Senior leaders from Box, Atlassian, Sun Life Financial & Netskope talk fluid technology and openness at work
A new breed of SaaS leaders are challenging the all-you-can-eat approach of traditional enterprise software.
Business leaders and employees no longer want to be overwhelmed with a vast portfolio of apps and platforms. The future of enterprise SaaS is lean, agile, and best of breed. Workplace Global Sales Director Lesley Lloyd Young welcomed a panel of C-suite influencers to the stage at Flow last month to unpack the subject, and share some practical advice.
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, Helen Russell, Chief People Officer at Atlassian, Rahul Sekhon, Chief Technology Officer at Sun Life Financial, and Sanjay Beri, founder and CEO of Netskope, joined Lesely for a panel discussion on the topic of ‘From Stack to Suite.’ Below is a transcript of the discussion. Highlights include team-centric performance management techniques, how to empower people with more fluid technologies, and how to build trust and openness at work.
Lesley Lloyd Young: I’d like to start by welcoming a few folks to the stage: Sanjay Beri, who is the founder and CEO of Netskope, Aaron Levie, CEO at Box, Helen Russell, Chief People Officer at Atlassian, and Rahul Sekhon, the Chief Technology Officer at Sun Life Financial. I thought we’d start by everyone giving a bit of background on yourselves.
Sanjay Beri: Quick background, I’m Sanjay Beri, I’m the CEO of Netskope. We work with companies to help secure their software as a service applications. We’re based in Beirut.
Aaron Levie: Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of a company called Box. We help enterprises store, share and collaborate around their content and their data. We started the company back in 2005, and kind of got the idea from a period of time in 2004 when it was incredibly painful and hard to just share files and collaborate. Way too cumbersome, way too complicated, but we thought that there had to be a way. We wanted to build a simpler, better way to be able to work and collaborate on files.
Helen Russell: I’m Helen Russell, Chief People Offer at Atlassian, also in the content, communication and collaboration space. I’ve been there for a couple of years and I have two CEOs for my sins.
AL: I don’t know who would sign up for that.
Rahul Sekhon: I’m Rahul Sekhon, I’m the Chief Toy Officer for Sun Life Financial. No, there’s no title for that, but that’s what I like to call myself. I’ve been with Sun Life Financial for about 10 years, before that I had the most coveted role, I was a network engineer. I used to work for pay networks, which no one remembers. Really proud to be here and have a dialogue around these earth-shattering ideas we’re bringing out here.
LLY: It’s going to be really interesting to talk to these visionary leaders, I’m hoping we unpack some things about how the technology we use has changed and how that’s impacted the culture, or vice versa, how culture and the way that we work today has changed the technology we use to get work done.
The other thing that we also want to cover is when you’re creating transparency in an organization, how do you also make sure that you are able to govern the organization? So with that, we’ll go back to where we were 10 minutes ago with the last panel and talk about people and culture. Helen, we’ve heard a lot about putting people at the centre. Are they at the centre? And when you look at how the HR function and the IT function have evolved, do you see the way that we’re thinking about health and wellbeing of employees changing? What behaviors have you had to think differently about, or have your employees had to think differently about in order to drive the culture and change that you want to accomplish?
HR: I would say we have made a great deal of progress, and that employees really are at the centre of the universe. Whether that’s the physical workplace, we’ve been doing a lot of work around not just making sure that the physical wellbeing and the physical environment is fit for purpose, but also assuming there’s not a one size fits all. That the environment a designer will do their best work in is different to that of an engineer, and to that of a marketeer. So there’s a lot of thinking around the physical space. And feeding — we like to give a lot of food, people want to eat all of the time.
“The environment a designer will do their best work in is different to that of an engineer, and to that of a marketeer. So there’s a lot of thinking around the physical space.” — Helen Russell, Chief People Officer, Atlassian
I would also say that from a behavioral aspect, I remember doing engagement surveys many years ago and it was all about trying to drive discretionary effort. How do we get 10% more discretionary effort? And a lot of the research was saying that people need to make sure that what they do every day aligns to the company mission, that’s the most important thing. And yet with some recent surveys that Mercer has done, it’s actually the strongest correlations are around belonging and around growth. So if I feel like I belong and I’m growing, that’s when I’m going to have so much commitment and contribute so much more. That’s a very human aspect, it makes it more about the how and less about the what.
