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Engage employees and create a positive workplace culture with Richard Hadden | On Top of PR podcast

By On Top of PR

On Top of PR podcast: Keeping employees engaged with guest Richard Hadden and show host, Jason Mudd, episode graphicLearn how you can keep employees engaged and create a positive workplace culture with our guest Richard Hadden.

 

Guest:

Our episode guest is Richard Hadden. Richard is an author, speaker, and workplace expert who helps leaders connect people practices with profit performance.

 

Topic: 

The one with Richard Hadden on what changes you can make to better engage employees.

 

 

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Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

  1. How do you create a great place to work? 

  2. What is the connection between people practices and profit performance?

  3. How can I improve my workplace’s culture? 

  4. What can I do as a manager to be a great boss when I have a small team and budget? 

  5. What is the future of employee engagement?

Quotables

  • “Creating a focused, engaged, and capably led workforce is one of the best things any organization can do for its bottom line.” — Richard Hadden, @contentedcows 

  • “You’ve got people who are in leadership positions and they’re simply not good leaders. It doesn’t mean they’re not good people, but they just haven’t yet developed skills around leadership.” — Richard Hadden, @contentedcows 

  • “Showing people that you care about them as people, that’s going to manifest itself in certain [positive] ways.” — Richard Hadden, @contentedcows 

  • “It’s about showing [employees] that you care about them and are willing to make exceptions because you know that they can bring about exceptional performance.” — Richard Hadden, @contentedcows 

  • “Engaged employees give better performance.” — Richard Hadden, @contentedcows

If you enjoyed the episode, would you please leave us a review?

 

About Richard Hadden:

Richard Hadden is an author, speaker, and workplace expert who helps leaders connect people practices with profit performance. A ninth-generation Floridian, Richard has been speaking since he was 18 months old but professionally for the last 20 years. In that time, he’s spoken for more than 1,000 audiences (mostly in person, but recently online) on five continents. He holds an MBA as well as the Certified Speaking Professional designation from the National Speakers Association. He’s also a member of five airline frequent flier programs, gets free bottled water at three major hotel brands, and holds VIP status with a nationally known pizza delivery chain.

 

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Presented by: ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving and promoting online customer reviews.

 

Transcript:

 

- [Narrator] Welcome to "On Top of PR" with Jason Mudd presented by ReviewMaxer.

 

- Hello, everybody, welcome to the next episode of "On Top of PR," I'm your host Jason Mudd. I am joined with a friend of mine who is a great speaker a great author and who really was one of the first people to introduce me to the whole idea of building a great culture at our agency. I wanna welcome Richard Hadden to the show today, Richard we're glad you're here, how are you?

 

- Hi, Jason, I'm great, how are you?

 

- I'm doing well, I'm glad to be here and very excited to spend some time with you today and introduce you to our audience of Marketing Leaders and helping marketing leaders understand how to create a better workplace and how to be a better leader in the workplace today, but first, let me just throw it your way so you can give us just a quick little bio and introduction to you and all of your great qualifications Richard. Oh, wow what an opening for that, thank you, Jason. Well, my name is Richard Hadden and when people ask me what I do, I guess I tell them, I'm an author, professional speaker, consultant, for about the last 25 years or so I've been working with companies who want to create the kind of organization, the kind of culture that really helps them to create a great place to work and thereby to improve their business results. So my focus has been primarily on the business implications of creating a great place to work as opposed to the social or moral implications of which there are and I think those are valid, but we're just trying to focus on what organizations can do strategically, that'll help them perform better through their people. So like I said, for about 25 years, I've been doing this, before that I had all kinds of weird jobs. I was an overseas telephone operator, I worked in banking, I was a computer programmer or a software designer, I had my own computer networking company but again about 25 years ago kind of went out on my own decided to start speaking and training and then in 1998 bill Catlette and I wrote our first book "Contented Cows Give Better Milk." And nothing has been the same since so in that time, I've had the opportunity to speak on five continents to more than about 1200 audiences. I mean, I've been speaking since I was a year and a half old but professionally for the last 25 years, over the last 25 years I've traveled all over the world and been on lots of planes and in hotel rooms and in conference rooms and ballrooms and that kind of thing. The last three months I've traveled 80 miles and that's primarily been between my house, Starbucks, the grocery store and Chick-fil-A. So not doing a lot of traveling these days until in person meetings come back. So that's my story, that's me, that's my story.

