Feedback that Empowers and Facilitates Engagement

0:06 There are some people that make their work just another thing they have to do, and there are those that make their work something that they want to do. Welcome to Working on Purpose with your host Elise Cortez. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration from those people who have found deeper meaning and personal connection to their work life. It's beyond nine to five. It's working on Purpose. Now Here is your host, Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose Chok. Thanks for tuning in again this week. I'm your host, Elise Cortez to any from Dallas, Texas, which is home base for me. This program is all about helping people more meaningfully and productively connect with their work and equipping organizations to do the same for their employees.

0:49 So I bring a guest with a particular perspective or an experience that I think expands the conversation. I often draw in the meeting and work research I been doing over the last fifteen years, as well as from my own consulting experience, include in the work I do to day Insignium, which is a global management consulting firm. I will get to my program in Jazz a moment. Let me think. My media partner and sponsor jobbing dot Com. Jobbing dot com is the leading locally focused job board in the nation and they are dedicated helping employers find quality talent in their own backyard and giving job seeers control where their search that can find work close to home. Last week, if you miss the show live, you can always catch if you've recorded podcast. We were on the air with Diane McClay, who has a certified professional Whole person coach who helps midlife professionals navigate career transitions through choice, encouraged to make meaningful change. We talked about the Unleashed Your Dream Career online interview series she's currently hosting, featuring twenty plus renowned experts who help midlife career professionals create and sustain more meaning and purpose in the second half of their life. Great conversation with her. She's incredibly energetic and knows her stuff. It was a great conversation with us. This week is David Perks, the founder and CEO of pay Compliment, a platform for customers, peers, and managers to give direct feedback to the people and organizations they interact with so that customer service level and employee performance are maintained at the highest possible levels in real time. All the time.

2:04 We'll be talking about how feedback service both the employee and the organization, and how leaders can incorporate it to motivate their teams to higher engagement and performance. David joins it today from Sydney, Australia, where the time is fifteen hours ahead of Dallas, which means it's four o'clock in the afternoon for me here in Dallas, and I think it's seven or eight am on Wednesday for him. David, welcome to Working on Purpose. Thanks Alsa, it's a pleasure to be here and it's a beautiful morning here in Sydney to have this conversation with you. Thank you. And I guess it's Thursday, not Wednesday for you, right, that's right on Thursday. All right, wait to start the day. Well, let's get into it. I want to give the listeners as much as we can, and I do want to say that again, I found you, I think I found you on Twitter and looked up what you were up to, and I said, you know, I think that makes for a good conversation for the radio program. So I was like to give a shout out to my social media friends out there. You are Otherwise you and I would have no reason to talk, David, So great to know you. Great to know you too at least, and the Internet's a fabulous way of making connections. So we're going to talk more about that today. I think sounds could well. I want to jump right end of the conversation and open with what you told me about a past practice of yours that I think is pretty important to this conversation. You told me that you were spending eight plus hours on flights from Australia, during which time you would write handwritten letters to clients and other people you work with, telling them what you appreciated about them. I'd like it if you could talk about this practice, where it came from, and how it led to you starting pay Compliment. Great way to start, and yeah, that really was the beginnings

3:37 of the principles behind the pay Compliment platform. And I think it goes all the way back to the values that we were brought up with it as kids, where my parents would always encourage us to write thank you notes for gifts and experiences that we've been through ass and that kind of became necessary in this corporate environment where I had that big corporate job. It was an American multinational company that I was working for in Asia Pacific, and we were really about four or five percent of revenue for that company. And so going through traditional performance management processes of grading people, forced distribution in a belcove of the top five percent, the next ten, etc. And then making our claim for any discretionary pay that we could, we were really a small voice in that organization, and it caused me to go down the path of looking more at intrinsic motivation than extrinsic motivation. And that's where this practice became very important to the performance of my team and my division. And so what I would do

5:10 do is on regular trips from Australia up to two different parts of Asia, I would just use some of that time on the plane to handwrite thank you notes and it would just be too individuals in a large extended team who I've noticed had done something outstanding, and rather than make a big song and dance and fanfare of that, I would give the individual would just find a moment where we could be one on one. I give the individual the written letter and just thank them for what they've done. And that was good, and you know, I got a good feedback on that as I was doing it.

