Positive Energy at Work with Jesse Dowdle, CTO, Head of Product at Motivosity

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:04) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Jesse, CTO and head of product at Motivosity. And we discuss how Motivosity is creating a water cooler for positive energy at work, tools for improving the quality of your one-on-ones with employees, and how to leverage the power of gratitude to make a self-sustaining company culture. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Jesse at 00:00:31) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) So I saw you have a degree in history and broadcast journalism.

(Jesse at 00:00:47) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:48) Yeah. So tell me how you got into technology and you're a CTO today.

(Jesse at 00:00:52) Oh my goodness. You know, it's so interesting how you get into higher ed and start down one path, and then some people, they know what they're going to do. They want to be a pre-med or whatever, and they're going to get through their bachelor's and move on. But I really didn't know. I was interested in business. I can tell you that.

(Jesse at 00:01:08) I was pursuing a degree in business initially, but as I got going into some of the different elements of the business program at Brigham Young University where I went to school, it just didn't feel like the right fit. And so there was a lot of floundering around trying to figure it out. I'd been involved in journalism in high school. Actually, I was the editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper. So I thought I'll join the journalism program at BYU, and that'll give me an idea of what I want to be when I grow up. But then, just the nature of getting a bachelor's degree, a four-year degree, you have to do a lot of general education as well. And the history classes were just so fascinating to me. I've always loved philosophy and history. And the two intersect in an interesting way because journalism is about media, it's about communication, and history is like philosophy. It's about understanding human nature and understanding the way people work.

(Jesse at 00:02:03) Those two, for me, they kind of dovetail together. And ironically, all through my college years, I was trying to make money on the side. So I was doing web design and I was dabbling in ActionScript, which was a programming language that Macromedia Flash, later Adobe Flash, used as its underpinnings. And it was just hustling for a buck while I was in school, but it never really occurred to me that maybe this thing that I'm doing to make money while I'm in school, getting a degree to do something else, would be where I would ultimately end up. And so, yeah, I finished that degree, a couple of majors there, and then went to work right away as a writer. But I was a writer at a video game company.

(Jesse at 00:02:45) Nice. So I was sitting next to engineers who were programmers, and that was their chosen profession. They'd gone to school, gotten a degree in computer science, and I was just there to write stories and flesh out characters and write witty dialogue and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:00) That's cool. That's a really coveted job for writers today. That's what a lot of people are going for.

(Jesse at 00:03:07) Yeah. And it was a window into an entirely different industry that I had no experience with or no real understanding of. But one thing I did learn from that was I learned that writers, they make a certain amount of money, and engineers, they make a lot more money. And I couldn't believe how these guys and gals who weren't even done with their degrees yet had jobs lined up at Microsoft and Google, and they were going to go to the moon with their careers. So putting two and two together, you know, I'd done some things on the side already, had learned a little bit about technology and had become a little bit proficient with ActionScript as a programming language.

(Jesse at 00:03:49) And then I was in an environment where there were lots of people who had an engineering background. And so when an opportunity arrived, I was offered a job at a small software as a service company, a SaaS startup. And the business side, it kind of blended those two things, the opportunity to become an engineer and to work in business, which I was originally interested in all the way back in college. And that was what really set me on my path. So I was an early engineer at a small startup and was there for almost a decade.

(Jesse at 00:04:22) And that startup was pretty successful and ultimately was acquired by Adobe a couple of years ago. And that was really my school. That was my education in technology, was coming up through a small software company that turned into a big success, not overnight, but over many years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:40) That's really cool. So you were hired on on the business side of that company. How did you end up gaining your engineering chops?

(Jesse at 00:04:48) Here's the crazy part. You know, fake it till you make it. Right? I had had a little bit of ActionScript experience. And back then, this is in the mid-2000s, a lot of people thought that the next evolution of the World Wide Web was going to be plugin-driven. The Flash plugin was very popular, especially for gaming. Like, if anybody ever played Farmville on Facebook, they know what that was like. And it was also a platform for rich Internet applications through a framework called Flex. Adobe had released a framework that was built on top of the Flash player where you could create an interactive app.

