RHR 115: Employee Experience Science with Kevin Campbell

Kevin Campbell: 0:00

Sometimes taking that conversation based approach and actually going back to people and talking about it and working on it together and not creating some heavy lift new processor program all the time. Sometimes that's required. Sometimes doing a whole structural shift or transformation is important and necessary. But that could take six months, a year, multiple years, but somebody on the frontline can make a few shifts and make a big impact in a matter of minutes matter of days.

Kyle Roed: 0:27

This is the rebel HR Podcast, the podcast where we talk to HR innovators about all things people leadership. If you're looking for places to find about new ways to think about the world of work, this is the podcast for you. Please subscribe from your favorite podcast listening platform today. And leave us a review revelon HR rebels Hello, rebel HR listeners, welcome back really excited for the conversation this week, we've got a great guest with us today. Kevin Campbell, is an employee experience scientist at Qualtrics. And also founder of lifted leadership LLC, where he coaches fortune 500 executives on how to acquire, develop and retain their most valuable asset, their people. Welcome to the show, Kevin.

Kevin Campbell: 1:14

Good to be here, Kyle.

Kyle Roed: 1:15

Well, I am really excited that that we're talking today, you know, before we hit record, I was just getting really excited to totally nerd out on people analytics. And and I think I have a feeling that there's going to be some really valuable insight for our listeners here today as we start to talk about, you know, kind of the data and that and how to tie that into some of the things that we do in human resources. So before we get into that, I want to understand a little bit more about your background and what got you into the people analytics and executive coaching realm?

Kevin Campbell: 1:56

Well, I think there's there's professional and personal reasons. Personally, my mom, when I was just about 10 years old, had a nervous breakdown from from work stress. And at one point, she crawled out of her job on her hands and knees. She was great at what she did. But she just got burnt out. And it really left a mark on me and made me realize that I wanted to do something to improve the world of work for the better. And early in my career, I believe that was going to do that through recruiting, I was going to I was going to recruit the best talent from the worst places and get them the best jobs at the best places. And ultimately, that led me to being a headhunter for Google. So I was recruiting software engineers from all around the world, and bringing them to Mountain View. And despite working at the best place to work, according to all the workplace lists, I still saw a high degree of variance in terms of how engaged people were in their job. And that's what made me interested in understanding what actually makes people happy at work. And as a recruiter, and I'm sure your listeners who work in recruiting can understand that there were times where I would fall in love with a candidate. And the hiring committee at Google would agree that they were a great candidate. So I wanted to figure out a data driven way of being able to quantify someone's potential to be good in a role. And that's what made me decide to go back to school and study organizational psychology worked with the Gallup organization worked with with Gallup. And the rest is history. I've been a people, scientist and employee experience scientist using people analytics, and the school of hard knocks and organizational psychology to help identify and close employee experience gaps and improve business outcomes as a result of it.

Kyle Roed: 3:56

It's really, you know, it's an interesting background. And I thought one of the things that was really interesting about about your journey is that you, you were at the employer of choice, right, you know, the, the, the company that's winning all the awards that that all of us in HR want to win or think we should win, and you still saw some gaps. And so, as you were, you know, kind of working through your education and working in some of these really cool sounding jobs. Did you find that there were common themes as it relates to those gaps amongst all employers, or what was it very employer specific? Any insight there?

Kevin Campbell: 4:39

It's a great question. So there's going to be a number of different factors that are going to be common across employers. But the the level of importance and the variance within the employer is going to be different from company to company. So one of the ways I like to think about it is that We all have different reasons for showing up to work every day. Some of us show up to work, because it's a way to provide for our families. Others do it because we feel like it fulfills some sort of mission or purpose in the world, others its sense of accomplishment, or just money. And those are all the common reasons why. And it's probably multi causal for all of us, right? It's not just one thing. But there are pieces of that pie that are a little bit bigger for each of us. And the same thing is true for your workforce. And the reason that's important is because if you get that wrong, you could be creating an employee value proposition or trying to craft a workplace. That's different than what your people or what the key talent segments within your employee population actually want.

