Intuit: How customer obsession becomes employee obsession

[00:00:24.490] – Paul Miller

Welcome to of Rewilding Work. I’m Paul Miller. Rewilding Work captures stories and examples of how senior leaders and changemakers are transforming the world of work across their organizations. Recently, I was fortunate to be part of a DWG Member Meeting at Intuit at their headquarters in Mountain View in Silicon Valley, just next door to Google. Intuit owns QuickBooks and Mailchimp and was founded in 1993 in Palo Alto by Scott Cook, who still comes into the campus frequently and loves being part of their customer research sessions. The campus is a nature paradise and it’s a truly humble company. My guest today is Priya Thummalapalli. Director of People Experience Solutions. And I’ve known Priya thankfully for many years. She was before then a Vice President in Digital and HR for Prudential Financial back on the east coast and a winner in recent years of the DWG Digital Workplace Leader of the Year Award. She’s deep, thoughtful, and makes her bold ideas happen in practice. I reckon she’s found her work home at Intuit. Do subscribe to the DWG channel so you get alerted about each new episode. Now for Priya Thummalapalli.

[00:02:02.470] – Paul Miller

So, Priya, in my mind, because you and I know each other quite well, you’re one of the more remarkable people in the whole digital workplace people experience world. And I say that in a shower of compliments on you just because I think you come to this with a real depth of understanding and a strategic view, an experiential view. So I just want to ask you, experimentation is part of the DNA at Intuit. Can you just talk about this example that I’ve heard about called Follow Me Home, how that works and how it has changed employee experience over where you work at Intuit.

[00:02:47.590] – Priya Thummalapalli

So firstly, Paul, thank you for the shower of appreciation. Thank you so much. I want to actually up level that answer a little bit to really start with Intuit’s operating values, and one of them, dear to the heart, is really what we call as customer obsession. And in order to support and fulfill this value, one of the core capabilities add into it that really differentiate us and helps us to really deliver on what we really, truly mean by customer obsession is what we call as customer driven innovation. It’s a methodology and a mindset. And in order to get there, what it really helps us is to uncover important and really unsolved problems. And so Follow Me Home is one of the programs that have been designed in order to kind of support this customer driven innovation. So essentially, what is it? It is really what the program literally how it sounds. That’s exactly what it means is follow me home. And our co founder, Scott Cook, he’s the one who actually brought this into being. And one of the things he used to do is really follow and ask the customer as they were using the product, he would ask them if he could go home, watch them use the product, observe this.

[00:04:18.400] – Priya Thummalapalli

And it just started becoming so important for us to continue to do this. In order to do the research, we need to improve the products. So that’s where it started. That’s the genesis. And then why is it different? Because you probably have heard people do a lot of user research today. There’s a lot of interviews, probably do a lot of interviews to understand how end users are using your product. But there is a subtle nuance here, right? So when you start to observe customers in their natural habitat, we are able to glean something that we typically will not get from interviews. What happens is we start to see behavioral we start to see behavioral information. And when you do an interview, you start to get a lot of you’re listening. You’re listening to answers. And so you probably are at the risk of getting a lot of false positives. And so when you take information like that by merely listening to someone instead of observing what they do, then you start to see a world of differences between what they say and what they do. And so then you start to see the value of this follow me home.

[00:05:32.490] – Priya Thummalapalli

It’s actually a type of research. And so when you observe behaviors and then you decide that you want to interview the customer after watching them in their natural setting, now you can go deeper. You can poke at the behaviors, right? And so you start to start to garner a lot of behavioral data, which is really important for us to really improve our products, improve our experience. And so we started to build that into our employee experience as well.

[00:06:01.730] – Paul Miller

So are you actually following your employees home? I think it’s amazing that you are following the customers home. And I’m presuming that when this was happening with your founder, this was before the world of UX and usability or user design. We had human computer interface. So he was clearly a real pioneer. But do you follow your employees home?

[00:06:32.350] – Priya Thummalapalli

So here’s the thing. My customers are employees, right? And so where are the employees today? A lot of the employees are at the workforce. And so think about it this way. Here’s an example. When we started to go into the hybrid mode and we started to invite employees to come twice a week into the office, now we have to create technology that supports hybrid way of working, which means that you are trying to create cross collaboration between people who are home working from home and who are at workplace. So you actually go into these meeting rooms and you start to observe the behavior of like, are people even up to the is the technology complicated for them to really get to a meeting quickly? Because it’s again, you’re back to back into meetings. Probably have 30 seconds now to get into zoom, open up the monitor, share your screen and so how fast can employees to wear the cognitive load here? So you’re starting to observe behaviors and so the advantage for us is you’re really able to get into people’s workspaces as they’re doing the work and engaging with your product.