(Jesse at 00:05:26) And this predates modern JavaScript-based front-end frameworks, and it was cross-platform. It had a lot of the benefits that we enjoy today natively in our browsers, but it all ran inside of a plugin. There weren't that many people that really knew ActionScript very well. It's based on ECMAScript, and so some of the fundamentals are there, but it was its own thing. And I had learned a little bit about it.

(Jesse at 00:05:49) And so that job posting at the small startup was for an ActionScript developer. They were really struggling to find somebody. And so even though I didn't have a degree in computer science and wasn't even really doing it for real, like a real job, they were willing to take a chance on me. And so I did start as an engineer at that company. Oh, cool.

(Jesse at 00:06:10) And I was in an engineering role exclusively for a few months, and then they realized pretty early on, okay, here's a guy who maybe he's not the best purebred coder, but he's got some other skills as well. And so I managed a team there and then multiple teams and then different countries and on and on and on as the company grew. Always on the technology side, but technology and product. And so my days of being just a full-fledged, you know, just write software every day, slinging code, were really pretty short-lived there at the very beginning, just two, three years.

(Jesse at 00:06:48) And I definitely can appreciate the difference between people who have chosen software development as their passion and that's what they love to do, and folks like me who love code, we're interested in it, but we see it as a means to an end. We're trying to build a great product and put it in the hands of our users. So we use code as a tool of the trade, but what we're really passionate about is the problems that we're solving for our users.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:14) That's really cool. So how did you end up at Motivosity today?

(Jesse at 00:07:19) Yeah. Motivosity is a really cool company. We're focused on helping companies build their culture, and we provide lots of different tools for that. Our mission is to help people be happier at work. And the reason I'm telling you all this at the start is because part of the reason I'm at Motivosity is because of the mission.

(Jesse at 00:07:37) Now after my years at Workfront, I took an executive job at another tech company, but I stayed in touch with many of the people that I knew there, as you can imagine, including the founder and chairman of the board of that company. And as I was working elsewhere, he had started Motivosity as kind of a side project and was working on getting it off the ground and getting to a point where it was starting to scale. And so once it had reached a point where officially the landing gear was off the tarmac and the company was ascending, then we started to talk a little bit more seriously about getting the band back together and whether it would make sense for me to come and do the startup journey again with him as an executive here. And so I've been with Motivosity now for three years, and we've been one of the fastest-growing tech companies here in Utah and also in the Inc. 5000 for fastest-growing tech companies the last three years. So having a lot of fun scaling this one, doing it again.

(Jesse at 00:08:38) And I love the fact that we get to work on a problem like helping people be happier at work, especially over the last couple of years. It's been a tough go of it for a lot of us in corporate world, in corporate America. And a lot of us are reevaluating the role of work in our lives and the relationship that we want to have with our employer. And it's causing us to really rethink what our priorities are. And so working at Motivosity, a company that's all about helping people be satisfied and happy with the work that they do, feels like a problem worth working on.

(Jesse at 00:09:11) So that's why I'm here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:14) Yeah. I mean, that sounds awesome, but help me conceptualize it. What does a tool for culture look like? How do you use it as the user?

(Jesse at 00:09:24) How does a piece of technology actually help someone be happier at work? Right? How does that work? It turns out everybody comes to work with different expectations of what's important to them and what they want to get out of their work experience. But people, in general, the vast majority of people, have a few major categories of needs that need to be met in order for them to feel satisfied at work. This isn't super dissimilar than something like Maslow's hierarchy. If you've ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? You've got food and shelter and things at the base, and then you've got these other in the pyramid, right, working your way up in happiness. It's the same way at work.

(Jesse at 00:10:01) And so in the hierarchy of needs at work, it turns out that there are three or four categories that everybody really, really needs. The first one is they need to feel like they're part of a tribe. They need to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of community with the people that they're with. It's so important for everybody that works in a corporate environment, especially, but in any kind of work environment with others, that they feel like they're part of the group and not on the outside. So that sense of affiliation.