Kyle Roed: 5:50

Mm hmm. Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's really interesting. That's an interesting perspective. You know, I definitely think about some of the work that I've done, you know, in, you know, personality assessments and trying to figure out, okay, what is somebody's kind of motivations? And what are their tendencies? And what are the things they actually want, and trying to, you know, kind of figure out that the brain science of of job fit, you know, it sounds, it sounds very similar to that, but it also kind of struck me that it also kind of reminded me of, you know, the work that you do in marketing, you know, and, you know, how do you kind of find your target, you know, your target market, your target audience? And, and so, so what, what common themes have you seen, where there's an overlap between what we look at related to, you know, kind of the customer experience, as well as the, the employee experience?

Kevin Campbell: 6:45

Well, so, marketing is a great point. Because, so much of our experience, when we talk about those things that customer experience, employee experience, or experiences are not an objective assessment of what actually happens, our experience is our perception, and the gap, either negative or positive gap between what was expected. And what happened. Right. So, so much of how you market yourself, as an organization, whether it's to your customers or to your employees is going to set a certain expectation. And if you're setting that bar high, and you fail to meet that expectation, then you're going to have a subpar experience. Let me give you an example. I'll try and sell you a job. The onboarding experience for this job is that we're going to put you through one of the most grueling experiences of your life, we're going to make you wish you would died, we're going to tear you down and build you back up in our image, you're probably not going to make it through the onboarding experience, because most people fail. And if you do happen to be one of the few that makes it through your reward is going to be being shot at by people that hate you and everything you stand for. I've just described the special forces for every branch of the military of every of every country in the world, right? But the best and the brightest line up to enroll in Special Forces, divisions, right? Because they want that challenge. And it's not about building for the masses, or building for a persona that captures everything to everyone. But building according to the persona that makes sense for you, your workforce, your business and the talent strategy that that you want to implement.

Kyle Roed: 9:31

That's really interesting. You know, and I've always said that the key to happiness is low expectations All kidding aside, you know, it is it is really interesting. And I, I remember, you know, vividly early in my career, I used to work for an organization that, you know, I won't name here, but it was all about trying to sell the dream, right, you know, like, Hey, you got a candidate, you just got to sell the dream, and they're gonna love it. And, and what, what we would find is we would sell the dream and then somebody would come in, and they'd be like, This isn't a dream, this is a nightmare, right? What? Why did you tell me that I was gonna have you know, all of these wonderful perks and that this was going to be a wonderful learning experience. Instead, I'm like doing, you know, menial labor and really frustrating getting yelled at by customers on a regular basis, like, and, you know, it was it was pretty eye opening. And, actually, I saw I started giving them the realistic job preview. And what I found is, you know, the selection was much better because people who were like, oh, yeah, I can handle that kind of thing. You know, I've done that before. You know, I'm from the school of hard knocks, they would come in and they'd be much more success. For, because they just knew Oh, this is just part of the gig. Right. But, yeah, it didn't. It didn't line up with the marketing strategy, though, that our recruiting team had. And so there was, there was like this in congruence with what I was doing and what they wanted us to do. And then, you know, that was kind of a point of conflict early in my career that, you know, I feel like you've vindicated me a little bit, Kevin, that makes me feel a little bit better about that experience. But it's true. I mean, I, I think it's absolutely true. So. So thank you for that.

Kevin Campbell: 11:15

Yeah, no, it's, I mean, I just want to, you know, chime in just for a second on that. I mean, it's like, that's where the, that's where the data can be so helpful, right? To healthcare organizations. One was a hospital system, the key talent profile, there was nurses, another was a medical device company, the key talent profile, there was salespeople. The assumption was salespeople were driven by money. And nurses were driven by mission and purpose. But and there's truth to that. But the thing was, is that the medical device sales reps, when we actually looked at what was motivating to them using data, what we what was determined was, they could make great money anywhere, the thing that actually made the difference to them was mission and purpose. For the nurses, it was the exact opposite, they're gonna find mission and purpose no matter where they go, because the nature of their work, the key differentiator for them was actually money. So So sometimes it's it's taking the, you know, the filter off, removing the stereotypes and thinking about okay, what is what does the data actually tell us? Especially the counterintuitive piece, right? The the part that's like, oh, wait, I didn't think that was actually going to have an impact. You know, on the on the customer experience side, a great example of that, is that customers that have problems, and then have that problem resolved, and being more loyal customers that, then customers that never had a problem to begin with. And I haven't tested this, but my guess is that the same thing is true on the employee experience side. It's not about having a perfect experience, but it's about having, it's that when things inevitably go wrong, how do people show up to make sure that you get back on track?