[00:07:41.520] – Paul Miller

Yeah and do you have a particular example? It can be quite small, maybe not of something that you’ve changed in terms of employee experience that’s come out of this observation.

[00:07:55.270] – Priya Thummalapalli

Yeah, one of what we call as the guided experiences. We started to build something where we wanted to observe new hires when they come into the campus and they’re setting up. And so some of the research we did was around really trying to understand what are people doing with all the information. They are inundated with day one information and it’s coming across different channels. So what are they really doing with this information? And we started to observe that they’re either taking notes in a Microsoft product like OneNote or in a Google Drive, or they’re printing it and they’re sequencing the work on their own to say this is a lot of time taking process. It is again cognitive. Right. You’re taking the information now, you’re trying to sequence this, you’re piecing the puzzle together. Now you’re not sure the way you’re sequencing it is going to give you the most impact and so you’re still doing it. And we actually had observations where employees were creating this booklet of information throughout and we’re like that booklet is what we need to be creating as a digital product. And take them step by step. Don’t overload on day one.

[00:09:14.320] – Priya Thummalapalli

What is the least can we give them for day one to complete so they can be set up for their new role.

[00:09:22.530] – Paul Miller

I Know and I had the pleasure with some colleagues of being at the Intuit campus recently in Mountain View. Wonderful experience. I really was able to soak up the culture. And I saw that you’re opening up a new building in your headquarters. What are the hopes and ambitions of that new building? Because I know it’s a post pandemic building, maybe it started beforehand, but it’s being thought of in that environment. Just really interested to see what you’re hoping to get, what’s going to be new and different there.

[00:09:55.550] – Priya Thummalapalli

Yeah, I’m excited for that building too. I haven’t seen it yet, it hasn’t been open yet, but I can definitely say it’s a new state of the art building. We’ve realized sort of our campus vision and roadmap here. What it does is it actually embraces the learnings around hybrid work, collaboration and flexibility. So those are the learnings that we had again through follow me homes and through some of the research work we’ve been doing and the learnings. Right. And so this new building is going to enable us to bring teams who have been in different spaces. So it’s actually bringing teams together. It’s also following the neighborhood concept. That’s something I shared earlier conversation too. The idea that teams sit together. It’s based on concept, it’s a large floor plan and it’s also designed around developing more agility and creativity and collaboration among teams. And it’s also going to invite people to come into the workforce even more come into the buildings. It’s designed for you to work the way you collaborate today.

[00:11:05.830] – Paul Miller

Yeah, sorry. It strikes me that if I think of some of these newly fashioned spaces it’s like why go to work? Why physically go to work? I think kind of post pre pandemic, it was hard to kind of come up with a great story. You commute, you get there, you sit at a desk, maybe you but these new spaces are really offering something that’s really quite unique. I look at them and feel like that would be fun to be there. It’s hard to kind of put them in a box. So just jumping topic, you’ve got a talent hub in New York City and obviously talent is key to an organization like Intuit. Tell me about the talent hub in New York.

[00:11:53.890] – Priya Thummalapalli

Yeah, so we did open the New York hub and essentially if you look at it, New York is what, the top two in North America when it comes to tech talent. And one of the things is we have access to really incredible diverse tech talent over there. There’s also a lot of upcoming startup companies, tech startup companies. And I would say there’s also a very vibrant VC culture over there like venture capitalist funding culture. And so if you look at the whole ecosystem, we are really trying to look at the best talent to bring the best talent. So we can even raise the bar on how we deliver to our customers. We have around 200 full time employees today in the New York hub. And looking at the talent, I think it just validates our decision and so it’s really helping us to start building solutions and technologies where we can take it to the next level.