(Jesse at 00:10:32) Another is people need to feel appreciated for the work that they do. This is a broad-based universal need that we have. Again, it's a social need. We need to feel like the work that we do matters to our colleagues, especially our peers, actually, even more than our boss, and that our work is seen and appreciated. So that's the second category where motivation at work comes from.

(Jesse at 00:10:58) Then the third one is a relationship with our boss. Everybody's got a boss. Even the CEO of the biggest company in America has a boss, right? The shareholders or the board of directors. Everybody has a boss.

(Jesse at 00:11:10) And having a transparent relationship and a relationship of mutual respect with our boss is one of the most important contributors to happiness at work. It's commonly said that people, they join companies for the company, but they leave companies because of their boss. This is the number one reason people leave their jobs, is because they don't have a good relationship with their boss. So that's the third category. And then there are others that go down, like actually what you get paid.

(Jesse at 00:11:37) It matters. Compensation matters. But it turns out, as a contributor to long-term happiness at work, it matters less than these other things I'm mentioning. Feeling like you're part of a tribe, feeling like you're appreciated for what you do, having a great relationship with your boss. And then kind of related to the boss one is, it's pretty important for people to feel like leadership at their company is transparent and communicates with them.

(Jesse at 00:12:00) That's important too. So as a software company, Motivosity, what we do is we build tools that support each of those motivators. So if you think about, okay, feeling recognized and appreciated at work, we've got a great product feature set that lets people express appreciation to each other in a social feed, reward each other with little bonuses, share awards and milestones, celebrate wins. So it creates sort of a water cooler for positive energy in a company. That's one of the things we do.

(Jesse at 00:12:32) We also build tools that help managers be better managers, like keeping track of one-on-ones or setting good priorities or just being supportive of the boss-employee relationship. So we've got tools that help with that. And we even have tools that help with that concept of transparency and listening. So that's surveys, employee satisfaction scores, and feeding back into the organization how people are doing and what they're worried about. So in each of those different categories of motivation, Motivosity has technology products that help those along.

(Jesse at 00:13:06) And the result of that is that with companies that work with us, they see their employee promoter scores go up. They see turnover go down. They get more reporting, like self-reporting of happiness at work and satisfaction with their job. And it's kind of amazing to watch, but it's based on human psychology and just kind of the philosophy of being social creatures and what actually motivates us long-term, applied through technology to a full organization. So, yeah, it's a really exciting space to be in.

(Jesse at 00:13:39) I hope you can feel my passion for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:41) Oh, absolutely.

(Jesse at 00:13:41) Because it's remarkable to see what it can do in the lives of the people that are lucky enough to work at a company that has Motivosity installed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:50) Yeah. Okay. I want to ask a ton of stuff about this because it sounds super interesting. You mentioned it's all based on psychology. Can you tell me a little bit about your product development process?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:02) Do you work with subject matter experts and psychologists and sociologists?

(Jesse at 00:14:07) We do. In fact, one of our senior product managers has a PhD in psychology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:12) That's cool.

(Jesse at 00:14:13) And so we do some of our own primary research, as well as we rely on research that comes out from the Boston Consulting Group and Harvard Business. We look at the social sciences quite a lot. And we look at the ways in which, I would say in the consumer space, the viral hacks that build engagement, some of them are positive and virtuous, and some of them are negative. If you're trying to build engagement in your platform so that you can sell more ads, that's probably a less virtuous reason to do it. But those same social cues that keep you coming back to Instagram or TikTok also apply in a business social setting where the reason for doing it is more generous. If we can get people to come back into the Motivosity platform to see the positive highlights that are being shared or to say thank you to a colleague, that's reinforcing patterns of behavior that are really positive for the mental health of all of the people that work there and can help contribute to work feeling like a place that they want to be with people that they want to be with.