Kyle Roed: 12:58

Yeah, that's really interesting, you know, all of my data, there would, of course, be anecdotal and, you know, kind of situational. I would say, you know, in my experience, I think you're, I think you're onto something there as it relates to, you know, the, how you react to a poor situation, or, or an employee who's frustrated with the decision that that you or another leader made. It's all about how you react to that feedback. It depends on the situation, you know, if I feel like if somebody feels like they've been wronged, so much, it's almost, it's almost irreparable damage. But if it's not drastic, and you admit that you were wrong, and then you make a change, and they can actually see the changes visible. I have seen people like the commitment level goes up, they're like it and I will have like, repeat customers, so to speak like that, they'll come back because they know, hey, if I got a problem, you know, Kyle's gonna listen, he's gonna do his best to help. And, you know, you do kind of, it's almost like a trust building exercise with employees has been my experience with some of

Kevin Campbell: 14:10

those. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I love what you said about never repeat customers, because I think that's a newer trend to right of like, thinking about HR, IT legal, your customer base for those departments for those functions, is the employee population, right? So the more you can think through that customer serving lens, the better off the organization's gonna ultimately be, right? My role is usually as an SME, and a consultant within the organizations that I work for as an advisory capacity. And I get pulled into sales conversations a lot, even though I'm not the salesperson. But I see the salespeople as my internal customer, right, the degree to which I can help them do their job better, the better off the organization is going to be overall. And the more that we, if you're not customer facing your customer, is the customer facing an employee. Right. And I was interesting, I was having a conversation with a customer success. VP, at one point, he said, Oh, yeah, that's true. But the difference is, is that employees don't necessarily have a choice of what it or HR or legal department to use, right. So you're wrong. People have a big choice, right? There's a lot of

Kyle Roed: 15:35

there's a lot of options right now. Yeah, the question is, is it bad enough to make them want to quit? And in some cases, maybe, I don't know. I mean, I, you know, shout out to my, my current HR team, or HR, well, HR and IT team, but, you know, I've worked in organizations where it is, let's just say, one of the bottlenecks. And for a myriad of reasons, it's not that they're bad, maybe they're under resourced, etcetera. But working in an organization where the IT team is responsive, and has that customer service mentality, we move so much faster, as it relates to technology adoption, and cybersecurity, you know, if I have an HR tool that I want to check out, or or, or a workflow that I want to put in, you know, I know that I can pick up the phone and get something in like, a couple days versus weeks. And, you know, it's, it's like, for me, that's fun, right? Like, I enjoy that aspect. I do think there's something to that kind of that customer service mindset, even if you're an internal, you know, resource or what would be considered administrative in nature. So yeah, we're definitely on the same page there. So

Kevin Campbell: 16:54

yeah, and all those little things add up over time to create the employee experience. Right? You know, it's not just, it's not just the manager, it's not just your pay. It's not just any of all the things that people want to make the be all and end all of employee experience. It's, it's, it's either death by 1000, paper cuts, or it's all the little things going right, that create a hole that's greater than the sum of its parts, and tapping in and tying in and measuring all of those little things in a way that doesn't feel cumbersome on employees, and making it action oriented. So that it's not just a bunch of dashboards and charts, but it's information that people can use to improve the employee experience overall.

Kyle Roed: 17:43

Absolutely. Yes, I want to dig into that a little bit. Because I think like, so, you know, listeners know, you know, I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to stats, and like psychology and like people analytics. But one of the challenges and I struggle with this a lot is there's so much data available out there, especially with all the you know, the HR is and, you know, you've got these applicant tracking systems, you can, you could build dashboard after dashboard for, you know, for an entire week, and then look at it and go, Okay, now, what do I do with this? Like, this is really interesting. And I like these, these pie charts. But, you know, as you think about people analytics, but then actually converting that into action items, what are some of the things that you recommend we think about, as HR practitioners, you know, kind of, essentially, you know, where, where should we start? And what are the big things that we need to really be thinking about as it relates to the people analytics available to us.