5:58 But what then came to pass was that four or five years after giving a person one of those letters, so gentlemen called Asha Kumarak in Singapore, it was time for me to leave that organization. And I received a lovely email from Ashop that told me that even after four years, he'd still got my letter and it was a treasured possession that he kept in his desk and brought out from time to time to reread when he needed. You know, that extra jolt of motivation, and that really was powerful for me. It meant to me that that small act four years ago had had a very long lasting effect on that individual, and it really then became my purpose to look at how to scale that up and scale that out and make that experience available to as many people as possible. So that's how the thought behind the platform started. And then luckily I work my way into a position of having my own company and my own team, and so I was able to experiment with that intrinsic motivation further with those staff and to kind of systematize that into the practices that are embedded into the paid complement platform. I appreciate very much that

7:29 you distinguish that what you're really surfacing or addressing is intrinsic motivation instead of extrening motivation. I think that's incredibly powerful, and I didn't really quite see that until you talked about it. So thank you for that. It is very powerful. And into that, and before you talk more about the platform, because I do want to share and hear how it actually works, I also want to go ahead and thread in your interest in helping people enjoy more meaningful work, because of course that's a complete crossover for both of us. Why are you interested in people find meaningful work? Well, for the longest time, probably a slow learner in this regard, I didn't even realize that some people didn't find meaning in work. I've always been extremely fortunate that, you know, my work and my passion have been aligned, and it took me a long time to realize that that wasn't the case for everyone. And we spend a lot of our life at work, and so that can either be the best thing ever, which is which is how it's been for me and unlucky for that, or a soul destroying chore. And I think for those people where you know, they fall into the latter category, that there are more people in that boat than I would like, and there's the potential to change that, and that's what we're keen to contribute to. And I think

9:03 also because I've worked my entire career in the software industry, I think it's also an obligation to give back because it's the digitization and computerization of work to a large extent that strip the meaning out of it for people by fragmenting the work that we do so that we often don't see the end result of our actions. And so you know, somebody else is at the point of sale, and twenty five people have worked in the value chain to you know, provide the experience to the customer. But twenty five out of the twenty six people involved in that don't get to see, you know, the customer delight or the customer disappointment at the end of their activity. And so I think, you know, we need to make that much less opaque for each person us into how their actions make a difference. And so it's kind of like the digital butterfly effect, where every action of every individual accumulates into the experience of other human beings, but it's not necessarily seen. And so a little story about that very early on in offering the platform where we have a consumer platform element to the platform where people can give feedback to retail and hospitality workers.

10:33 As an example and so an example of creating meaning, just a normal person in a retail outlet. You know, we got the feedback for her from an elderly gentleman I think he said he was seventy two or seventy eight, and he always saught this person out in the store when he needed to recharge the same card on his phone, because that person would not just stop what she was doing get the right sin card and the right plan for him recharge it, but she would also go through and make sure that the recharge had taken effect and that he got credit on his phone, and that that was the only means that he got to communicate with his grandchildren. And so connecting those dots, I feel, really creates that meaning for that retail worker that getting down from stocking the shelves and going to the front of the store and getting the right product for the customer and then making sure that that delivered the outcome that the customer was looking for actually makes a massive difference in that particular customer's life. And so what we're doing is crowdsourcing stories like that and then connecting the dots for every worker that we that we can, so that they can see the meaning in the work and the contribution that they're making to

12:05 other people's lives. You see why this was just a must have conversation for me, right David, you're just smack right down my alley. A couple of things really quick, if I want to go back to loop back around on what you said. One is this whole notion how digitization can remove some of the places in ways that people can see the overall force for the trees and what their contribution is for the whole. I think that is incredible that you can see that so crisply as you do, and that you've got a mechanism to kind of bridge that gap without that. What I do in my work oftentimes, of course, is I work with leaders to help them language that their for their teams, so they can help help the team see that contribution when it's not immediately obvious for themselves. So the fact that you've got a mechanism to help that along as well. That creates that ripple effect I'm completely in favor of. And then the other thing I wanted to also say is this whole notion of you know, how dismal work can be for a lot of people. I think you and I talked about my research around meaning and work and identity that produced fifteen modes of engagement, and when I go and share that with crowds, David, people are amazed when they identify which mode of engagement they're in. They're shocked that there's any other way to work.