(Jesse at 00:15:18) And so we do. We look at the psychology of it, and we also look at some of the practices in our own industry that have been applied by other companies to help build virality and keep people engaged and interested.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:31) Forgive me for this comparison because I know a lot of people have a negative view of social media. But so you're basically creating the same kind of dopamine hits intentionally that Instagram and TikTok have done to engage their platforms, but for the purpose of positive talk at work?

(Jesse at 00:15:50) Right. So if you think about something like Facebook, for example, since we're talking about negative examples of social media, one of the really positive things that Facebook implemented a few years back was they pivoted to a real focus on groups. They realized that these smaller social circles was where the real positive benefit of their platforms could come. And many people, even if they're no longer using Facebook just to post on their feed or whatever, they're still probably participating in a local group. I know for me, my local neighborhood where I live, we've got a Facebook group and there's probably 200 or 300 people in there. There's not a ton.

(Jesse at 00:16:26) And we use it to stay in touch as neighbors. That's a really positive benefit of a social media platform that has nothing to do with the broad monetization goals or the spreading of fake news or anything like that. It's just about us as people being together. And at work, it's kind of the same way. Even if you work at a really large company, you probably have a team that you work with that has eight to 20 people on it, and your boss probably has five to eight direct reports, and you're probably part of a department that maybe has a couple of hundred people in it.

(Jesse at 00:16:59) So you've got these social circles inside of your work life too. And what we're trying to do is promote the connection within those social circles. And we do it not just by promoting any kind of connection, but promoting positive connection. Appreciation for shared work, championing and getting excited about wins at work, even giving people rewards for doing good things. That's all part of what we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:24) So what size company typically works with you? Because I'm imagining my company, we have like 15 people. And so even if we have everybody contributing to a social media platform, it probably wouldn't feel like a social media platform. There's not that many.

(Jesse at 00:17:40) Yeah. We do actually have a lot of small businesses that will use it, but perhaps for different reasons. Sometimes they're globally distributed, but they all work remote. And so having a good place to kind of get together and chat if they're not already using a different kind of platform for that. But you're right that where we see this adopted and where it tends to really add a lot of value is in that mid-market. When you get up to about 150, 200 people, that's a pretty good sized tribe at that point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:10) Getting past Dunbar's number.

(Jesse at 00:18:11) Right. Exactly. I'm glad you brought that up. Yep. So we do serve customers of all sizes. We have customers with tens of thousands of employees. But our goal is to make each employee, each person that works there feel like they're a part of a tribe with the group that they sort of socialize with. That same Dunbar number, that 150 to 200 people. So even if they're part of a really big organization, our goal is for them to feel like they're close to the people that they engage with more regularly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:40) That's cool. So, how is it different than having a casual Slack channel?

(Jesse at 00:18:45) Well, one of the things that we do to structure and formalize it more is a lot of it is based around appreciation. When you open up the Motivosity interface, it doesn't say like Facebook, "What's on your mind? Post whatever." It says, "Who do you appreciate?" And you get on there and you post when you want to say thank you to someone, when you want to recognize someone, when you want to share a highlight or a win at work. So we really try to guide the content of that social feed towards those kinds of things, because we know that those are the activities that are correlated with having a sense of well-being at work, feeling good about work.

(Jesse at 00:19:12) And there's a place for negativity somewhere, but it's just not Motivosity. Our goal is not just to promote any sort of social interaction, it's to promote the kinds of interactions that lead people to want to stay at their job, to want to work with their team better, to want to do a better job at work, and to be happy about being at work. So not to minimize the negative, but sometimes we get asked questions like, "Would you guys implement an anonymous comment box?" Like, the kind that used to be in break rooms where employees could put things in. And we'll say, "Actually, our goal is to increase transparency from leadership. So we're going to build features for that, but we're not going to necessarily build features that become places where people go to feel negative or to complain or be frustrated." There are other places that they can go for that. We want Motivosity to be the place somebody goes when they need a pick me up in their day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:22) Right. And I feel like the anonymous comment box is like treating the symptom but not the problem if things are wrong.