“The strongest correlations are around belonging and around growth. So if I feel like I belong and I’m growing, that’s when I’m going to have so much commitment and contribute so much more.” — Helen Russell, Chief People Officer, Atlassian
AL: Can I do a real-time survey out loud? Whose companies are not from Silicon Valley originally? So one thing that’s kind of interesting on this dimension is that I think Silicon Valley — there’s a lot of reasons to knock us right now in the industry, a lot of big challenges globally. But one of the interesting things on this employee dimension is that because of the competitiveness of the employee market, it puts a massive premium on the way that companies treat and engage employees. Again — there are plenty of examples of this not going right in Silicon Valley, so bear that in mind. But because everybody’s fighting for talent so much — and because literally in this corridor, up or down 20 miles you could get a job within five minutes at any like company with your same skill set instantaneously — that’s very unique.So this has created an environment where you fundamentally have to put employees at the centre of everything you’re doing. That’s table stakes.
“Because of the competitiveness of the employee market, it puts a massive premium on the way that companies treat and engage employees.” — Aaron Levie, Founder and CEO, Box
There are plenty of things to learn from creating an environment in the most hyper competitive place in the world from a talent standpoint and being able to bring that to other parts of the world where openness, transparency, and creating an environment where people are engaged, doesn’t have to mean unlimited free food at all times. I think sometimes that gets lost in some of the lessons that are pulled out of the Valley. It’s really about creating an environment where every single day, the only value we can create is going to come from individuals who come in to work and basically create the intellectual property that we’re building. So it’s this hyper, extreme environment of really learning what does it take to put the employee at the centre.
LLY: In putting the employee at the centre, a lot of that is about communication, especially in a global company where you can’t physically give them those things. So as you think about communicating with employees, what have you realized or what has had to change about the way that you communicate? Especially achieving the purpose across a geographical boundary or across cultures. What have you done to solve for that?
“In putting the employee at the centre, a lot of that is about communication, especially in a global company.” — Lesley Lloyd Young, Global Sales Director, Workplace
RS: So Sun Life has been around for a couple of years — about 60 — and we’ve been predominantly a Canadian company, we’ve had presence in the Philippines and other places. But I think one of the fundamental things that I’ve personally experienced as an employee as I’ve worked for different companies is that communication — no disrespect — but it kind of feels like servants coming up to the top, and people sitting in the ivory tower saying ‘Thou shalt do this.’
And we looked at this opportunity about 2–3 years ago because our workforce was changing. 30–40% of our workforce is outside the main campuses, 60–70% of our work is done outside the office out there. And we were not able to engage and reach these employees out there. And moreover, we could never get real-time feedback from the employees.
“What we’ve been able to do [with Workplace] is move from communication to conversations and dialogues. And they are so much more fulfilling. And what we’re observing is that it’s changing behaviors, and not just at the employee level where you’d expect it to have all the change hit them. We’re seeing leaders engage with a very high level of frequency. A lot of empathy and caring is coming from them.” — Rahul Sekhon, CTO, Sun Life Financial
Once we started experimenting with Workplace — and I’ll use the word experimenting because we’re not done yet, it continues — what we’ve been able to do is move from communication to conversations and dialogues. And they are so much more fulfilling. And what we’re observing is that it’s changing behaviors, and not just at the employee level where you’d expect it to have all the change hit them. We’re seeing leaders engage with a very high level of frequency. A lot of empathy and caring is coming from them. We made a fundamental design choice two years ago which was very contrary to highly regulated organizations, which was that we’re going to look at things from a binary mode — we’re either open or not. And we chose to be open.
“We made a fundamental design choice two years ago which was very contrary to highly regulated organizations, which was that we’re going to look at things from a binary mode — we’re either open or not. And we chose to be open.” — Rahul Sekhon, CTO, Sun Life Financial
One example I’d like to share with the group is, how do we know we’re on the journey to being open? About a year ago we launched a sabbatical program in the US, because we all know how people love to take vacation but they can never detach from technology. So it’s a six-week sabbatical, and typically if it was to be communicated we would have gone to the intranet or emails, we would have given people the information, they probably would’ve done something, but we would have never seen the feedback. But what happened two months ago was there was a post on Workplace, and there was a person based out of Maine who wrote this letter about the impact the sabbatical had on him. And this person talks about the story of how he was going to take a sabbatical but his wife was diagnosed with cancer and she passed away, and it allowed him the time to go back and spend the time with the kids over those six weeks. And he wanted to thank Sun Life. Now we would have never seen that reaction sitting in a Canadian-centric organization coming out of Maine. And that’s the power of how we see openness as coming into the mix.