13:16 They don't recognize. So there's other ways people experience work, and therefore they don't know that there's something can even be better or worse for them. So why don't you just to acknowledge that as well. It's quite a spectrum of experience out there in the world, I've found. Yeah, I totally agree, And I would have been one of those people who would have been in one mode of engagement and a positive one, blissfully ignorant of the other fourteen. Very good. Yes, I meet those people. They're always fascinating. Oh well, let's talk about the employee experience here for just a second, if we can, David, When we spoke on the first call to get acquainted. You said that people oftentimes don't get the signals that they're doing good work or a great job. What do you mean by that? Tell us more. Yes, I think that there are really four types of signals that each person needs in order to do their best work every day, and we've kind of corraled that into for the framework that we call the four A framework, and the four a's in terms of signals are alignment, assistance, assessment, and appreciation. And so those are the four key ingredients to high performance at an individual level, we feel, and if we take each one individually and look at, you know, the traditional signals that people get and

14:50 a better possible feature for that, it kind of tells the story. So if we look at alignment, typically what would happen in organizations is that goals would be set at the organizational level and then cascaded through the organization, and the message that workers get in that kind of conversation is this is how you will align. And so there's very little choice for the individual in in how that happens and what they're aligning to in that cascaded paradigm. An alternative and a way of creating stronger signals is to turn that around and to have the conversation that goes along the lines of this is what we're doing, how can your strength and purposes make the best contribution to that, and so really aligning the individual to the goals as opposed to aligning the goals to the individual and turning that context around. Similarly, with assistance, what would typically happen in assistance is I'd be looking at a competition framework for the job description, and the conversation would be, Okay, this is where you're you don't measure up.

16:17 These are the gaps in your experience against this made up framework that you know HR have conjured up and you're not hitting the mark. Instead of that, if I look at your inherent strengths and the skills you want to master and orient the assistance that I provide as a leader to that, then we're going to end up in a much better place where your strengths are elevated and you're a unique individual as a resource to the company. As opposed to that, we've got a set of people performing at a mediocre level across a pre defined set of competencies, and so changing that assistance conversation to be strength based and individualized. It's very important. Assessment conversations tend to be I'm looking back at the year just gone, and this is where you failed, and so we're looking at all of the reasons why someone is rated at a level that they're rated, and it's generally a negative conversation. Instead of that, if we have the assessment conversation that says, I'm looking forward at what challenges lie ahead, and this is where I can see that we can stretch you, then that really changes the emphasis or episodically in the moment. If we have

17:48 the conversation when this happened, I noticed that, and then can we brain some some other ways to handle that if it comes up again. That way, we're perhaps looking at something that could have been a negative conversation and turning it into a positive framework for better future performance. An appreciation, I think is the one that makes the biggest difference, but is often the least authentic, and so I think leaders in general have become quite lazy in regards to appreciation, and even when it's shown, it's generally a platitude. So I thank you. A pat on the back is better than nothing, but it's not as powerful as a structured piece of appreciation. When you did this, I felt like that, or I learned something which was this, or I was able to So what was that person's impact that I am great on me, that I am grateful for. How did I improve as a result of that person's act. So those are the kind of signals that we're we're really looking to elevate in the platform and to make sure that every worker gets the breadth oft signals and the frequency of signals that helps them to do their best

19:19 work every day. I'm completely a fan and I'll comment more, but let's kind of cut for a quick break here. I'm your host, Alice Cortez. We've been on the air with David Perks, who is the founder and CEO of pay Compliment, a platform for customers, peers and managers to give direct feedback to the people and organizations they interact with, so the customer service levels and employee performance are maintained at the highest possible levels in real time. He joins to Day from Sydney, Australia. We'll talk more after the break. Stay with us. It's your World, Motivates Change, Succeed Voice America empowerment dot com. Elise Cortez is a speaker and engagement and development catalyst.

20:12 She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization. She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at www dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. It's time to live the life of inner peace that you deserve. Tune in every week for Sacred Exploration with host Lisa tremont Oda. You can discover the you that has been kept hidden all this time, show off your personal gifts to the world. Lisa and her guests will combine health and spirituality to bring the experience that you've been waiting for. You'll enjoy this journey every Wednesday at five pm Pacific Time at eight pm Eastern Time on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. It's sure to be a nourishing experience. Do you sometimes feel powerless over your own life? Does it seem like you're living for someone else, unsure of what your purpose is, or if you even have an important voice, It's time to take back that control. Tune into Empowered with Dez and Gen. They've been in the same place and have learned to regain control of their lives. They also feature amazing guests who share experiences of how they have found success. Start on your journey by listening Mondays at one pm Pacific four pm Eastern on Voice America Empowerment. Success starts here Voice America Empowerment dot

21:51 Com. It's your world. This is Working on Purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, please call in to one triple eight three four six nine one four one. Again, that's one triple eight three four six nine one four one. You may also send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Portez dot com. Now back to Working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose if you're just joining us. My guest is David Perks, who is the founder and CEO of pay Compliment, a platform for customers, peers, and managers to give direct feedback to the people and organizations they interact with. So the customer service levels and employee performance are maintained at the highest possible levels in real time all the time. So before the break, David, we were talking. You're talking about your four A levels, which was incredibly useful, and I really appreciate it. If I heard this right, that you've bucket them on both more of the negative plus the positive side. If I heard that right, also great, Okay, good. I also really appreciate how at each level you could see the ongoing build in the depth there. That was incredibly useful, and I would think that in order for the people that you work with to be able to separate that and really start to see how feedback can be given in a very structured way can be so useful. And to that end,