 

- Excellent, well, we've got to find a way to get you on those remaining continents just to do it, I mean that's--

 

- It's just Africa and Antarctica, that's all I'm waiting.

 

- Yeah, well, I'm sure we can figure that out pretty easily. I'm trying to go to all 50 states and I just have three left.

 

- Okay well see, you know I've already done that.

 

- I know you have

 

- Yeah, yeah

 

- Of course you have. In fact, for our audience, we're recording this, kind of, as it appears that the pandemic of COVID-19 is starting to slow down and things are starting to return a little bit to normal. In fact, just to be fully candidates, basically, June 2nd and I just submitted my mileage report and it was almost embarrassing. I think it was like, I can't make this up. It was like $2 and 12 cents. You know, I have a little app that does it for me and I was like what's $2 and 12 cents, right? Why would it even sit at my expense report. But I know that at the end of the year when we do our final whatever of our thing, if it's not in there and it's missing, we'll spend more time trying to figure out why wasn't in there in that report laughing over $2 and 12 cents. I know I bought a new car in January and it's a hybrid. I haven't filled it up three times.

 

- Oh, yeah

 

- From January to June I filled it up three times.

 

- Absolutely, well, so, Richard, again, you've been a big help to me over the years. I love everything you do and produce, it's always first class, you've spoken at some events that I've put together, and you are always the fan favorite, the crowd favorite and so having you on the show today is an honor. But let's jump into some of that substance so that people can get excited about you and your work and obviously we'll want to at the end, give them a way to contact you and follow you and get your great information. So I think just kind of, let's just jump right in and say, when you're when you're talking to somebody who is employed at a corporation no matter the economic conditions, we're always trying to recruit and retain, motivate, incentivize and keep good talent and create a great place to work. So kind of talk to me a little about your research and where were people kind of let's bring people up to speed on your platform.

- Okay, great, well I always say that creating a focused, engaged and capably led workforce is one of the best things any organization can do for its bottom line. So again, this is not about all the goodies that we sometimes hear about, bring your pet to work day and nap pods and M&Ms in the break room and all that, it's not really what it's about. Those kind of things sometimes happen in great places to work but--

 

- Now are those called culture augmentation? That's what I've heard people talking about.

 

- Cultural augmentation, I call them creature comforts They're fine If there was a bowl of M&Ms here I'd be munching out on them just fine, but I think too many organizations put too much credence in those kinds of things when we find that it really goes a little deeper and then I'll talk about that a little bit later. But, again, it was about 25 years ago, Bill Catlette and I Bill and I had worked together on a number of projects, both independent speakers and consultants, and we'd work together on a couple of projects. And he came to me and he said, "I've got this crazy notion that maybe organizations that intentionally deliberately create a great place to work might make more money than those that don't." He said this is just observational, anecdotal, but you know, it seems like I see the same companies showing up on The Best Places to Work list and they're also in The Most Admired list and they're also in The Most Profitable list and they're also in The Best Customer Service list. And so all these same companies unless they've just got a really great PR function and I know PR can really help--

 

- I know yeah

 

- But unless unless that's the only reason then I'm wondering why there's such a conflict. So we didn't ever even start it out writing a book. We were gonna use it for our own material, try to steal other people's material to read and find out what research had been done. So I'll date myself a little bit, this was in actually 1995, 1996.

 

- It's a great time yeah.

