Crisp SVP People Ops Joe Bast

And so what does having a great place to work mean? It means high, like high productivity.

It means high attendance.

It means people are engaged.

Lots of work is d- getting done quickly.

It means our voluntary attrition is low.

There are so many things that enable an engineering team or a sales team or a product team to actually work well when the employee experience is right.

When you join a company and you have this goal, this expressed passion, there's a million different levers to measure it, like you just rattled off a few.

At the same time, you have these goals, probably around head count, right? Benefits and, and retention and blah, blah, blah.

Where do you begin to see how you can make an impact, how you can start taking stock of, is this a great place to work currently? And where do we start to, to turn the gauges?

So it's, it's interesting.

So in a very covert skunk work sort of way, when I join a new company, I spend my first 30 days doing a really deep audit of the people systems, okay? And we'll talk about that in a minute.

But that...

I don't ask for permission to do that.

I don't ask, "Hey, you know, have you guys done anything?" Like, it's a self-guided mission I'm embarking on to objectively assess where we're at.

At the same time, I'm with the leaders saying, "What are the goals of our business?" And I, I didn't say, "What NPS, ENPS do you want for your, your employee engagement scores?" What are the goals of the business? Are we in a growth mode where we have product market fit and we're trying to, you know, acquire clients and standardize sales proces- processes? Or are we in an MVP mode where we're trying to find the exact right product for this market that we're trying to disrupt? Because those two different goals are gonna change how we engage the workforce, who we recruit, how we pay, you know, those sorts of things.

Business stage, where we're at is a big one.

And then what are they running into with people problems right now? Are there-- Are they having a hard time getting enough people in the door? Are they having a hard time managing the performance of people who should obviously be moved out? But ask them, you know, plain and simply, "You brought a, a people leader here for a reason.

What were the things you were hoping that we would accomplish?" Now, in the background, what I'm doing is I'm going deep with the director or the head of recruiting, so I can learn all about our processes from, uh, from how do we open a role to how do we make an offer and get it signed to how do we onboard.

I'm sitting down with our, with the people operations manager and usually the benefits brokers to find out what our programs look like, how much are we spending, how's that compared to the industry, what are we offering, what are we not offering.

I'm sitting down with the chief of staff who did an org survey six months ago, 'cause I wanna understand the comments that were in there and what's been done to take action on them.

But, like, that deep audit goes in the background, and then once I find where the gaps are and I've heard where the leaders wanna go, I just line up the things that need to be added or fixed with where the leaders wanna go.

It sounds so simple, Joe.

It-- I've been doing this for, oof, 25 years.

Um, and I will tell you, it's, uh, from this chair, it's simpler now insofar as I've done it a couple times.

It's harder now because people are moving faster.