(Jesse at 00:20:30) Right? Sometimes we get asked about content moderation for the same reason. "How do you, what if somebody posts something negative on your feed? What are you going to do about that?" And what is interesting about the social sciences in this respect is, and this is a well documented phenomenon, when people use their real name for starters, they're much more civil. They're much less likely to be inflammatory or a troll or to express bigoted perspectives or whatever it might be. They have to put their own name on it. And taking that a step further, if they're posting into a group that is the people that they work with, like their actual colleagues, then their reputation and credibility is even more important when they post. And so out of the millions of posts every year, the number that actually have to be taken down because they violated the terms of service, it's like less than 10.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:28) Wow.

(Jesse at 00:21:28) Less than 10 a year out of millions of posts. Can you believe that? And it's all because of this phenomenon of social responsibility using your own name and your accountability to your colleagues. And then what I said before, the fact that Motivosity really nudges you to share the positive, to express appreciation, to do these other things. So very rarely are there any issues with content and needing to moderate content for those reasons.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:50) So I want to hear a little bit about the tools you've created to address the relationship with boss. Is it like a leadership training platform? What is it?

(Jesse at 00:22:00) You know, a lot of people go there first because that's what we're used to thinking of. "Okay. We need better managers. What are we going to do? We'll hire a consultant to come in here and teach them how to be better managers, or we'll give them a book and have them read the book." But there's this other phenomenon in human nature where the people we spend more time with, we naturally like more. I don't know. That probably has a name. Some scientist probably got the credit for that one. But this is a natural thing. It's one of the reasons why people even get in relationships with those that are friends, or that they've known for a long time is we just naturally like the people that we spend more time with. It's the way we're wired.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:40) Mere exposure.

(Jesse at 00:22:41) Mere exposure. Yeah. So the number one predictor of a good relationship between a boss and their employee is the consistency and quality of their one-on-one meetings. It's the consistency and quality of those one-on-ones, that one-on-one time. And so the first thing that we do with our product set is we build a great collaborative tool for having a shared one-on-one where you can take shared notes and have a shared agenda and set priorities and so forth. And then we also make it really easy to keep on top of it. So you don't let those meetings fall between the cracks. We create little loops of gratitude, like the ability to say thank you at the end of the meeting, both from the employee to their boss and vice versa. And we just try to help people establish this pattern. So the boss and employee, they're in the habit of getting together regularly just to talk, just to be together, to hopefully exit the meeting with a shared understanding of what's most important, right, with some clear priorities and things that have been set, so they feel like there's forward momentum. But truthfully, just the act of having that meaningful one-on-one time is the number one predictor.

(Jesse at 00:23:44) So we have other tools as well. You mentioned learning, we do some training and there's some learning material there. There's some other tools for journal entries if you're a manager, journaling tools, there's tools for doing performance reviews, even giving coaching. But the number one thing is doing those one-on-ones and doing them regularly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:12) Yeah. That's something that I've been personally working on a lot recently. In the past couple months, I had a team just kind of grow under me. And it went from managing like one person that I've known for a really long time, so we didn't really have to communicate. And then we added another one of those, and then we started adding people that were brand new to me. We run lots of different podcasts here, and each podcast is like its own complex thing to manage with like preproduction, production, distribution, booking, and just a lot to keep track of. And so I slowly started to feel the water rising until suddenly I was drowning.

(Jesse at 00:24:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:55) And so then we had one-on-ones every week that I knew I was supposed to do them, but I didn't really know what to do. I would just get on them and be like, "Hey. What do you want me to talk about?"

(Jesse at 00:25:04) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:06) Yeah. So I started implementing a structure to them. And as we're going, if anything isn't as it should be, we write it down. By the end of the meeting, I have a couple bullet points that I send over, and then I also paste it into the calendar invite for next week's.

(Jesse at 00:25:23) Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:23) It changed overnight like how I felt about managing my team. So you immediately going to one-on-ones really hit home. That has been huge for me, personally.