 

- We started looking at this, and we found there wasn't anything out there that made the connection between what I call people practices and profit performance. And so we started doing our own research and before long we thought we got a book here, then we got serious about it. And so we under undertook a research project to do some statistical correlation between organizations that have a reputation for being a great place to work and their actual financial performance. We did it over a long period of time, over a 12 year period of time. We saw that the companies that were intentional about creating a great place to work lo and behold happened to be the ones that were making the most money. So then we said, let's find out what it is that they're doing to make that happen. And that's where we came to the conclusion that it was not necessarily the creature comforts or the culture augmentations is that what you called it? I love that, it was not those those things. But essentially, it was about leadership and about culture. And so anyway, we put together all these numbers. And when I'm speaking to an audience, I'll usually say to them, I have 47 slides with like the most amazing pie charts and graphs who wants to see them and nobody wants to see them. So I don't show the charts anymore, but we've got the numbers to back it up. And so we went around looking to see what is it that companies do that causes people to wanna work in a way that contributes more to the bottom line? And long story short, fast forward 15 years after the first book came out, we'd written a couple of other books in the meantime, including one called "Contented Cows Move Faster." And then the publisher of the first book came to us and said, we probably need to upgrade this 'cause that book came out in 1998 and you've got companies like Netscape, which doesn't even exist anymore and other things like that. And so we said, okay, great so we went out and studied a whole bunch of other companies. And the same thing happened, when we look at companies that are intentional and deliberate, it's not accidental. It is intentional and deliberate. Once again, we found there's a strong correlation there. So that book came out a few years ago and it's called "Contented Cows Still Give Better Milk." So you know, in the ensuing time, we have just really spent a lot of time, people say, alright so you say you're a professional speaker, what does that mean you do? Well, what I do is I travel around the country and sometimes other parts of the world and research and look and see what is it you're doing making yours number one, a great place to work and number two a profitable place to work? I come back, I write it down and I tell people about it. I mean, it's as simple as that, I didn't make any of this stuff up. Bill and I don't talk a lot about our opinions on things because we feel like people probably have their own opinions and our opinions are not really adding much value to the mix but what we can do is bring observations back and talk about this company does this, this organization does that, this leader does that. We've seen behaviors that bring people along and help them. At first, it really was about making more money. And now it is not only that but also as you alluded to a minute ago, it's about can you find the best people, can you retain the best people and can you engage them to do their very best work?

 

- Right, and I think that's kind of one of the challenges is that sometimes our gut instinct or what we think engages our staff actually can work against you. And so sometimes there's that kind of what I'll call common sense gut instinct that says if I do this, it'll work but then I do a lot of studying and reading on leadership and culture, I try to be a student of it. And sometimes you're just contrarian inside that you learn that says when they make a group of people work on a project together and they promise this group, they're going to make some money and they promise the other groups are gonna get a candy bar, the people get a candy bar actually perform better because they're not feeling the pressure of the money. And they're not thinking in their mind how they're gonna spend the money before they've already earned it kind of thing. So yeah, that's very interesting. So talk to me about, so let's say, because I've been in this situation before where I work for a company, our culture is not very good and you said earlier, you have to prioritize the culture and it doesn't happen by accident. But the truth is we both know every company has a culture, whether it's good or bad right? Yeah it'll define itself and so I've worked at a company that had terrible culture. And I tried to be different as the leader of my department if you will. So let's say there's a viewer, member of our audience who's in that situation where maybe their culture, their company's not so great, but they wanna try and do something for their own team and maybe show how positive culture can can work. What would be some advice you would give them?

 

- Well, I would say, first of all, look at the quality of the people who are managing, who are your managers? So many people, you've seen this, people get their management jobs because they're good at some functional, some operational discipline. That's how I got my first management job. It sure didn't have anything to do with me being a leader, I was 23 years old, I was a manager in a bank. I couldn't even balance my checking account let alone lead a group of people in a branch of a bank, but I look goodness suit.

 

- So I think that was my best qualification. But seriously what we see in so many cases is you've got people who are in management positions and we really should say leadership positions. And they're simply not good leaders, doesn't mean they're not good people. But they just haven't yet the developed skills around leadership, maybe they've not seen it done, they've not had it modeled for them, they've not been the recipient of good leadership, and yet they're in management positions. And so a big part of the culture is do we tolerate and sometimes, in fact, support and promote people who are not good leaders in management positions. Other companies say, you know what, if you're gonna be in a management supervisory team leader position in this company, you have to at least show the rudiments of an interest in good leadership. And so I think when we make that a standard, that helps us to define the culture and people are gonna make mistakes and people are very forgiving of a good hearted leader who is leaning forward and really trying their best and who screws up okay, that's going to happen, right? But you get somebody who's just not interested in being a good leader and people are not gonna do anything for them.

