadening your thinking around things. If you're spending three to four hours a day watching YouTube and Netflix, there’s a place that I would start, like what are you watching on those two platforms? Are you using those platforms to engage and educate yourself? And I'm not saying you have to have a rigid schedule like me and refuse to watch Netflix and TV. I'm just saying if you watch Netflix right now for four hours a day, can you watch it for three and a half? Can you kind of half an hour and then read a bit of a book? Or watch a documentary on Netflix.

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Ross  

Small bit for a TED Talk or little things? There's something I want to pick up on. And I've been talking about it with another friend of mine and I'd be interested in your viewpoint. And it's this aspect of take health care and essentially, it's sick care. We wait till something goes wrong and then we say fix me. And there's a small pocket of society that is working on the prevention. So we eat right, we exercise right. It's not complicated, we know the things that are gonna affect our health, get good sleep, all of these areas. One of the least looked at pieces is our mental health. And you mentioned you know about your own anxiety, your own challenges, and to do things that constantly take courage, that take uncertainty, that are bashing and hitting the muscle of your mind. The phrase that I've been talking about with Jody is mental fitness. So thinking about it, rather than saying your mental wellness or well-being but fitness. And in fitness, you have this period of where you need to break something and then let it rest to recover to make it stronger. 

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So it's not all rock and roll, you have to have some pause. And so I think the same is true to,  “I've got it's going so fast, I can't keep up with it,” and never taking the time to reflect and pause and allow your mind that time to recover from the new knowledge or the breaking or the experiences that you've had. So I'm fascinated as your views on that as a concept. What practices you have from you get up, you have your coffee, you do yoga, you do pieces that allow you to build this mental fitness alongside physical fitness. What's your thoughts on that?

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Matt  

So starting with the macro, the reason it's built the way it is, is because it serves certain people in the value chain. So you look at healthcare, I look at the practice of psychology as well. We have this western view that being okay is the goal. We don't talk about transcendence, we don't talk about aspirational goals, beyond that it's like triage. And whether it's healthcare or it's in mental health in particular, unseen illnesses are very difficult for us to be able to look at and talk about. It's so much easier to talk about physical ailments even though it's increasing in certainly in narrative. I think if anything, another blessing from COVID is that it's exposed a bunch of people to feelings of anxiety and depression that may not have had them before. 

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So those of us who have experienced them, from my case most of my life, I was almost in a comfortable space knowing that I could be introverted and go and have my own time, and be able to turn down plans and focus in on things that were going to be looking after me. Because of my anxiety, because of the experiences that I've had, I have a very sensitive nervous system. So I have to look after myself, it's not an option. If I don't then I burn out. So what that looks like for me is a really structured schedule. And I don't advocate this for everybody but I guess, Ross, here's why, I have a real strong passion to make an impact in this world, I run a social enterprise that set a $1 million target for charity. We're doing amazing events and collaborations in service to educating the market and trying to make workplaces more human-centric.

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So I'm driven by that. If I'm going to achieve that goal, I have to be the best version of myself, period. So knowing that, that's what forces or at least gives me the push I need to do the work. Because it would be easier somedays to sit on the couch and eat ice cream and watch Netflix and not think about my problems, that would be really easy some days, and some days I really want to do that. And I'll never see the progress that I want to be able to see and realize the benefits that I've seen if I don't spend the time to focus on what I know works. And a lot of them are things that people have heard before, but I'll just give you my list. 

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So every day I meditate 15 minutes, every day. And the days that I skip, or if I skipped a few days in a row, I notice it. It's the biggest effect of my life so far, has been a daily meditation practice. And there are a lot of options and a lot of apps and a lot of biohacking tools people can use to engage and start that practice. And it's hard when you start it's super awkward, and trust me, my mind is running a million miles a minute. So for me meditation, the first 25, 30 times was like a giant waste, waste air quotes of time. But I eventually worked it through and got past and then realized, now I've trained my brain to where I can pop into meditation. Now, Russ today, right now, if you want to pop in, I can go in and out whenever I need to. And that, for me has been the opportunity to resource and reflect and give my mind a bit of a rest.

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Another practice that I've done pretty frequently before COVID was sensory deprivation float tanks. So being in a sensory-deprived environment, a two-hour meditation session, you're in Epsom salts like you're weightless, it's great in your body, it's great for your mind. I come out of those sessions with like four pages of notes. Because I don't give myself time and space in my day to sit back and brainstorm. I'm sitting in that tank, I'm meditating, some of my better ideas have come from that process. And I come away feeling so relaxed, so rejuvenated, so great that I use it as a weekly practice.