(Jesse at 00:25:34) Yeah. I'm glad you shared that. And what you're doing is exactly what good managers should do. They're keeping on top of it. They're forwarding that agenda along. And all we're doing with our technology is making it really easy for someone like you to do all of that. You don't have to send that email out because Motivosity does it. You don't have to schedule that next meeting or keep track of what you discussed last time because Motivosity does it. Then on top of that, it's connected in with the rest of the social things you're doing. So as a manager, you still have a boss as well. So now your manager can see that you are consistently having one-on-ones with your team and the quality of those one-on-ones as well. So you don't have to prove to your manager that you're doing a good job because they have that same visibility downstream and can see all of the good things that you do as a leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:25) That's really cool. One thing I'm curious about is you mentioned you have like tools to say thanks and show gratitude.

(Jesse at 00:26:33) Mm-hmm. There is an important principle at work there, and this is another part of human nature. We have discovered through doing millions and millions of, you know, micro studies every time somebody gives an appreciation, is that if that appreciation is timely, so that if it's got that quality of it's referencing something that just happened, it's from someone that you maybe already have some kind of a relationship with, and if it's paired with some sort of very small reward, all of those things make that appreciation more meaningful. We call these micro bonuses. But it turns out that just the way we're wired, even if the amount of money is a dollar versus $50, if there's money at all, that chemical reward is way more significant and that the amount matters less than whether it exists at all. So inside of Motivosity, everybody gets a few dollars every month to say thank you with. And each time they express gratitude, they send along a buck.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:41) Oh, that's cool.

(Jesse at 00:27:42) A dollar or two. That money builds up over time in your spending balance, and then you can use it for literally anything you want. And so we have, of course, a store full of gift cards. You mentioned Starbucks. There's lots of digital rewards, but we also extend to every single user a card. We call it the Thanks Matters card. It's a Visa card and it's not a gift card. It has your actual balance on it, just like a bank balance. So you can use that money that you get anywhere that you want in the world, anywhere Visa is accepted. And what we find is people, the more often they use the card, the more often they use that money that they got in gratitude from their colleagues, the more they want to pay that forward. So they go in and they say thank you to others. We call that the gratitude loop. So it goes from doing that work together, receiving appreciation, redeeming the money, and then paying it forward with more gratitude. And you can see how once something like that gets going inside of a company, how it can become self-sustaining and can support an entire corporate culture becoming more positive over time as everyone is participating in that gratitude loop.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:55) Yeah. That's really cool, and I think it's really important that it's on its own card and it's not like just deposited in your account because then now it's fun money. Now it's like, "I only use this card to go out to dinner and do fun things because that's what it's for."

(Jesse at 00:29:12) Exactly. We want that positive association, right, from the gratitude itself to what you use it for. And sometimes, those that are putting these programs together fall into the trap of thinking they just need to provide certain kinds of rewards that people will like, whether they're swag or they're experiential rewards. And I mean, don't get me wrong. I like a cinnamon dolce latte from Starbucks just fine. That gift code will be great, that QR code. But what people really value is they value that feeling of trust, and they value that feeling of respect and freedom. And so it's one thing to say, "Well, my company loves me enough to give me a t-shirt or to give me a QR code to Starbucks." It's another to say, "My company puts a card in my pocket, and every time my coworkers appreciate me for the good work I do, the balance on that card in my pocket grows." So it really is. It's like carrying your company's gratitude for you around with you everywhere you go. That's one of the reasons why people that work at companies that use Motivosity, they tend to stay because it really does build that sense of belonging that people crave. That's a universal need that we have as human beings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:29) Yeah. So at the beginning of the interview, you mentioned that it's amazing for you and like a driving force for you to see the results of your work. Can you tell me some of the cool things you've seen at the companies that use your product?