[00:12:55.430] – Paul Miller

No, that’s great and I think that’s really an exciting thing. And one of the things I saw here was that there’s a retailer called Curry’s. They’re a high street retailer. They closed down their offices in London and what they did was they took a floor in WeWork but they branded it all in Curry’s and in a way kind of injected a new kind of atmosphere into coming together. But also something a little bit, I’ll say, kind of funkier for the employees to come to a co-working space where there are other people doing things. So just picking up on this word hub, you’ve got a product experience called My Hub, exploring ideas like how to use reminders that influence employee behaviors to take the right action. Could you just tell me a little bit about that? And is that in your area of sort of remit?

[00:13:50.410] – Priya Thummalapalli

Yes, that’s something we just launched and I’ll take you back a little bit in time because you’ve been a thought leader in digital workplace and intranets and employee experiences since a long time. And one of the things we’ve always seen in our circle is how are we really solving the problem of cognitive load when it comes to information that we send out to employees. And so companies have time and again they’ve been launching intranets and employee experience platforms essentially to try and see how do we nail information overload. We did the same and we started with again, we used our customer driven innovation methodologies, which is trying to understand through research and going a little deeper to try to observe what employees are doing today in order to do tasks. And we also looked at a lot of data. We look at both quantitative data, we look at contact center calls like HR calls that come in, where we are looking at what are the areas employees are really asking for help today and why are they reaching out for human support. So that means there are some barriers we really need to get that out of their way.

[00:15:11.330] – Priya Thummalapalli

The second part was we started to do deep dives into we would take the data, that would be a signal for us. We go and reach out to employees depending on the circumstances. And we would start to do a lot of research. When we started to put the research together, there were three things that were pretty apparent today because we’re looking at so many different channels now. Enable content. If you can see, it used to be emails, then it became the intranet. Now we have collaborative tools like you have Teams and Slack. So you’re getting the same information in so many different ways. And then you have peers who are giving you information as well. And they’re breaking it, probably they are solving it for you. They are breaking it down for you. And so we started to say, how do we harness all of this? For example, if you look at Slack, people are solving problems for each other. How do you harness that information and put that in front of the employee where somebody has already solved that for you? So we were looking at the entire ecosystem and we said there are three main things.

[00:16:19.260] – Priya Thummalapalli

One is the content’s too generic. You’re sending the same generic content over and over again. And then we looked at it and we said, how can we provide content that’s really meaningful but has an outcome at the end of it, right? And the third one we started to look at is unifying the content in a place so that people are not looking at five different channels because of which they’re actually losing out on the information. They’re missing out on important things that could be very beneficial for them. It could be learning, it could be some benefits information, something regarding their financial wellness and they’ve lost it because they’ve missed the deadline. They’ve lost the opportunity. And we hear that over and over again. So we set out on a path where we said, let’s start piloting this. And we took a hypothesis that if we are able to unify content, we are able to personalize content, but also deliver a slightly richer and a more intelligent experience, where we can predict things, where we can use nudges, then we can do two things. One is we have access that access to information. So employees have access to really important information that applies to them individually.

[00:17:39.170] – Priya Thummalapalli

And the second part, which is where we are learning right now, is a lot of where can we as a company, if we want to push behaviors, we want to influence employees to take action that is going to help them to take better actions with positive outcomes, then we have to go into the world of nudges. And so here one of the things we started to discover, is so nudges just to explain that they’re really subtle interventions and it helps you make guide choices without restricting sort of your autonomy. And so typically in the world of when you have kids, you want them to eat healthy, they come back from school, they’re really hungry. If you keep fruits at the eye level and take away the bag of potato chips, they’re going to reach out for the fruits. You’re hoping you’re going to reach out for fruits. But those are nudges. They are guideposts towards healthy behaviors. And so when you put that in the context of a company, we start to see, I mean, manager effectiveness is so important because managers really literally make or break the experience in the company. And so you want to create better leaders, more effective managers.

[00:18:54.650] – Priya Thummalapalli

On the other hand, you also want people to take time off. You want to prevent burnout. So how can you start predicting these guideposts that are going to help people make important decisions? And the keyword here is also without imposing or undermining the user autonomy. So it’s a choice, it’s within a choice architecture. They’re making these decisions.

[00:19:19.090] – Paul Miller

Sorry, carry on.

[00:19:20.630] – Priya Thummalapalli

No, you had a question.