 

- Yeah, that's true, that's very true. Speaking of culture augmentation, one trick of the trade I've always had is whenever a report comes out of the best places to work in America or in a local business journal or in a magazine or whatever, I always read through what those companies are doing and I just think to myself, what of these could we do--

 

- Yeah.

 

- In our company that's easy? And so for example, there's a big fortune 500 company in my market and one of the things that they were praised for is having an on site post office so that employees could mail packages to loved ones and letters and all that stuff. And I said, well, we're a small PR Agency we don't need a post office inside our office. But why can't I offer stamps or let people use our postage meter and then just fill out a little form saying what they used or whatever. And what we mostly did would just forgive it, if it was relatively reasonable, if somebody is--

 

- 50 cents here and there yeah.

 

- Yeah if somebody's coming in and mailing customer letters for their husband's business or something like that then that might be a problem. But you know, what we just did is just say hey, here's stamps, here's our postage meter, use what you need, make a note log it, so we just know where it's going. And it's just kind of little things like that to make the employee's day better and brighter and allow them to really get more work done. And so I remember one day I was touring a friend of mine's office and he said, hey, check out... they got this new office, it was super nice, when he asked me to go in the kitchen and he was really proud of that they had a fridge full of sodas and that employees can help themselves to sodas, and he thought it was like this groundbreaking revolutionary thing and I just said, well, that's cool, the next step would be to have snacks. And the next step would be maybe to keep the refrigerator full of food that people could make lunch while they're at work if they're on a deadline or something. And he looked at me like I was the craziest person in the world, he's like, you want me to pay for everybody to have lunch and snacks? He was like I have soda. And I was like well it's a good step but let me try--

 

- It's a good start

 

- To get to need you more.

 

- Well, I love the idea of the stamps, I hadn't thought about that, I'm going to write that one down. You see, again, I didn't make any of this stuff. I get it by trolling my friends and other leaders in business and so I'm just making a note of it here because that's a great idea. And again, so what's the purpose behind it? What's the rationale behind it? People could be more productive, they're not having to go to the post office and buy 50 cent stamp, you know?

 

- Right, waiting in line and driving.

 

- Yeah, those those little kinds of things, so I love that, I love that.

 

- Yeah, well, I think I've gotten really good at borrowing inspiration from other sources and nobody has a patent on, you know, we provide stamps to our employees or whatever it might be. And so when I hear of another company like we do summer Fridays, where our employees get off at 3:30 on Fridays between Memorial Day and Labor Day. I heard somebody else did that and I said man, if I worked somewhere I would want that, too so let's start doing it.

 

- That can be a huge incentive. I heard of another thing, again, in speaking with an organization about six or eight months ago, at this point, I think I'm jaded, I've heard it all, I haven't heard it. I haven't heard the beginning of it. So I was talking with the group, we we're talking about what do you do to show your employees that you appreciate them? And I was talking about kind of including families and appreciation things and someone who was the CEO of a company, probably about a $20 million company, not a huge mammoth corporation but pretty big place and said well for all of our employees, if they have a child under the age of 18 on their birthday, we send them a card and a $25 gift card.

 

- Hmm, I love that. Something as simple as that, what does it cost? Costs them $2500 a year at the most. And everybody, they've never had that before. That's another thing, if you have employees you said wow, I never heard this before, I never worked in a place where they did this. I never worked at a place that showed their appreciation like this. You want that to be going through people's heads. You also want it to be going through their heads, "hmm, I'm looking at this other opportunity, I wonder if I would have the same kinds of things, appreciation the same things that I appreciate here, if I would have them there."

 

- Absolutely, and that's what's going on I think in everyone's mind when they're looking at opportunities. We just wrapped up a streak a quarter or two ago where we went 63 months with zero turnover at our company.