(Jesse at 00:30:43) Oh my goodness. Whenever I need a pick me up, we have an algorithm that runs for all of our customers that will surface the most meaningful appreciations. And it looks at all kinds of different data points in terms of the quality and quantity of what was said and how many people reacted and responded to it. It's almost like a recommendation engine for good vibes. And so I'll go in and just see what people are saying across the platform to each other. I don't have to know the giver of the appreciation or the recipient personally to read their words and be inspired by all of the good things that people do for each other every day in the workplace. We really have no idea just how much good, even in companies that really struggle, just how much good is going on every single day and how much people have each other's backs and how they dive in to help. And I think sometimes in our media-saturated world, we tend to really inflate the negative things that happen and really focus on the negative and the 24 hour news cycle. And even just the macroeconomic climate that we're in right now can make us all a little gloomy, but there's far more good in the world and in individual human interactions than there is negative at any given point. And that's one of the things that gets me excited every day to go to work, is knowing that we're doing a little bit to help that gratitude loop go a little bit faster.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:17) That's awesome. So I'm curious how you make the pitch to the CFO of a company. Like, have you quantified a happy workforce's ROI?

(Jesse at 00:32:28) Yeah. You know, it's something our entire industry kind of struggles with, to be honest with you, because it's not how business leaders are accustomed to thinking. They understand the importance of wellness, of psychological well-being, and they understand the impact of churn and turnover and low morale in an abstract way. But it's really difficult to compute that number and put it in a spreadsheet. And when people are buying software in our space, you know, the employee engagement space, they're buying it for the same abstract reasons.

(Jesse at 00:33:04) We know that this is gonna make us better, and we know we wanna be better, so we're gonna buy this software. It's tough for them to do a real ROI calculation that will stick in the mind of a finance leader. So we don't usually sell to the finance organization. You know, we sell to HR, and we try to make the parts of it that the finance team cares about, like transparency into spend and being able to track where the dollars are going. We try to make those things really easy.

(Jesse at 00:33:34) A lot of times, companies are graduating from something finance organization. The amount of transactional transparency that they get on a platform like ours is a real win for them, and that would be a reason why they would be supportive of a program like ours. But ultimately, the decision on this has to come from, you know, the management team, the CEO, or the CHRO, the people who are accountable for and thinking about the company culture and their desire to make an investment in that, even if drawing the line from the investment to, you know, a business outcome is a little bit tricky when you're talking about well-being of your employees. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:22) That makes sense, though. I didn't think about how you're stepping up from a box of gift cards and how much of an improvement you can make just from that relatively easily.

(Jesse at 00:34:31) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:32) By having transparency. So as someone that has paid a lot of attention to the science behind what makes a good leader and what makes a great relationship between employees and their bosses, what's something you're personally working on right now to improve as a leader yourself?

(Jesse at 00:34:54) Mhmm. The thing that I really try and I'm trying to work on right now has to do a little bit with, so my role is head of product here, and I've got some really great product managers who work for me. But because of this strong technology background, you know, I kind of came from the engineering side. I tend to be really, really analytical in my approach to product management, really focused on the metrics and the data. And that probably comes through a little in me talking about all the research and the science and everything that goes into this.

(Jesse at 00:35:26) Sometimes being that analytical can mean that when trying to diagnose a problem, I could be a little cold, you know, a little bit dispassionate. That's a good thing when we're in crisis, having someone who's really steady and just, let's just look at the numbers. Let's figure it out. We've got this. That could be good.

(Jesse at 00:35:43) But it can also be, I think, a little frustrating to have a boss who's just so focused on the numbers. The story wasn't inspiring. Sorry. The anecdote, I need metrics. I need data. I need a written product brief. I need all these artifacts. From a personal perspective, I try to build really good personal relationships with each person that works for me. But then when it's time to get down to business, I'm very much analytical. I'm cut to the chase, and it can be a little bit ruthless when it comes to making business decisions.

(Jesse at 00:36:18) So I'm working on tempering that and being kind and making sure that at no point do the people that work for me feel like our relationship is in peril at all. The way that I'll sometimes say it is, I'll say, Adam, the situation we're talking about is not okay, but we're okay. You know, you and I are okay. And try to be much more explicit about that. Like, something could be a problem. It can need to be fixed, but our relationship is super solid, and I trust you that you're gonna figure it out. So that's something I'm working on doing better as a leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:56) Great advice because I'm also kinda coming from the other side of that where I'm working on being more firm.