LLY: And how do you enable that?
RS: Well we basically create envy. Pick up a couple of leaders who are going to be the champions, and we give them all the tools and the capabilities, we continuously educate them about the different capabilities they can use out of different tools [on Workplace], and we let other leaders watch them and see how much fun happens when you communicate openly.
“We basically create envy. Pick up a couple of leaders who are going to be the champions, and we give them all the tools and the capabilities, we continuously educate them about the different capabilities they can use out of different tools [on Workplace], and we let other leaders watch them and see how much fun happens when you communicate openly.” — Rahul Sekhon, CTO, Sun Life Financial
One of the things we talked about in a previous session is vulnerability. When leaders show their vulnerability, that invites and opens up for employees to share more. I’ve gone out and made statements like ‘I’m an immigrant, that’s how I came into Canada,’ and people can associate with that. One of our presidents in the US talks about the journey he and his parents made through the world wars. And it’s just those personal stories that build the DNA of an organization.
“When leaders show their vulnerability, that invites and opens up for employees to share more… One of our presidents in the US talks about the journey he and his parents made through the world wars. And it’s just those personal stories that build the DNA of an organization.” — Rahul Sekhon, CTO, Sun Life Financial
LLY: Sanjay, do you have any thoughts around that?
SB: Yes, I think a couple of big things, when you look at your workforce, all of us have different workforces. Some have folks who are fresh out of school, some have been around for a while, and they frankly all like to communicate differently. So one of the biggest things is, within your culture and within your company, before you start with tools you have to start with the culture of being a company that says we want to collaborate. Sales and marketing — everyone knows there’s a tension there. Well, we’re a company that wants to share and break down that healthy tension. If you look at engineering in the field — everybody knows there’s some pre-built tensions in an organization, and you’ve got to promote a culture that says, ‘Look, we’re here, here’s our goals, here’s our success, we’re all in this together.’ And you have to put metrics in place that measure the company success.
If you have that culture first, and you empower that culture of openness, collaborativeness, that we’re all in it together, then you give employees a set of tools. In my view, you don’t just give them one tool. I’ve found folks that — believe it or not — love getting on a call and going ‘Let’s get on a call and talk through this. If we can’t see each other, I’m not going to trust you.’ And after that, from then on they don’t need to see each other again. Then they want to work on Workplace etc.
I think building that foundation in your company, where the culture is very front and centre, and everybody espouses it. Making sure people build personal connections in person, that then enables them to use these great tools afterwards. I think getting that foundation right is critical.
“Making sure people build personal connections in person, that then enables them to use these great tools afterwards. I think getting that foundation right is critical.” — Sanjay Beri, CEO and Founder, Netskope
AL: One thing we run into with a lot of Fortune 500 organizations going through this transformation is, unfortunately there’s this very fundamentally different way of working between the ‘classic industrial age’ if you’ve been around for 30, 40, 50, 100 years — very waterfall-oriented business processes, very hierarchical, information is power, the way to get ahead is to know something somebody else doesn’t know.
You don’t want to be vulnerable, you want to hide the fact that maybe something in your area isn’t working. So there’s a lack of transparency not because of any personal reason, but fundamentally, the business disincentivizes that transparency, because the only way to get ahead is effectively by being able to hoard that information.