- Wow

 

- And that was huge and I guarantee you or at least I'd like to think it wasn't just because of me it was because of our culture. And we're offering unique opportunities, unique autonomy and flexibility and we certainly are not in position to pay the absolute best wages in the market, but we do our best to make people feel appreciated. And there are times, like you said earlier, where myself and others in the organization as leaders, we might strike out but we genuinely try our best and I think that makes it so people are willing to go to bat for you, they're willing to stay loyal to you and the like. Now, I would argue 63 months was probably too long, we probably should have mixed things up a little bit.

 

- Conventional wisdom would probably dictate that there should have been a few changes in that per the time but who knows in your specific case?

 

- Yeah, exactly, so when people left we had an opportunity to kind of revisit that and reshuffle and do things that we needed to do, which were great for us. And I think honestly, boasting about that streak became a little bit of a priority for us as opposed to making the decisions that were best. But ultimately, and I think that's a good lesson, is ultimately, it all works out, so you can wait it out or you can make changes and move forward. Now, Richard, I wanna kind of go back to my previous question just a little bit. So let's say you are a manager but you don't have a lot of autonomy or budget or abilities what can the manager do at the very lowest level where they have a small team? What can they do to become a great boss and to try to create a great environment for their team?

 

- Well and there is a lot that they can do 'cause I hear people say and people said this to me for decades. Well, my boss doesn't do it, here I am, I wrote a blog post one time called "Stuck In The Middle With You" and it was about middle managers. You lead your sphere, you can create influence and better it, don't worry about the people, what I call above the ceiling tiles, don't worry about those people. You worry about your group, and what you can do to create great leadership there, and you can do that. If I had to prioritize some of the things if you would start by just showing people that you care about them as people that's going to manifest itself in certain ways such as if they have an issue, if there's a family issue, something comes up, then you're not accounting for every minute that they might or might not be in the office. You're gonna know it's about, I always say, are you looking for attendance or output?

 

- Yes.

 

- So that's just one example but it's about showing them that you care about them are willing to make exceptions because you know that that can bring about exceptional performance. It's about helping them to develop as well and especially individual leaders have such a sphere of influence in that. Helping people to learn, to grow and to develop that can be not only by making access available to them for training and development, but giving them additional opportunities, giving them additional responsibilities, those kinds of things, giving them additional visibility in the organization. So I can go on with lots and lots of examples, those are just a few right there. And again, just be thoughtful, be kind, be considerate. Say how would you want to be led, how would you want people to deal with you in this situation?

[Narrator] You are listening to "On Top of PR" with your host Jason Mudd. Jason is a trusted adviser to some of America's most admired and fastest growing brands. He is the Managing Partner at Axia Public Relations, a PR agency that guides news, social and web strategies for national companies. And now back to the show.

 

- You mentioned caring earlier and just care and there's definitely a movement talking about love in the workplace and showing compassion towards your employees and I know some people are very standoffish about that, but I look at the companies who care and the companies who really love their employees and love their company like it's family. And I do, I just see a difference in the quality of the work environment there. Those are the types of clients we wanna work with. It comes down really to respect, just respecting people and their time, and their family and the likes. So Richard you have written how many books?

 

- Four.

 

- Four, okay. What are the titles of those four books please?

 

- Sure, the first one is "Contented Cows Give Better Milk." That was the first one that was kind of what got this whole thing started out. I have to say, because when people do ask, the book has nothing to do with cows. And we're certainly not trying to compare employees to cows. We have on a very few occasions over the last 25 years had someone bring that up and I want to absolutely make sure that there's no misunderstanding, we are not saying your people are cows or they look like them act like them, smell like them For the most part, anything like that. But we do know that in the same way that contented cows do give better milk and that's scientific proof, engaged employees give better performances and that's really all we're talking about. So the first one was "Contented Cows Give Better Milk." The subtitle was "The Plain Truth About Employee Relations And Your Bottom Line."

 

- Okay,

 

- So again making the business connection between people practices and profit performance, how's that for alliteration?