[00:19:21.990] – Paul Miller

Yeah, I suppose what was just occurring to me was that and I’ve been thinking about the quote from your CEO, your current CEO, about AI, which was he said, electricity, the internet, AI. This is big, this is big. Like electricity was big. This is big. Like the Internet is big. This is big. So I’m wondering about the role of AI. And then I thought, could the system, the hub or whatever, be noticing how somebody’s working and see when they’re getting to a point where their stress levels, maybe the tonality of their interactions, maybe they’re checking on things too late at night, too early in the morning. And it says you get weekly digests of how you’re doing. But something that almost kind of, sort of gently suggests that maybe it’s time for you to take a day off. Maybe you should not to kind of beat you up for it. But wouldn’t it be good if the AI was subtly kind of, I don’t want to say watching, but a little bit watching what we’re doing?

[00:20:34.090] – Priya Thummalapalli

Yeah, I would take it a step further and say AI is a technology, right? You can use data, just data to help influence employees. I’ll give you an example. Here one of the nudges and geared towards helping employees take time off or time to rejuvenate and not go through burnout is. And you can see in a tech world like your back-to-back, one of the things we actually created was this interface where we’ve been hearing from employees and managers to say, hey, I just need to know how much time off I have. And so that became like an insight that we share to all employees. They don’t have to click into workday or some other HCM tool or an HR tool to go see how much time off they have. By putting it in front of them, they’re able to, on an everyday basis, when they open up the product, they’re able to see this, right? We took a step further and we said, let’s put a nudge to these employees. So if you’re a manager and you have someone in your team who’s not been taken time off at all, and it’s been six to eight months already, this person taken a day off, that’s an indicator for us.

[00:21:49.990] – Priya Thummalapalli

And so if you’re able to nudge the manager to say, hey, it seems like X hasn’t taken time off for the last nine months, now the manager has data, right? And that data is what influence you to take action. And when you’re having that conversation with your employee, the employee knows the manager cares for them. I mean, there’s a lot of things that can happen in that interaction are so important. I mean, if you look at it from a framework for user experience, and if you really see how this has the potential to change behaviors, I mean, there’s a famous framework called the Fogg’s model. And what it says is in order to change behaviors, there are three elements. There’s motivation, there’s ability, and there’s prompt. So in this context, the motivation is really we have a motivation in order for us to have positive health outcomes. It could apply to time away. It could apply to somebody not taking preventative health care. You have benefits that help you to take an annual health care, preventative health care. If you’re not enabling the person to go and take it, there are potential consequences for not doing that.

[00:23:04.730] – Priya Thummalapalli

Motivation and then ability is how easy can you really once you’re motivated, how easily can you execute on it? And so we’re doing this through reminders and nudges, where it’s action oriented and you’re removing the barriers to get the job done. And then lastly, prompts are where they’re guideposts, where we’re saying hey, we have a new nudge for you, we have a new reminder for you. It’s going to be important. If you do this, you get X. And so if you start to see like over time you have the potential to change behaviors here and that is an area we are just learning a lot.

[00:23:39.750] – Paul Miller

Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it and just thinking about my time on your campus. As I say, you can feel the culture of the organization. We saw people doing a food packaging for a charity that they were working on. There was just a lot of interesting, almost like not necessarily work activity. And what was your feeling when you arrived in the Intuit campus? So you move from the east coast to the west coast. You arrive into Mountain View, maybe the sun’s shining, you come out into the campus as you had your first week there. What were the adjectives you used to describe it and how did it feel?

[00:24:30.950] – Priya Thummalapalli

Very similar to how you felt when you came here two weeks back when you were sharing with me. I would say there’s intention in building collaboration here and I quickly learned one thing, which was the bar is very high for leadership here. In the sense that when you deliver on experiences, when you deliver on products, when you deliver on anything here, the bar is pretty high. And so what does it really tell you is that you can’t do it alone. You got to walk with the team and team of experts with you. It’s cross collaborative. It’s not just your own team. There’s a lot of cross collaboration. And so in order for you to meet the bar, you have to ask for help. You’ve got to be collaborative by nature. And so when I started to observe those behaviors and it really helped me, it’s a humbling experience, honestly, because start realizing that you’ve got to ask for help to move along. You’re raising the bar for the team and then you’re unblocking for them in areas which is really impeding their speed to get things done. So there’s a lot of it’s a very different culture and you can also physically the environment has been built to really enable collaboration.