Kevin Campbell: 18:45

So I like to use an acronym. People Analytics is as easy as ABC 123. So I'll start with the 123. Pick one thing to act on, do two things about it. And communicate it out three times. There are so many employee feedback systems, there are so many passive listening systems, you can collect data on people's behaviors through the applicant tracking system, the HR is there's more active feedback, mechanisms like surveys, and a lot of times people are acting on that data, but they don't close the loop on what they've done. They might take 1000 actions and a number of different areas, and never communicate that back to employees better to do less, and talk about it more. The other piece is you want to have it be action oriented, which is the a business relevant and conversation based. So what do I mean by action oriented? I love that you mentioned dashboards as an example. Right? So sometimes what I'll do with clients is I'll build dashboards or a mock up of dashboards before we've ever collected any data and say, Who's going to own the actions that this dashboard suggests? Put that dashboard in front of someone and say, What would you do with this? Because now you're not asking someone to design something in a vacuum based upon what they think they need, but you're having them react to a real vision of what could possibly happen. You find out Now that a key demographic within your population doesn't decide decides that they're not going to stay for the next six months. What do you do with that? And oh, and by the way, you find out that it has to do with a sense of belonging within your organization, what do you do with that information? Right? So really begin with the end in mind around, what's the action that you ultimately are going to take, put as much effort into acting on the data, as you do collecting the data, maybe even more. So. I think it's also around communicating that, that you're not sharing this information or collecting this information just for the purpose of understanding, but that you're doing it for the purpose of improving things. So that's the action oriented piece. The next piece is business relevance, you know, what are your burning platforms? You know, we all know kind of, from the research and talking to folks like myself and yourself that employee engagement has a huge impact on business outcomes. But how can you make that palpable for people, you know, sometimes you don't necessarily need to run a study, or do some sort of linkage analysis, in order to show that that relationship exists, maybe you already know that relationship exists. But you want to go back to your frontline leader who's worried about, you know, store sales, or why people are calling out that day, or something that doesn't feel like people analytics, but you want them to know that this stuff is important. Maybe sometimes drying, that connection for them is going to make the bigger difference. Right? So worked with a retail organization, huge problems with turnover, they were so busy, that they didn't even have time to meet their new employees, oftentimes, they would just like shoot a text message, or shoot off an email to new employees when they would join because it'd be so busy taking care of all the work that was left behind by the people that quit, became this this cycle. And what we found through through doing some some employee journey Analytics was that if a manager on an employee's first day met with them, one on one, there was a five fold increase in their intent to stay six months later. So that's that's how you make something business oriented and actionable. Because let me tell you, a retail store leader doesn't necessarily care about your onboarding survey, or your belonging survey or your engagement survey. But if you tell them, you've made this one small difference in your actions, and it could mean that you're not busy, and you can actually go home to your kids at night, that's going to compel some sort of action because it feels relevant to their business their day to day work. And beginning with that, like sometimes when when I'm debriefing, employee engagement results, or any kind of people analytics results, with with leaders, I don't even start with talking about anything related to the workplace or the workforce explicitly. I'll talk about their business goals. First, let's say what's your strategy? What are the challenges that are facing your business? And how can this information that we're getting from our employee listening and people analytics? How can that inform this strategy and the decisions that we're making? I know I've said a lot. So I'll pause there before we move on to see,

Kyle Roed: 24:08

that's great. No, that's great. I'm sitting here, I'm kind of taking notes. I'm thinking about oh, man, I really screwed that up. The last time we did a survey, I should probably think about that. But I had flash, total flashbacks, I spent 13 years in retail. So I'm like, I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, Yup, yeah. I've been that manager. Like, I it that way, I didn't have text messaging capability, because, you know, we weren't supposed to have cell phones on the floor. But it was like, sometimes you see somebody that was literally like, Oh, here's a new person, high five, see you later, you know, I gotta I got a customer mad at, you know, customer service, and I gotta do, you know, stuff like that. And, but that would be, you know, a really powerful analytic, I think. It's also one of those things where, like, I think about it from an HR standpoint, and it's like, a lot of times we are the ones like tasked with here onboard this person, right? Like the guy new hire here, get them ready to go, you know, deal with them on the first day, you know, get them ready to go. And then, you know, so often it's like that baton handoff in a race where it's like, here, we you know, here you go and handed out and it's, it's like, if you fumble that, that handoff, and that manager is like, well, you're supposed to manage the training and onboarding, I'm too busy to handle it. If you do have analytics that you can point to and say, Hey, manager, you know, here's what we found. If you take the time to spend x amount of Minutes with this person, they're more likely to be here in six months, do you want that to happen? That person is gonna say, Yes, say, okay, here take five minutes with this person. Right? You know that that's a compelling argument and that, like you said, the busy managers going to understand how to use that data outside of the HR person that's probably pulling their hair out, because they, they can't stop hiring because people keep quitting. Right? So