 

- There you go.

 

- And then the second book was called "Contented Cows Move Faster" and it was very specifically about something that I wanna talk about in a minute called "discretionary effort." Let's come back to that term "discretionary." And a third book we wrote in conjunction Bill Catlette and I wrote it in conjunction with another author named Meredith Kimbell, and that book was called "Rebooting Leadership." And "Rebooting Leadership" is a short form book but it is primarily for first and second level managers and supervisors and it is very granular and specific and prescriptive. It says do this, don't do this.

 

- Okay.

 

- It goes on in that vein. The fourth book is a total rewrite of the first book and the publisher said we think you're probably gonna have to rewrite about 15% of it. No, we rewrote about 90% of it. And it's called "Contented Cows Still Give Better Milk" and we changed the subtitle a little bit so that it is now "Contented Cows Still Give Better Milk: The Plain Truth About Employee Engagement and Your Bottom Line." Because in the 15 years between the first book and the second book, this whole concept of employee engagement had become very much something that we would talk about. We used to talk about employee relations, employee satisfaction, and we learned that really, employee engagement is what we've always been talking about, but we've just given it a bit better name.

 

- And so those are all available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble local bookstore.

 

- Yeah, what we usually say wherever books are sold, at any of your favorite at any of your favorite online or in person

 

- And certainly if you can do business locally, we encourage that and even if they have to order it for you, it's always good to support a local business.

 

- Actually the first book "Contented Cows Give Better Milk" is actually out of print.

 

- Oh I may have a copy.

 

- That was a condition of the fourth one being written, we had to retire the first one.

 

- Yep. So, Richard, you wanted to talk about discretionary effort? It's a term I've heard of, but most people haven't. I'm gonna turn it back over to you let's address discretionary effort.

 

- Sure, thank you, discretionary effort. The reason I bring it up is because for years Bill Catlette, and I looked at what is it that causes, there's this connection between behavior and profit, how does that work? And we have settled on the fact that it's something to do with discretionary effort. So discretionary effort is a term that was coined by industrial psychologists almost 100 years ago. And here's how they defined it, now if you're an HR nerd like me, you'll love this. But here's how they defined it, they said, "discretionary effort is that increment of human effort, the expenditure of which is at the exclusive discretion of the worker." And if you break that down really what they're saying is discretionary effort is the same as what we generally refer to as going the extra mile, or going above and beyond. I used to be an economics professor, I taught economics at Jacksonville University, and I have an economics degree and so I love thinking about behavioral converting into economics. And what happens is, if you think about it, if you pay X and you get Y in output that's fine. But if you continue to pay X and that stays constant, but you now get Y plus Z, then that Z, you get for free. And you didn't have to pay for it. And people say but is that not exploiting workers? No, no, no, because by definition, discretionary effort is what we do because we want to not because we have to. So you can't pay people for their discretionary effort but you can lead it out of them, you can inspire it out of them, you can create a great environment where they want to go above and beyond, you can do things for them that are not economic that they will want to repay you with and in their effort and in their involvement and their engagement. So that I think is one of the things that explains why companies who get more discretionary effort, which is a strong component of employee engagement, why they perform better financially, because they're getting better output for the same input.

 

- Richard, I'm gonna put you on the spot, we didn't talk about this at the time, so thanks for your flexibility. What does the future of employment and employee engagement look like do you think? I mean the workplace is changing always right? We've seen a lot, I've seen a lot of change in my career, especially in the last 20 year. If you had a crystal ball, what do you think employee relations look like even 5, 10 years from now?

 

- Well, I have given that a lot of thought. So whether I'm on the spot or not, it's not the first time I've thought about it. I'm sure.