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And then the other thing for me, you mentioned already is yoga. I have to move my body and in particular, I have to move the physical energy in my body a lot. So while I can't go into doing martial arts, right now, yoga is a great way for me to kind of just keep my body moving and physical. And then it's just things like eating better than before, and getting good sleep and drinking water, all the things your parents should have told you when you're growing up. Like just good practices, and they're not exciting and other things are more fun. And you'll feel better if you do them. So I would just encourage folks to maybe consider taking incremental steps towards that.

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Another thing that I've done a lot of lately is journal. So there's a lot of practices that people are know of and aware of. And I'm not sharing anything that's major, except that maybe perhaps the structure, I put in my schedule, I carve out time for these, I build this into my schedule. So I have a 30-minute time slot every single day in my calendar for meditation, that's what I do in that 30 minutes, I make sure it happens, I give it a priority. Yoga I put in my schedule, I make sure it happens, I give it priority. I also put in my schedule when I see my friends, when I call my mother, because I structure my schedule, because for me I want to be… 

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Ross  

You found the way you work, you found your operating system. And I think for people to explore the operating system, and the realization that we're going to need a different one, to live in this world, to live well. And something else that kind of came into my mind as you were talking was this concept of slowing down in order to speed up. So we don't have to run the engine at high, high revs to go fast. 

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Matt  

It’s actually worse if you do.

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Ross  

It's worse. So there's moments of slow, slow down. Are we breathing? Are we pausing? Am I breathing just to exist or am I breathing to rejuvenate my thinking? Am I sleeping just because it's the time of the day? Or am I preparing myself for sleep to do these things? So I think picking just a few elements can then give you the confidence, give you the muscles, give you the courage, give you the space to whether it's coming out with four page of notes from that moment that “Ah I've got four pages of things of notes, I've got to do, I've got to do it, I've got to do it. Where's my pen? Where's the technology? I'm going to speak to Otter.ai so it gets it done all of those things,” to just going, “Actually I'm going to go into a dark room, I’m just gonna have no noise, nothing there and know that it will come,” and do it enough times that you'll build that confidence that it will come.

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So that to wrap up, I'm interested in just before we started recording, you were talking about the specific shifts of you were in say, a blue ocean in the way that you're doing digital transformation, all of these things. Now everybody's doing digital transformation. And you mentioned one little sort of nugget, it was like the end teaser of a Netflix series of something about some VR with a particular client. 

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So I'd love if you could just share a little police of what you've done inside BentoHR to adapt in order to reframe and look at how you want to do things in the future. And whether that touches slightly on the VR experience that by the time this is out, I'm sure it will have happened. But give us a closer on that would be a great little story.

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Matt  

Happy to. And then I think just under your previous point, I would say for those who don't yearn to come out of a float tank with four pages of notes, I get it, you'll be nicer to people around you and you'll be nicer to yourself when you meditate. I found myself at times being really irritable, being really short-tempered, and having when your mind is tired, you're just not the best version of yourself and the people around you deserve the best version of you.

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Ross  

You can be a better dad, a better wife, a better husband, whatever it may be, is that doing that is not only a service to you, it's a service to the people you love. And that's beautiful.

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Matt  

And if you're a leader, which most of our listeners are, you have a responsibility to your people into your teams to do that. So yes, it's selfish, but it's also selfless. This is a form of selfish, selfish selfishness. To answer your question around Bento. As I mentioned before, we wanted to create, we wanted to simplify digital transformation. I know that for the majority of HR professionals, that the idea of anything digital can be a bit intimidating. We don't as part of our learning trees, the universities in our professional associations do not value technology and data. They feel much more like accounting and educational institutions, and they prioritize things that frankly, are declining in currency, that's a whole other podcast.

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But the reality is, the majority of HR people coming out of school going into the workforce are not well prepared for the HR jobs need them to perform. So that sets them up for failure and it creates a really tough position because they feel like “Yeah, I'm motivated, I spent all this time in school. And I know what I'm going to do. And this isn't at all what I thought it would be.” 

So with digital transformation it’s one of those intersection points. So we make it simple. We essentially work with organizations, they cast their vision of what they want to achieve. And we power it with technology, with data, with processes to achieve their outcomes. And we help them do things like build business cases to achieve it, we help them pick the right technology vendors to power it, we help them pull their data streams together so they can visualize and see the impact of their actions. We make it easy for them to do the things they want to be doing, which is build programs and strategies on top of the infrastructure. We do the plumbing and the electrical. 