Kevin Campbell: 26:05

I love what you're saying right now. And that that leads right into the CPS, right, which is the the conversation driven element, right, like so. So often. Somebody that owns onboarding with an HR as an example for like an onboarding survey, they get that data. And then they go into the lab, with, with the, with the COA, or, you know, their their favorite podcast, and lay out all the ways to fix this problem. And, you know, on their own, whereas was a much more effective. And the funny thing about it is that it's actually, in some sense, not always the best idea that comes out of the conversations. But it's the idea that gets implemented, right? So so I think, HR professionals, they they onboard, employees all day, every day, right? A single hiring manager might only onboard a handful in the same time period that somebody from HR would so so a lot of times HR is going to have a better idea of what needs to happen in that process, and the manager does. Still, I would encourage them not to do the action plan themselves, even though they're probably going to come up with a better idea. In many instances, having that conversation and making it conversation oriented. So that the ideas that are created are ones that the person who's tasked with implementing them feels like they're able to do it. Because if they don't feel like they're able to do it than the right, and if they feel like they're able to do it, then they're right, because they'll, they'll create whatever they're predicting, ever to have the mindset that they bring to the situation, right. And you don't sometimes they actually know better you work in manufacturing, a great example is, you know, I know of a company that was having a manufacturing problem, where boxes were going off of the line without product inside of it. And they hired this consulting firm to come in, and they were going to charge some untold amount of money to fix this problem. But they had the bright idea of going to employees first, and asking them for a solution. And the the folks on the on the manufacturing line had a $5 fan installed. And when a when a box would go by without product in it, the fan would blow it off the line.

Kyle Roed: 28:44

Genius, genius.

Kevin Campbell: 28:48

Right, that might not be a long term solution, necessarily. But it was it was certainly a quick one that cost them a lot less than what it would have been to hire consultants. So yeah, so So sometimes taking that conversation based approach, and actually going back to people and talking about it and working on it together, and not creating some heavy lift new process or program all the time. Sometimes that's required. Sometimes, you know, doing a whole structural shift or transformation is important and necessary. But that could take six months, a year, multiple years. But somebody on the frontline can make a few shifts, and make a big impact in a matter of minutes. matter of days.

Kyle Roed: 29:30

Absolutely. You know, I think I think it's a really powerful statement. And, you know, I, I, I can certainly reflect on many times in my career, and in I'm sure many of our listeners can as well where, you know, they feel like they've had the right answer. And they have tried to dictate what the right answer is perceived to be in their minds, and have been met with heavy resistance, because people just feel like they're being told what to do, or they don't have any agency, and in actually providing the solution. And even though it might be a wonderful idea, you know, it could be a 10 if the if the person you're talking to is like, you know, they believe it at the level of a two, you know, you're gonna get a pretty poor outcome versus someone who believes it strongly. Even if the even if the answer is an eight versus your 10. Right, you know, like some you have to give up a little bit of that ego sometimes. And, and and let it you know, let it happen. One of the one of the things that I also wanted to jump into a little bit is I wanted to understand a little bit about maybe some of the actual metrics that you're seeing success with. And one of the things you mentioned was, you know, kind of employee journey Analytics, which I just think it sounds really interesting. So before we get into that, like, what what do you define as employee journey analytics? Like what? What does that mean? What are you really looking at? As you're looking at those analytics?