[00:25:51.690] – Priya Thummalapalli

So the way the cafeteria is built, if you can see there are no tall buildings here and what you start to see is there’s nature everywhere. So you see even right now when I look outside the window, most of the meetings are a walk and talk. There’s a trail, you can take the trail, but a lot of these conversations happen here. A lot of serendipity happens in a place like this. So it’s really inculcating this environment fosters a lot of collaborative.

[00:26:23.410] – Paul Miller

Yeah, fantastic. And I know Scott, the co-founder comes in, have you met him?

[00:26:32.270] – Priya Thummalapalli

I’ve seen him in a lot of like he’s very unassuming. He’ll sit right next to us in a lot of the company town halls. He’s amazing. I mean, if you got to hear him in some of the podcasts and video interviews and he’ll break things down for you in a very simple way.

[00:26:53.850] – Paul Miller

Okay. There seems to be quite a lot of humility Intuit. Is he quite a humble person?

[00:27:00.650] – Priya Thummalapalli

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

[00:27:02.860] – Paul Miller

That’s interesting because I think that kind of culture resonates. Priya, it’s been wonderful to chat to you. I think you’ve found your work home in Intuit and it’s fascinating to see what you develop and what happens next there. Thanks so much.

[00:27:24.660] – Priya Thummalapalli

Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Love being here.

[00:27:33.090] – Paul Miller

And now for the studio guests who came into the studio the next day to reflect on my conversation with Priya. Sharon O’Dea is the founder of Digital Workplace Experience Study DWXS and a co-founder at Lithos Partners. Prior to that, she was Head of Digital Communications at Standard Chartered Bank. And Dan McMillan is the Chief Financial Officer at DWG. Why a CFO on the pod? Because Dan is a key non-financial voice on DWG as a living system. Great. So Priya talked about customer obsession at Intuit and the whole Follow Me Home concept from their co-founder Scott Cook, who sounds amazing. What, Sharon, do you think of that approach when it’s applied to the world of work?

[00:28:32.450] – Sharon O’Dea

I was really excited to hear this because it’s something we don’t do enough in the digital workplace space is really to get a sense of people’s real needs, but also their context. So doing that level of user research, we often do things like we’ll dig into analytics, but they can only tell you so much, can’t they? They can only tell you how people use the tools that you’ve given them and they don’t tell a full picture there. Actually, it’s only when you go and see people in the context of their work, you can understand how those tools use and also, really importantly, all the ways they don’t use them. So we’ve all been to people’s workplaces and you see post-it notes all over the place of things. Those are things people can’t find. They’re unmet user needs or things that are printed off and left on tables. I never can find that policy. I’ll print it, keep it there. So you never know if someone’s using an out of state version. And when I go and work with organizations, I love to get out there and do user research with people who are out on the road or in a call center because you can really get a sense of the time pressure they’re under, the context in which they’re working, how they go and look for things.

[00:29:29.160] – Sharon O’Dea

And it’s invaluable in how we design our digital workplace. We really don’t do enough of it as an industry. So it’s really great to hear her say that applying that kind of customer centricity to the digital workplace is something we ought to do a lot more.

[00:29:42.750] – Paul Miller

Yeah, I think that’s so true. And we also, Dan, talked about the new campus headquarter building, which I was fortunate to be able to see before it’s opened, not inside, but just from the outside. And it was designed by, I think, a very progressive company, which Intuit is for, I guess, this period of post Pandemic working collaboration, agility, team based working. Dan, what do you think of this idea of team based working neighborhoods? And is this the post Pandemic formula?

[00:30:20.070] – Dan McMillan

I think it’s actually really important and I think the sort of pandemic has obviously speeded these sort of transitions into this shared workspace up. I know tech companies, pre Pandemic were already looking at these ideas of more creating spaces that thought provoking, creative areas where people can come and share. But I think post Pandemic, it’s really important to get people back together in some form at some point in time. And I know personally, from going to shared workspaces, sort of not frequently, but enough that that contact is really important for development and relationship building. And this Priya’s description of what this space is going to be like at Intuit is really exciting. And I think anything you can do as a business to encourage your employees to want to spend more time together is really important.

[00:31:18.330] – Paul Miller

And Sharon, have you seen this happening amongst your clients, this idea of neighborhoods and really putting more of a focus on the team located physically?