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So you're right. Pre-COVID, we were a digital transformation consultancy coming out of a pre-revenue phase that was feeling very good about ourselves. We had a 2020 plan that was going to be rock solid, we were getting good market potential, we had lots of really positive feedback from people that were in the industry saying, “You guys have hit on something special, you're providing a service that people need,” and then COVID-19 hit. And in one way was horrible because you could see what was going to happen. And I have strong relationships with places like Brazil and Mexico and places where they're having bigger challenges, did my MBA in part in Sao Paulo. So, I certainly wasn't as taken aback by the impacts. And I couldn't help but realize it was a huge opportunity for BentoHR, because it's what we do best. This is when we thrive is when things aren't great. People don't call us when they're trying to sustain what they have. They call us when they want to transform and to make it easy. So we've been focusing on doing that. And when we saw what had happened, we decided to turn all the revenue generating parts of our business inward and turn them all to charitable arms and just started to produce more content, have open office hours, volunteer our time. 

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I talked to hundreds of HR leaders from around the world talking through office closures, how they restructure their teams, working from home. I remember talking to people before offices were being closed having the debate with their boards which, “Should we close, should we not close, people are coughing, what do we do?” So that's the piece where we turned our attention differently. And then when things started to settle, we asked ourselves, we don't necessarily want to be in this space where now everybody claims to be digital transformation consultants, we are different. We do offer a different value proposition. And the landscape has shifted. So how's it going to shift? Where's it going to go?

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And when I think about a world where again, we oscillate back and forth between physical space and virtual space, I wonder how we're going to sustain culture. I wonder how we're going to sustain engagement. I wonder how we're going to sustain the team bonds that power organizations in most places I've been. And I don't think Zoom calls and conference calls are going to cut it, I just don't. And if people are doing office rotations and doing four intense schedules and all these different things, getting people back into the same room at a large group is not going to happen anytime soon. So we need a better solution, we need a more human-centric solution. And we can build it intentionally into our plan as I build my routines into my schedule, and our path to doing that going forward as immersive technologies better known as virtual reality.

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Ross

I've got a holodeck in my head, Matt. Is that what you're going to create?

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Matt

100%? So exactly. And if you can take that holodeck to our conference on July 28th and 29th, were with Microsoft, we're going to be releasing the first HR conference in full virtual reality, it's the future. We are on a trajectory that is phone calls and in-person, immersive technology is closer to in-person than the phone calls, it's a better experience, it's an immersive experience. We're fighting for attention in people’s cell phones, with augmented reality, virtual reality, you have their full attention. We can teach you how to learn better, we can create great work environments, we can actually help people be more effective and create environments that they are calm and productive, and are happy and collaborative.

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And they can engage with their teams in a seemingly real environment in a way they couldn't before. And it has such potential for things like performance management and team meetings and hiring and training that we are interested in having that conversation at least beginning that dialogue with the global HR community, and bringing together both 30 Plus speakers, seven podcast, hosts, workshops, keynotes, panels, to have the conversation about how do we blend technology and humanity through HR. And one phrase Ross, I have never liked and every time I hear I get more and more irritated, which is “If only we had a seat at the table.” We're building our own table.

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Ross  

I love it. I love it. And the field of dreams, build it, and they'll come. This reality of saying, “This is how technology can leverage a connection for humanity to be more humane again in a disconnected world,” I think it’s a lovely vision and mission for the new reality of what HR does. It's not compliance and legal. It's about allowing humans to still engage, interact, build deep relationships, and not just become task avatars, via Zoom interface, or wherever it be. So it's been a real joy to listen to your experience and stories. And if our listeners want to get hold of you, what's the best way to get in touch with you, Matt?

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Matt  

LinkedIn, I spend far too much time on that platform. I actually just changed my header recently. I'm now an immersive work experience architect. 

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Ross  

Love it ,okay.

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Matt  

So that's where I'm spending my time. That is, to me the new reality. And if anyone has questions, they're interested about the event. It'll of course, have been launched by now, but we're gonna have a series of ongoing dialogues with our consumers and with our attendees. I'm super excited, but I think it's a real path forward to make things better. And we certainly can see more of that these days.

Ross  

It's been a real pleasure, Matt. I wish you good luck for it. And our relationship to continue in helping and supporting each other for the missions, it’s going to be great fun. Thank you.

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Matt  

Thanks so much, Ross.

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Voiceover  

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Outro

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