Kevin Campbell: 31:01

You're looking at different points in the employee journey, and answering questions by connecting data at those different points that you wouldn't be able to answer without connecting the different points along that journey. So what are the early experiences in onboarding that predict how engaged somebody is going to be six months later? What training and development opportunities actually lead to a quicker time to ramp which developmental experiences for leaders lead to higher employee engagement scores, and what aspects of employee engagement lead to lower turnover in the real world for those those that regrettable population, and more importantly, of all the things that you can do to improve the experience of work for your employees, which of those things will not only improve the experience of work for your employees, but will also yield you positive customer positive results when it comes to customer loyalty, or customer satisfaction, or intent to return or refer their friends and family. So that's how you connect the dots between different points in the the the employee lifecycle, and a lot of times different people are owning different pieces of pieces of that puzzle, they don't talk to each other, in a coordinated a coordinated way, right, like so maybe the talent acquisition, sometimes talent acquisition will own onboarding, sometimes it won't, but let's say it does. So maybe the talent acquisition folks, they own the onboarding, feedback, they own the candidate experience feedback, but they don't own the manager training. And your manager training is the the missing piece of the puzzle for having better offer acceptance rates, and a less bias job interview. And they're the missing component of that onboarding piece. But if you're, if your data is not talking to each other, and your people aren't talking to each other, you're missing out on a huge insight that's just waiting to be discovered, and can be integrated in a really interesting way.

Kyle Roed: 33:25

I love that there's, there's so much there. I do think, you know, I think many out there kind of thinking yeah, that's really cool. I, there's so much there. But I'll use an example of something that and this was not a big, massive lift. But one of the one of the theories that we had in my organization is that speed of hire was was important that that was the theory, right? That that was just an assumption. Because we were calling candidates and they'd be like, already got a job. Right? So what we did is we just pulled the data from our applicant tracking system, and we kind of we just figured out, okay, what jobs are we hiring for more quickly? And then we looked at how long does it take for somebody to touch this application? Right. And we found that there was there was some level of correlation here that jobs that said open for a week before getting a phone call versus jobs that said open for a day and got a phone call, like the next day. They were just filled quite quickly. And and but that insight actually led us to to actually take some some action. So we invested in some some text messaging capabilities, went out and invested in our recruiting team to make sure that recruiters could actually make a warm connection. And then what we found is in our new hires, as we were bringing some new hires in, we got some consistent feedback that, hey, you know, I really, I really didn't know anything about your company. But you were just the first people to call me after I started putting my my application out there. And then by the time I was in orientation, the companies that I applied the other companies I applied for it, were just starting to call me back. And so it was like, well, it's too late. So I was like, okay, good. Now, we're the ones that are hiring them to quickly and then they're turning down other jobs. But it's like, that's just a great example of like, that was a theory that that we had the data kind of supported it. So we just made a really simple change. But we had to use those analytics to think through okay, is this is this correct? Is this theory correct? And then and then I've used that to coach managers to like, hey, when we give you these resumes, you can't wait for two weeks because that's still happening. So I can't claim that we're perfect at that. But what

Kevin Campbell: 35:42

I love about that, too, is that I think it's a great example of how you can act on a correlation. And know that okay, well, you know, there might be a rival hypothesis in terms of what's happening here, there might be another variable that you're not accounting for. But calling people back right away, after they've applied to a job, moving on a candidate quickly, is a good thing to do. Anyway,

Kyle Roed: 36:11

right. It's not regrettable to do that.

Kevin Campbell: 36:18

What the what the data will show us is it will reinforce, oftentimes good behavior that we already know we ought to be doing. But it's not, it's not just about that. It's also about giving people the gift of focus. Because of all the things that you could do all the things that you should be doing that, you know, you're not think about it from our health perspective, right? Like, if we want to lower our cholesterol, get better, get better sleep at night, have better blood pressure, what's that one behavior that I can do is it can be meditating is going to be cleaning up my diet, it's going to be exercising, if there was a way with health analytics, that we could know with as much specificity what to focus on as we do with people analytics, we will be a lot healthier, right? But that we have, so we really have a gift, when it comes to a lot of these things to say, hey, here are the three actions among all the different actions that you can take, they're gonna yield you the most bang for your buck. Man, if we had that in most areas of our life, we'd be in much better shape.