“It’s a fundamentally different shift when you decide to build a culture where openness is not just tolerated, but critical to the success of the company. This idea of celebrating failure and taking risks, the essence of that that’s so important is that you want to encourage people to take a risk, and when that project or that thing doesn’t succeed for whatever reason, you aren’t punished for that, you aren’t down-leveled because of that, you aren’t put in the corner of the organization on the worst project because of that, because then no one else is going to be incentivized to take a risk.” — Aaron Levie, Founder and CEO, Box
So it’s a fundamentally different shift when you decide to build a culture where openness is not just tolerated, but critical to the success of the company. This idea of celebrating failure and taking risks, the essence of that that’s so important is that you want to encourage people to take a risk, and when that project or that thing doesn’t succeed for whatever reason, you aren’t punished for that, you aren’t down-leveled because of that, you aren’t put in the corner of the organization on the worst project because of that, because then no one else is going to be incentivized to take a risk. So you have to create an environment where people feel comfortable and are incentivized to be able to share what’s wrong in their department. What numbers aren’t hitting the goals they need? What are the problems customers are having?
Technology alone is not going to solve this, and in fact, a lot of organizations have this instant organ rejection for any kind of openness if you don’t have the culture that corresponds with being able to incentivize that openness, that transparency, that ‘risk taking.’ And not in platitudes, not in posters on the wall, but fundamentally the incentive structure of the organization — the things that get valued by the way teams execute and being able to build that kind of culture. This is a massive challenge, so hopefully by the end of this conference we can figure out how to do that.
“A lot of organizations have this instant organ rejection for any kind of openness if you don’t have the culture that corresponds with being able to incentivize that openness, that transparency, that ‘risk taking.’”- Aaron Levie, Founder and CEO, Box
LLY: Helen actually was talking about this a little earlier, about how we incentivize individuals that are on teams, in a culture where your objective is to create the team, and it’s about what the team can create. If you think about a company as a community that is a team, but yet we do reviews and everybody is reviewed based on their single objectives.
HR: Our mission is to unleash the potential of every team, and team is also one of our values. And yet the typical systems that are coming out of our world — by our world I mean the HR world — tend to be very individualistic. So you’re holding something up here as a mission and value, and yet your programs and processes are incongruent, and in direct conflict actually.
“Our mission is to unleash the potential of every team, and team is also one of our values. And yet the typical systems that are coming out of our world — by our world I mean the HR world — tend to be very individualistic… We are trying to really make sure that team is held up as a higher order as how I actually contribute in my role.” — Helen Russell, Chief People Officer, Atlassian
So we started to really try and unpick, how do we make sure something like performance management — everyone’s favorite topic — how do we make sure that feels like we are incentivizing Helen to be the ultimate team player, as opposed to Helen to have sharp elbows and sh*t all over her colleagues. Technical term!
We are trying to really make sure that team is held up as a higher order as how I actually contribute in my role. And similarly from a reward standpoint, how do we build incentives that again are recognizing what we collectively did, as opposed to what I did.
AL: How did you formalize that team orientation in the performance process?
HR: So basically the way that the performance process works is that we found that we could take a lot of bias out by creating three steps that you walk through. The first step is, I’m going to ask you ‘How is Helen doing in her role?’ and there are various different statements to ascertain how she is performing, for simplicity let’s just call it level 1, 2 and 3. And you give an answer on that, then the next question is, ‘How is Helen living the values?’ then there are various different statements. Then it’s ‘How is Helen elevating the performance of her team?’ And so each of those things are equally weighted, so if you score low in any you can’t come out with the ultimate score. This is not just something we talk about and it’s a nice to have, this is fundamental to how we’re going to assess you.
LLY: So we’re going to switch gears a little bit, so those performance management tools, they’re fun to work with, huh? Those are better than where we were 10 years ago, but the IT is definitely changing and it’s fundamentally different than it was 10 years ago. Some would say that even in that range you can get a whole new HR app today that’s completely different than the one you used three years ago. When you think about that, how has it changed Aaron, and how does it actually impact the culture of the business to have these more fluid technologies in your business?
AL: If you briefly look at the history of how we got here as an industry in enterprise technology and you go back 30, 40 years ago with the first set of major IT investments that companies were making and software infrastructure at scale, we were focused on solving just the most pressing issues of the time which was like — accounting for your inventory and financial statements and we implemented the base level of what technology can do. ERP systems, the basic levels of customer relationship management systems, email emerged, that was the art of technology for decades.