[00:31:30.410] – Sharon O’Dea

Absolutely. I mean, I think, like you, we work with lots of kind of larger, more complex organization, and they might have been distributed well before the pandemic, just geographically across different parts of the world, but it’s actually creating places that people want to go to because you can’t force people to go in. All your best people would, frankly, just get better jobs elsewhere in more flexible workplaces. It’s about creating places people want to go to and encourage that kind of collaboration so that it is valuable for people. There’s no point making people schlep into the office just to sit on the phone and do more Teams calls. Actually, it’s about how do we create those spaces of get together? And I mean, I’ve seen it among my clients, but I’ve also seen it there’s some really headline ones in the news. If you think about Bloomberg’s new HQ is really designed around making it a place people want to visit and ultimately they want to leave. But also the recently announced HSBC move. So they’re moving in, what? 2024. 2025. From their very corporate HQ in Canary Wharf to a much smaller one in central London, which will have that kind of neighborhood concept, but also bringing things like sustainability to the party to make it much more of a place that people want to visit and enables that kind of group working in a way that so there isn’t just a series of Zoom calls in a different place.

[00:32:38.050] – Paul Miller

Yeah.

[00:32:38.520] – Paul Miller

No, I think. It’s a great thing to see. And I love what Priya talked about with data to nudge behaviour. I mean, she mentioned quite simple things like employees being reminded easily about the amount of time they’ve got off. And I really like the fact that managers are reminded about people who report to them and how much time they’ve taken or not taken off. I mean, Sharon, what’s your take on this idea of nudge behaviour as a way of influencing kind of better ways of working or is it a little bit, I don’t know, a little bit manipulative.

[00:33:16.830] – Sharon O’Dea

Nudge theory is all well and good in practice, but it’s absolutely a fine line between monitoring and surveillance. Actually. We have a huge amount of data in employees, as I understand it. Often your workplace knows you have a serious illness before you do because they can see drops in productivity. And that’s actually a conversation we need to have. We need to be much more open about what’s being collected on each of us as individuals and how we might be able to use it as managers. Microsoft had that conversation recently about to what extent do we give managers at an individual level data about their teams. So while it can be useful, we need to bear in mind that there’s a balance there to be had around privacy. And we need to have a mature conversation as organizations about what we have, what we share and how we use it in that a lot of people. We don’t have high levels of data literacy, so we have huge amounts of data on people. HR data on the way that we use our tools. We don’t necessarily have the ability to use it in mature ways. And that’s something that needs to change, I think, in terms of giving people, but also understanding how it might be misused and thinking about some of the ethical questions that raises.

[00:34:19.970] – Dan McMillan

Which is why sorry. I think it’s also key to make employees aware of what data and what data is being used for. I think your comments about the sort of the secrecy or the spying on employees using that data is quite important because it can be very off putting. There seems to be a lot of data there and often the information or the matrix and outcomes of that data are not available yet there’s huge amounts of data to be used.

[00:34:50.750] – Sharon O’Dea

Yeah, I mean, as ever in our minds, we’ve got the focus on those of us who are maybe more senior in more knowledge based work, but actually it’s further down the chain. It’s people who have less agency over their work, who are monitored in much more restrictive ways. And I do think actually we need to have a clear conversation people and be open about what is being collected on them and how we use it.

[00:35:14.260] – Paul Miller

Yeah, and I think this is where kind of policy principles, kind of ethical standards for organizations, they’re explicit about. I think the problem, if you were going to tell employees how much data they’ve got, it would be a very long and increasingly long list and quite scary. But if actually you’ve got some ethical principles, and I think Intuit is a company that does, that’s a good way to approach it. I mean, one of the things Dan that Priya talked about was she said, I love this, that the bar is set very high for leadership, which I think means to get into a leadership role, you really need to be good at certain things. And this idea that you can’t achieve alone, I think that’s such a great approach. I mean, what’s your response to that approach to leadership?

[00:36:08.070] – Dan McMillan

I think it’s a very positive sort of way of looking at it. I think it can be quite humbling to sort of appreciate that you can’t do and drive things forward on your own and you’re reliant on the teams around you, whether that’s sideways, upwards, downwards, wherever the team may be. And it’s this collaborative approach to goals and achieving. I think to be a good leader, you need to have a good team working with you. Not necessarily for you or against you, but as a collaborative approach. And I think listening to Priya and Intuit, they’re very forward thinking on that. And it sounds like Scott, the founder, sounds quite humble. If I had to say. The only thing I would say is the follow me home obviously has some negative connotations that employees are being spied on. But the concept is brilliant. Going back to your customers to actually work out how they use your products and from that innovate, change, modify, improve is brilliant. And there’s no reason you can’t pull that through to your employee experience.