Kyle Roed: 37:20

I love that term. And, you know, I think that that the gift of focus, I mean, I think in in today's world, there's, there's so much going on, you know, there's a lot of disruption out there, there's, there's a lot of headlines, but, but if you can do that, and human resources for your team and your employees, you know, you're going to be you're going to be poised for success. So, with that being said, Kevin, this has just been a wonderful conversation, I think we could probably go another two hours. But I'm sure you were super busy. And I want to be mindful of your time. So we're going to shift gears, we're going to go into the rebel HR flash round. So first question here, where does HR need to rebel?

Kevin Campbell: 38:04

The biggest place where HR needs to rebel, is to stop calling other parts of the business, the business. HR is also the business. There's no There's no difference between HR and then the business. Every everybody that works at an organization is a human being. They are they are a human resource. They are people, people are the business. HR is the business. And I think, you know, it's it's, I'm nitpicking because it's it's an innocent use of language. But I think the words that we use, can impact the way that we think about ourselves and the way others think of us. And HR is just as much the business as any other department.

Kyle Roed: 38:53

Absolutely. And I will tell you coming from a manufacturing background, Toyota Production System, you know, you you literally define things as value added and non value added value added being defined as you directly add value to the product, non value added as you don't. So in that version of life, HR was always called non value add, right, literally, like labeled non value at. And I think about that, and the power of language. And what you just said, I think is really powerful. Because at one point, I did have a leader that said, Listen, you can't do anything without people. So quit saying your non value at it. Right. And that was for me, that was a mindset shift. And I'm thankful that I had a mentor that helped me kind of make that, but I think many listeners could could should think about that and reflect on that in the context of their organization. What would happen if the people weren't there? Or the right people weren't there? Or the people weren't retained? Or you know, people weren't hired? Like, you're pretty important. Thank you for that PSA Kim. All right, question number two, who should we be listening to?

Kevin Campbell: 40:02

So when you ask this question, do you mean like what who should you be listening to at work or should you be listening to out there on podcasts were helped me out with you can

Kyle Roed: 40:13

go wherever you want with it. I've had everything from bands to to podcasts, so yeah,

Kevin Campbell: 40:18

okay. Yeah. So, anything by Adam Grant is worth listening to Bruce Temkin, my mentor and the leader of the Experience Management Institute. If you're interested in experience management, whether that be employee experience, brand experience, customer experience, product experience, he Is the beyond the besides Qualtrics he's the creator of the experience management category. So anything coming from the XM Institute, and Bruce Temkin is going to be golden. Another Qualtrics partner that's worth listening to is Walker. And they're also on the bleeding edge when it comes to connecting customer and employee experience. And another podcast, hey, there's there's enough room for everyone. But AI, HR, the Association for innovation and HR is another good one that's out there.

Kyle Roed: 41:17

Absolutely. Great suggestions. Yeah, check it out. I do think you know, that this this experience movement for me is just so fascinating. And I think it's it's it is actually it's putting science and and data behind what I think many of us in the kind of the people profession who have always believed and assumed but it's it's it's putting some some power and some voice behind that. So I think that's just it's wonderful work and and I'm definitely gonna check out the Bruce, I'm not familiar. So thanks for the shout out. Yeah. All right. Last question. How can our listeners connect with you and learn more?

Kevin Campbell: 41:56

Find me on LinkedIn, Kevin G, Campbell, XMPP, ACC. that's those are the designations I have, after my name, they make it easy to find me. Follow me on LinkedIn, connect with me on LinkedIn, and, you know, Google my name. And, and find stuff that I've written and shows that I've been on. And we'll be in touch I don't I don't have anything that I'm hogging or selling. Don't have a website that I'm trying to send people to. I just love talking about this stuff and sharing this information with as many people as possible.

Kyle Roed: 42:31

Absolutely. And we will have all that information in the show notes. So Kevin, it's just been an absolute joy. Getting to know you, I'm definitely going to be following all the all the content that you put out there and just appreciate appreciate your work and putting some some of the energy and effort behind some of the work that we're all doing every day. So thank you very much.

Kevin Campbell: 42:50

Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks.

Kyle Roed: 42:52

All right. That does it for the rebel HR podcast. Big thank you to our guests. Follow us on Facebook at rebel HR podcast, Twitter, at rebel HR guy, or see our website at rebel human resources.com. The views and opinions expressed by rebel HR podcast are those the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any of the organizations that we represent. No animals were harmed during the filming of this podcast. Maybe