23:21 I'm interested, certainly because of the work that I do as a management consultant and doing a lot of leadership development. I know you're interested in helping leaders incorporate giving feedback and expressing appreciation for their workforce in order to help motivate their employees but certainly give them more meaning in their work. Can you see a little bit about that perspective and the efforts that you've got going there. Yeah, So what we've noticed in general is that feedback the word is stigmatized, and it's stigmatized and creates anxiety, largely because people associate it with negative feedback. So what we're doing through our naming and through some of the techniques that we use, is trying to bring balance to that. And neuroscience indicates that the brain is six seven eight times more effective at remembering harmful or negative events than it is at positive events. And so what we're trying to do is encourage leaders to build up a bank of positivity by noticing and observing and commenting on positive aspects of people's work in order that when the time comes that they need to course correct or adjust, that that is seen as an unusual event and that it doesn't trigger a threat response in the employee's brain that puts them

24:56 into defensive mode. And so we work with neuroscientists and psychologists to really try to engender a reward response through the way that we capture and deliver feedback to individuals, so that there is the greatest chance that they'll remain open to the observation, that they will take it on board, and that they'll take action to address the observation. And that's important we feel because you know, a lot of research and studies show that performance review and feedback for about thirty three thirty four percent of the recipient is a negative event rather than a positive one.

25:38 And you know, obviously that's not the intent something that you just said there that I want to call it. That's quite first gating around the neuroscience piece of this stepid in that we tend to we seem to remember more powerfully the negative comments than we do the positive ones. And then you said something about a threat response, and so my mind immediately went to, this must be some thing really baked into our very very angel brains about survival. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely so. We're designed to survive as a human being, and that's baked into the way that our brains work. And very often, you know, just the mention of feedback, if I was to say to you, at least, let me give you some feedback in your brain. You know, I've taken control. I'm going to give you some feedback. You don't have a choice. It's coming your way. Because of your prior experience, you'll you'll associate that that conversation is probably going to be critical about you know, your your performance and harmful to reputation, and it might not even be equitable or fair because it's just my opinion. And so I'm ing through that all of these reactions that most likely cause you to defend yourself. Where if I was to say, at least can we find a

27:12 time where I can share some observations with you that conversation, I'm giving you some choice. We're going to share some conversation, some observations, and so it's a conversation. You're a party too, it's not a broadcast. You're there to receive it's observations, and so it's going to be based on some facts rather than some opinions that I've gotten. So just the language changes the experience, and what we've tried to do in the platform is to bake that language in and to bake good behavior around feedback into the platform so that we're triggering those reward responses and in a growth mind that rather than fearful and anxious about what's to come. And of course I'm a fan of the growth mindset too, and I've had other guests on the show talking about that as well, and it's related to something you talked about earlier. That I want to get a little bit more information onto. David. You talked about that good leadership is strengths based and encourageous people to pursue what they're passionate about, what they like doing, and of course, I, as a gallop sort of had strength coach, I completely agree with that, but we'd like to hear a bit more about your perspective on that. Yeah, So really what we're trying to do there is help people to know their strengths, so using techniques similar to strength Finder and other frameworks for that. But I think you know,

28:45 we've got a blog post that's been quite popular around autonomy, and we use in that the example of an autonomous vehicle, a self driving car, And if you think about that, you know, the reason that cars can be autonomous is because they've got one clear destination that they're heading for. They've got signals coming in from all sorts of sensors about adjustments that they need to make to cope with environment the environment that they're operating in. They've got GPS signals that tell them they're on the right path, and speed signals that tell them they're moving at the right pace to get to their destination. And so when we think about autonomous employees, really organizations and individuals that are actually more comfortable with the idea of an autonomous vehicle than they are an autonomous employee.