“For the most part, [years ago] innovation was mostly focused on back office systems and processes, the things that would keep the lights on in an organization.” — Aaron Levie, Founder and CEO, Box
PCs came into the enterprise, people started bringing in a couple of their own tools but for the most part, innovation was mostly focused on back office systems and processes, the things that would keep the lights on in an organization. A couple of iPhone generations later, now we’re in 2018. The world is totally different and I think this conference is a testament to that, because some mix of this room is HR professionals and communication professionals, another mix of this room is technology professionals, and that convergence of understanding that people are at the centre of our technology problems, understanding that we have to fundamentally think about the intellectual property that gets created in the organization which is going to come from individuals and human creativity, and ultimately how do we get the most productivity out of individuals? How do we accelerate the speed of our businesses? How do we get closer to customers? How do we innovate more quickly? That requires a fundamentally different technology stack to the one that got deployed in the 80’s and 90’s and 2000's.
It’s going to come from a very different set of vendors, it means that the same technology companies that you bought from that had the lion’s share of your IT budget — maybe 50%, 60%, 70% of that budget — in the 90’s or 2000’s don’t make any sense in this modern way of working and running an enterprise. So we think this is leading to what ultimately this conference and the industry is all about right now, which is best of breed technologies coming together, that can be stitched together either by the customer or by partners, but also from the vendors themselves, where we don’t require customers to do all that integration work themselves. Where we collectively as technology vendors, many in this room, are doing that work behind the scenes to deliver a unified experience where you’re going to get best in class innovation in each technology category coming together to deliver that unified, modern way of working.
LLY: Great. So Sanjay, as a security provider, we’ve been talking about people at the centre, we’ve been talking about the best of breed suite and we’ve been talking about people. So how do you put those all together and balance the competing desire of ‘I want transparency,’ but we need to be secure?
SB: I’m a big believer that it’s a misnomer that security and openness are opposite. In fact, I’m a big believer that if you don’t have openness, you’re not going to have good security. Just like what Aaron said, the reason people swipe their credit cards to buy all these great software as a service apps is because they can do it now. They don’t need some IT person to rack up a bunch of equipment and set up something, they can do whatever they want. And the reality is that they’re going to choose what the company’s going to use in the future. It’s not IT saying ‘Yes we want you to use this app’ it’s the marketing person saying ‘I want to use this application and IT better get on board, or something’s gonna happen.’
“The biggest thing that the IT professionals and the CIOs need to know — and that they do know now, especially in North America and more so in the EU — is that their partner is their business partner, and they’re there to be very open with them and to bring them along that journey. Part of that journey is to be very open and transparent about what are the concerns with the choices they’ve made and how do they help them.” — Sanjay Beri, CEO and Founder, Netskope
If you go to a marketing person and tell him or her, ‘Look, your data is stored in an application without the right amount of data protection and it could be publicly exposed’ they’re not going to say ‘Oh geez I don’t care, it’s a great app and I love to use it.’ They’re going to say ‘No, I don’t want that brand damage, help me.’ And so the biggest thing that the IT professionals and the CIOs need to know — and that they do know now, especially in North America and more so in the EU — is that their partner is their business partner, and they’re there to be very open with them and to bring them along that journey. Part of that journey is to be very open and transparent about what are the concerns with the choices they’ve made and how do they help them.
LLY: Just on those last two comments there with regard to best of breed and combining technologies to deliver the capability, and the security question. Rahul, you’re out there living it every day, what do you think?
RS: I have a slightly different point of view, I think technology has made life more difficult for employees out there. If I look at my organization, similar to many other organizations out there, people’s primary job is not to kind of run and implement and use technology. Their job is to run something that is fundamental to your purpose, to your mission. And what we’ve done by providing too much flexibility in tools, everybody’s trying to create their work processes around that.
“What we’re working on is a strategy where less is more, we’re focused on more implementation of platforms like Workplace, getting the maximum utilization out of that.” — Rahul Sekhon, CTO, Sun Life Financial
And this creates the fundamental issue of two things which we’re trying to fight very hard to enable out there: it’s the aspect of searching and sharing. We don’t always have to create stuff out there. Most organizations are vertically structured in a unit, and there’s no cross-sharing of ideas. So what we’re working on is a strategy where less is more, we’re focused on more implementation of platforms like Workplace, getting the maximum utilization out of that. And then us and IT getting out of the integrations game, we do not want to be system integrators. So that’s fundamental aspect number one.