 

- Yeah, well, it's gonna look very different. But it is going to move incrementally, now with some of the things that have happened in 2020. Those increments are moving along perhaps a bit faster than than we would have-  

 

- work from home

 

- Imagined a few years ago. So work from home was already something that was growing a lot. I began working with government agencies 10 years ago who wanted to learn how to do better in terms of work from home. And now everybody has been thrust into it or many people have, but I think Jason, the biggest thing that we see is the relationship between the employee and the entity known as the employer. It's changing and will continue to change. And one of the things that we see this very visible evidence of this is in things like the gig workers and Uber and Lyft and those kinds of things and these are people who have just said, I am taking myself out of the traditional workforce because I want the autonomy. You mentioned autonomy a bit earlier. That's a huge incentive, something that is of huge value to workers and I'm not going to stereotype by age, but I will say that, as time marches on, the workers we have in the workforce, more of them seem to value that autonomy.

 

- I think so too.

 

- Than had been the case in the past, so you've got all of that. So people want that autonomy. There's a great quote by Robin Chase, who is the co-founder of the company Zipcar, which is kind of rent by the hour car rental agency that is operating in many large cities. And here's what she said, this is a woman probably in her 60s or so and she said, "My father had one job in his lifetime." She said, "I will have six jobs in my lifetime and my kids will have six jobs at the same time."

 

- Wow, interesting.

 

- And when you think about that, it's absolutely true. So I think about my own son who is 27 years old he is a performing artist, he has not worked for a company for a number of years, he has taken himself out of the traditional workforce and he has a bunch of little things going and during the COVID period, I joke there's some weeks he's made more money than I have. So he acts, he sings, he does voice work. He does all kinds of things as his own entrepreneurial boss because he doesn't want to be a part of the workforce. And he has that option now that did not exist a generation ago to the same degree it does now. So again, biggest change I see is the relationship between people and the entity that they call their employer. And then a whole lot of it, then also is what we're seeing now, again, it's been accelerated because of the pandemic and that is, do we need to be in the office 40 hours a week to constitute being productive? So are we looking for attendance or productivity? Are we looking for endurance, or output? And companies are gonna have to redefine that because it has always been the case, it's like a physics problem. The workforce is greater than any individual employer. And in most cases, it really is an employee's market with unemployment having taken a spike right now that's gonna be a little different for a while. But in general, especially a few months ago we were, in very low single digit unemployment. You have to not only compete for customers, you must compete for talent. And if one employer is allowing the kind of flexibility and autonomy and shows the level of trust in their workforce, and you don't show that same level of trust, you don't have that level of autonomy and entrepreneurial spirit, many employees are going to be attracted to that other employer and not to you.

 

- Right, those are good words of wisdom. I think we've run out of time and I think we should end right there. That was very well said, Richard. Real quick, our audience is probably feeling inspired and challenged and motivated to make their workplace better, be a better leader, so how do they connect with you and continue to consume your content on social media or otherwise?

 

- Well, anything that says "Contented Cows" is probably us so go to contentedcows.com, I emphasize S on the end of that Jason because there is a website called contentedcow.com, but it is for a pub in Minnesota.

 

- Okay. If you wanna go there that's fine but you're not going to get a lot of leadership stuff there. But I understand it's a really cool pub. But come to contentedcows.com. There, you can find out about the work that we do, about our speaking presentations, about our virtual presentations which we now do, about our coaching service and about our books and a little bit about our story. And so you can follow us on Twitter @contentedcows and on Facebook @contentedcows.

 

- Excellent, and you've got a fantastic email newsletter that is always--

 

- In fact it's going out in about an hour,

 

- I look forward to reading it then.

 

- It's called "Fresh Milk from Contented Cows."

 

- Okay, well that sounds great. Richard, thank you for being here today. We will put in the show notes, a link to your LinkedIn and your website and all that with the S for "cows" and really have enjoyed our time together and I look forward to seeing you soon, hopefully, possibly when we start having meetings and conferences again, I might have to swindle you in to come to speak again.

 

- Let's do that Jason, let's get together. Thank you for having me, it's been great to be here.

 

- My pleasure, thank you Richard. Well that was a great episode with Richard Hadden and we really enjoyed having him and be sure to check out the show notes so you can connect with him online and get his emails and follow him on social media. [Narrator] The has been "On Top of PR" with Jason Mudd presented by ReviewMaxer.


Topics: On Top of PR

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