(Jesse at 00:37:05) And truthfully, like, this is one of those things where, like, relationships between bosses and their employees are so tricky because you've got the power dynamic in there. You've got, like, real consequences. Like, your boss has the ability to decide how stressed you're gonna be about making rent next month. Right? Like, they're in a position of power.

(Jesse at 00:37:23) And then there's also the knowledge gap. Maybe they know they might be much more experienced than you, but many times they're not. I mean, if we're being honest, right? A lot of times you know more about the specifics of your job than your boss does, and that's probably by design. Right? So there's all of this kind of woven in there, and then you've got the human factor. You've got your different personalities, experiences, your background. All of this, it goes into this cocktail. And hopefully, out of all that emerges, like, productive business outcomes and also productive relationship outcomes. But you'd be forgiven for feeling like it's a little bit like having a black belt in communication to be really good at.

(Jesse at 00:38:04) So, I love your openness to say, hey, I'm working on trying to be more direct, because that's something every employee deserves from their boss, while also saying, yeah, I really do care about them and I care about their feelings. And it's an art that you'll probably just practice your whole career and never really feel like you've got it nailed because it just is different. Everybody that you work with, every employee you ever have is gonna be a little different. Their needs are gonna be a little different. You'll always be calibrating how to get the best result and how to get the best relationship because both are important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:39) Yeah, absolutely. So is your company in person, remote, or hybrid?

(Jesse at 00:38:46) Yeah, we're hybrid. We've got a couple of offices and our employees, some of them are here five days a week. Some of them are fully remote, but most are in and out a little bit. It helps a lot to have a virtual platform for the social fabric of our company, because we don't miss as much not being in the office. And it helps those that are remote feel like they're more connected to what we're doing, our shared purpose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:13) Yeah. Do you ever do, like, any company get-togethers to meet those people that you hire without ever seeing in person?

(Jesse at 00:39:21) Absolutely. And it's really important that companies do that even when they are fully remote. At least a couple of times a year, it's important for people to get to be with their tribe, their group of 150 to 200, to get together a couple of times a year. So for us, that means traveling overseas, as a lot of our engineers are in Europe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:40) Oh, really? That's cool.

(Jesse at 00:39:42) Or they fly here. And we have sales reps all over the country in different places. And so that means getting them together a couple of times a year as well. And then we encourage people to be in the office. The office is kind of like a perk. Right? You can work remote, but then you can come in and get some free food and talk to your colleagues and work on a problem on the whiteboard like we've got behind me, and the office is available for that. So it's definitely changing the way that we work, but I think for the better. I just read yesterday that companies are saving an average of $11,000 per year per employee going remote.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:18) Wow.

(Jesse at 00:40:18) In the United States. So it's real savings, not to mention probably being good for the environment to keep some cars off the road.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:24) Yeah. So use some of that $11,000 on a cool trip or something.

(Jesse at 00:40:28) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:29) Is there anything that we didn't get to touch on today that you wanna make sure we get out to the world?

(Jesse at 00:40:34) You know, Joel, we're really fortunate, you and I, that we get to work in an industry where we get to talk about technology and the impact it can have in the world, and it's super high leverage. We live in an era where one developer can move literally trillions of dollars in markets by writing an algorithm for a stablecoin that comes unpegged from the dollar, for example, a negative example. But, like, we really do. There's incredible power there. And I think it's super important to emphasize that in the technology world, we have a choice.

(Jesse at 00:41:09) Like, we can choose to be ethical. We can choose to build strong social bonds to do good in the world, or we can choose to pursue the almighty dollar at the expense of the people around us, or our communities, or our environment, or whatever. And so I hope that those that listen to this podcast, you know, reflect on their responsibility as technology leaders to both build great teams and solve problems that do more than just enrich shareholders, but that actually help the world be a little bit brighter place than it was the day before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:41) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.