[00:37:17.950] – Paul Miller

Sharon, do you think leadership’s changing in this way, this more collaborative approach, this more humble approach, is that just sort of optimistic, hopeful thinking on my part.

[00:37:32.190] – Sharon O’Dea

As always, classic consultant answer? I think it depends. I think we’re seeing much more of it, but a recognition that I guess collaboration requires psychological safety, so that’s creating spaces where people feel it’s okay to ask for help, it’s okay to say, I don’t know everything, or I might need an extra pair of hands on this. And digital as well as physical environments are a way that we can signal that and do that more effectively. So it’s know, as Priya talked about, creating places that foster that collaboration, but in the digital space, we can do the same as well. It’s actually not just about creating physical spaces or digital spaces where we can work together, but creating that level of psychological safety. So modeling those behaviors when leaders ask to help themselves, it creates permission for others to do the same. So I’m starting to see a lot more of that, actually. It’s about being humble, being open to asking for help and signaling that it’s okay for others to do the same. And the digital workplace is one of the best ways that we can do that. It makes it very visible, making our work visible and therefore kind of encouraging that level of collaboration.

[00:38:33.100] – Sharon O’Dea

So a short answer then is I’m seeing a lot more of it, but not universally, and it really does depend often on the individual leader. So some people are just better at this than others.

[00:38:43.990] – Paul Miller

Yeah. So, Dan, any other final reflections on what struck you from the conversation or things that you picked up about Priya? From my exchange with her?

[00:38:55.760] – Dan McMillan

I think it’s very exciting listening to Priya and all the sort of developments that Intuit are putting in. I think one of my sort of not concerns but questions would be the measurement around the success of some of those things and this collaborative, or this new work space, as I’m going to call it. It’d be very interesting if they’re going to put in matrix to actually measure the success, whether that be productivity or creativity or sustainability or anything else that that workspace is supposed to draw on, and whether they’re sort of looking to review the progress of that space. Because it’s all well and good, having lots of data and lots of new innovation, but if you’re not going to, in effect, benchmark it or use matrix to actually compare that to your existing models, it’s very difficult to sort of put a level of success onto it, I think.

[00:39:49.390] – Paul Miller

And Sharon, any final comments based on the interview or just things you picked up?

[00:39:56.990] – Sharon O’Dea

So I think just from the overall picture of it, it was really encouraging to hear an organization talking about the employee experience in the round. So not just about physical space or digital space, but actually the entire experience and how all these things tie together. So towards the end of the interview, she was talking about how they’re rationalizing their content. So it’s easier for people to get using the data they have to make things more relevant to people, which is about respecting people’s time, but also recognizing what’s important and useful for them and actually how we wrap those layers together between the digital and physical spaces. So people feel that they’re getting what they need, they have the tools they need to do their job, and enabling people to get on with the things they’d rather be doing. So I hope we see a lot more of that. It was really encouraging to hear.

[00:40:39.640] – Paul Miller

Yeah, I think she’s a real pioneer. There’s something about Priya which I can’t quite put my finger on. I sort of knew when she was at Prudential Financial on the east coast of the US. And now she’s on the west coast. She’s got a kind of combination of sort of strategy and depth and practicality. There’s something I just really enjoy about the way she approaches things. Dan, Sharon, thank you so much for your comments and great to have you in the studio as our pundits for today.

[00:41:09.190] – Sharon O’Dea

Thank you.

[00:41:15.290] – Paul Miller

Here are my three seeds to plant in your organization based on the conversation with Priya and our guest today. Seed number one leadership in work today demands high standards, and the best leaders know you cannot achieve alone. Isn’t that a fantastic way of thinking about leadership? It’s not a solo activity, it’s a collaborative activity. You’re only as good as the people you work with. Seed number two new hybrid workplaces are based on teams working together in neighborhoods. Again, it’s not about solo working, collaboration, physically coming together, being colocated and forming communities and neighborhoods. And seed number three, observe what people actually do, not what they say. Then you can design experiences that help people work at an optimum level. You can call it UX user design. The important thing is to watch what people actually do and solve the things that are causing them problems. Do subscribe and like right here so you get alerted to each new episode. And I look forward to seeing you next time.