The thing about security is, it’s a two-fold kind of an answer. Again, go back to the purpose and the mission of your organization. What’s fundamental to you? I believe you can do nothing in this day and age — call it the data age- without making sure security is embedded in the core of everything you do. The fundamental issue is, how much of humans need to be involved in security?
So you could be more secure, but you could have the human tax out of security and I think the moment you do that, organizations will thrive and gravitate more to utilizing these tools.
HR: I think it’s a cultural piece because you treat people like grown ups, and they behave like grown ups. We had a recent example where it was the ultimate test of sharing, where we made the decision to close down our Stride tool in favor of a partnership with Slack. And myself and Mike Cannon-Brookes arrived in Austin in order to disclose to our Stride team what was going to be happening, a week before earnings.
“I think it’s a cultural piece because you treat people like grown ups, and they behave like grown ups.” — Helen Russell, Chief People Officer, Atlassian
And not only were we disclosing what was going to be happening, but we were disclosing it to people who could ultimately lose their jobs as a result. So it was the ultimate test of, you know you’re giving somebody some information a time in their lives when this is pretty emotive. But there was this trust that we engendered that said, ‘You have been incredible employees we want to find other things for you,’ and we actually found other things for 90% of them. And the ultimate trust was that we said, ‘We just need to keep this close for a week,’ and there was not one leak. And boy did they deliver.
LLY: That says a tremendous amount about your culture. And trust, to circle back to where we started. I have one rapid fire question for each of you. Let’s start with you Sanjay, if you could give your employees three applications to make their work life a delight, what would they be?
“It used to be that we used to email that partner, call that partner, but Workplace helps us enable that collaboration externally very quickly.” — Sanjay Beri, Founder and CEO, Netskope
SB: We have a large engineering culture, and so the ability to quickly, say when you look at Atlassian for the management of their engineering, that’s one thing. And two, a collaboration tool. For us, we do a lot of work with partners. The way we collaborate with some of partners such as Facebook is through Workplace. It used to be that we used to email that partner, call that partner, but Workplace helps us enable that collaboration externally very quickly.
LLY: I think you and I had our first conversation through Workplace.
SB: Right. And the third which I know is not an application, it’s controversial, is I still use the phone. I’m telling you, if you’re connecting with a field person, you get on the phone and you talk to him or her and you get to know them. And that lets you use these other tools, so we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, you’ve gotta have that third piece.
LLY: The mobile device is what reduces the distance. If you think about people on the shop floor or the retail floor, that has completely changed the way we work and how we are able to connect. As Julien was saying at the beginning of the day, the entire organization. It’s not just the knowledge workers, it’s people who are in the field like the UPS person delivering something. Aaron, what about your three?
“The mobile device is what reduces the distance. If you think about people on the shop floor or the retail floor, that has completely changed the way we work and how we are able to connect.” — Lesley Lloyd Young, Global Sales Director, Workplace
AL: I’m going to cheat because we like many apps. Workplace, Atlassian, Netskope, Box — it’s important that you standardize on Box across your enterprise. The biggest thing I would leave anybody with is really focusing on the user, with the people at the centre of your organization. Going through a principle process of what technology’s going to make them most productive, don’t listen to vendors about what that is. We all have our own biases of what we’re trying to sell.
“Focus on the user. Focus on the user experience, figure out what makes them most productive and standardize that where possible. But always have a degree of flexibility when a new innovation comes into market that you want to be able to try out.” — Aaron Levie, Founder and CEO, Box
Focus on the user. Focus on the user experience, figure out what makes them most productive and standardize that where possible. But always have a degree of flexibility when a new innovation comes into market that you want to be able to try out, don’t have such a closed mindset or technology architecture that doesn’t allow for bringing in the best of breed innovation that we’re seeing more of.
HR: Video conferencing, we’re really pushing on the boundaries of remote right now to give us access to more workforce.
LLY: Can I ask you, you just described a situation that was pretty tough, in what situation do you use that? Have you found particular ways that just video works?
HR: A couple of things. I would say, when you have remote folks on your call, create a consistent experience. So we acquired Trello, they were 70% remote, and what they do is the folks in their office in New York only ever dial into a call as if they’re all remote. If you’ve got six people sitting in a conference room and one personal dialing in remote, you know what a total pain in the ass it is for the remote person with all the chatter. And so all six dial in from their desk instead.
“I would say, when you have remote folks on your call, create a consistent experience... If you’ve got six people sitting in a conference room and one personal dialing in remote, you know what a total pain in the ass it is for the remote person with all the chatter.” — Helen Russell, Chief People Officer, Atlassian
The other thing is trying to create water cooler moments. Trello had this thing called Mr. Rogers where everybody would just dial in and say things like, ‘I’m having a really bad day.’ Not just calling in for a specific purpose. So creating a virtual water cooler. And chat and comms is obviously a huge aspect of that as well.
LLY: What about you Rahul?
RS: I think our focus is less on technology, because we believe people have the technology they need. Most organizations out there have modern technologies. What we — by we, I mean IT — haven’t done a good job of is teaching people the different ways to use technology. I think it’s all about behaviors, how comfortable are you to, instead of creating all your own content, to search for it out there if someone else has already done it? How easily can you share information? How open are you to that?
But if it’s specifically technologies, then certainly I would say Workplace is top of mind. Zoom is number two. I haven’t tried Box. And the third that we look at, which is a struggle, which I don’t think I’ve found the app for, so if someone has the answer please come forward. Employees need to find space, they need to book meeting rooms. So if someone could solve that, that would be fantastic!
“What we’ve got to do is move away from perfection with communication. We have to start moving towards, ‘It’s a little bit chaotic, it’s good enough.’ This is one of the things we’re seeing now where everybody in the organization — two years into the implementation of Workplace — is a communications expert.” — Rahul Sekhon, CTO, Sun Life Financial
Those are the fundamental ones. And another thing that leads back to trust, transparency and communication is that people want information. Whether it’s information coming from top down, from peer groups, or from different organizations, or about how you implement initiatives and projects. What we’ve got to do is move away from perfection with communication. We have to start moving towards, ‘It’s a little bit chaotic, it’s good enough.’ This is one of the things we’re seeing now where everybody in the organization — two years into the implementation of Workplace — is a communications expert.
We recently moved into our new corporate headquarters at One York, and we had a massive flood about two months ago. And rather than crisis management, it’s how the employees came together to comfort each other, and how they created that whole microcosm of ‘Let’s indicate the problem and make people aware of it.’
And now we’re seeing even simple things like, we’re very next to the famous Maple Leafs team that wins everything every year. And every time there’s a Leafs game we basically have somebody who will say [on Workplace], ‘There’s a Leafs game, so if we have an emergency in the building where we need to gather as an organization, there’s this other spot.’ And those are the pieces where we’re seeing now that communications is also like IT — stepping out of the whole piece of controlling the information. And that’s where the power of the organization to move forward is coming from.
LLY: I’m going to ask one more question of you. You have one of the largest organizations on the stage and probably one of the most geographically disparate. For the person who’s the farthest away from the headquarters in Canada, how do you enable them? What would be the three things you’d give to them?
RS: Well I think it’s about simple things like listening, soliciting feedback and making sure that every voice counts. As we launch products, as we launch communications, as we talk about initiatives out there, how do we make sure that people are getting invited in the conversation out there?
“If somebody’s giving you negative feedback — even if you have all the justified reasons to say, ‘This feedback’s not accurate’ — it’s how do you bring the empathy and the caring to say, ‘This is relevant, thank you for making the effort.’ It’s really bringing that openness to the culture, and there’s only one simple way to do it: leaders have to show the way.” — Rahul Sekhon, CTO, Sun Life Financial
But mostly importantly, if somebody’s giving you negative feedback — even if you have all the justified reasons to say, ‘This feedback’s not accurate’ — it’s how do you bring the empathy and the caring to say, ‘This is relevant, thank you for making the effort.’ Because some other day, that person’s going to come back and give you great feedback. So it’s really bringing that openness to the culture, and there’s only one simple way to do it: leaders have to show the way. This is not for your employees to start. Leaders have to say, ‘This is my vested interest, I’m going to do this personally out there.’
This is one of the reasons why we’ve been very successful with Workplace, because most of our leaders have recognized that and said, ‘We are going to go and march forward with that.’
LLY: Ok I think that’s a great place to end. I appreciate the panel and thank you so much for your insights. Thanks a lot!