29:48 And so we think that's you know, perhaps not right, and that employees can be autonomous in a very safe way by having one clear destination that's based upon, you know, what they're designed to do, what their strengths are are geared towards, by having the signals that tell them they're they're on the right path, and by having the signals that tell them that they're the progress signals that tell them that they're moving at the right pace. And so, you know, I think it's much more these days about individualizing jobs and designing you know, flexible jobs that are geared towards the individual that's in the role, as opposed to trying to coerce an individual with unique strengths into the shape that you know, the textbook says the role would be best served by I am drinking up every single word that you're saying. And what I think what I want to say is, at one, it makes so much sense what you're saying, and then two, it's so inspiring to hear someone language this the same way that I do, and then actually have a platform and a perspective to be able to help employers around the world with this. This is great, or just organizations around the world with this. It's just really refreshing to hear you talk, David, and the accent doesn't hurt either, I suppose. And speaking of different organizations, do you have any examples that you

31:25 can share with us, maybe one or two, and Sally, not without giving the identity away if it doesn't help the person or the organization of organizations that you've seen it really incent high employee engagement or high performance or better customer acquisition. Yeah. So we've been working with very closely with kind of founder customers because they've been the ones who've been giving post the signals to take the platform in the direction it's gone. And I'm thinking of one in particular, and they outreach to their employees with five questions and one of those questions is quite confrontational when you when you take it out face value, it's am I in the right role? Team and firm? And it's a yes or no answer with comments to justify that, and you'd actually think that you know people would be reticent to answer no to that question, and I think it says a lot for this organization's culture that on any kind of cycle of the outreach, about five percent of their people will say no, I'm not feeling like I'm in the right team for role or firm. And of course that then means that you know, a conversation about why and how that can change and

33:02 what needs to be done to address that can happen. And so you know, I think radical candor is you know, getting a little bit of airplay, and that would be an example of where we've seen that level of you know, confidence and culture and interesting employees to make sure that they are in the right role, team and firm perpetually really paid dividence. And we've seen that people who have answered no to that question in a cycle have had an intervention and then have started to answer yes to that question subsequent to that intervention.

33:53 So we can see, you know, the direct consequence of asking the engagement questions and then attending to the answers has helped with retention and motivation of a reasonable proportion of that workforce. So four or five percent of your workforce being re engaged or reenergized is significant. It is significant, It certainly is. And I also I do appreciate that radical candor. I've never heard that phrase before, but I quite like that. And I purposely did this, David in terms of how I wanted to chat with you in this conversation that I wanted you to sort of talk through some of your thinking and what's important to you before I ask you how the platform actually works so that our listeners could be more present to really understanding it better. So at this juncture, will you tell us, I mean a little bit about pay compliment and how it enables a lifelong platform for the individual and how it actually serves the various parties that you work with. How does it work and what's involved. Yeah, so I won't turn this into a sales pitch, but I will talk about the things that are important too. Is it in our model? And so the first one that you mentioned there is lifelong And so we are a member based platform where the individual is the member and their membership is sometimes initiated independently, but often initiated by an employer. Regardless of that their membership lasts

35:24 for their life. And with the rise in the gig economy. We think that's really important because what we're trying to address with that aspect of the platform is that more and more workers are in non exclusive relationships with an employer or in short tenure relationships with an employer, and if we use employers centric platforms for performance, then those individuals don't have any continuity while they learned how they will coach the feedback that they received, that all gets left behind when they moved from one organization to the next, or if they're working concurrently as a gig worker for several organizations, then their signals are fragmented and they're not consolidated into one cogent stream that drives that individual's improvement. So by having a lifelong employee centric platform, we think we address that. The second thing that we're trying to do is recognize that organizations these days are much more of a network and much less of a hierarchy, and so the relationships that we have inside of those organizations are more fluid, and we should rely less on the idea

37:01 that information is going to come to us from a cascading effect through through an organizational hierarchy, and so we democratized feedback by making the opportunity to give and get feedback available to anyone at any time. And so we've talked a lot about leadership, but in this context, we would see everyone in the organization of being as being a leader at least of themselves, and potentially a leader through influence rather than title or position of others by coaching them through events.

37:42 So we've democratized feedback, we've made it lifelong. We're employee centric platform, and we provide both structured and unstructured means. And so if I want to give feedback just in my own language, you know, as a story or an observation, I can do that by writing it or recording video or speech. But on the other hand, if I need some structure and I want to use a mechanism like stock keep Start or four level coaching feedback, or even their promoter scores, then you know, we have templates that are structured to allow that to happen. So very variety is important to us, and we think, you know, a good feedback diet is a varied feedback diet.

38:37 It's a mix of assessments and grading as well as storytelling and situational observation. Brilliant David Oh my gosh, I'm so impressed that really is brilliant and a private witted citizen. To our last break, I'm your host, Alice Cortez. We've around the air with David Perks, who is the founder in CEO of pay Complement a platform for customers, peers, and managers to give direct feedback to the people and organizations they interact with, so that customer service levels and employee performance are maintained at the highest possible levels in real time, all the time. Stay with us, We'll be right back. It's your world. Motivate, change, succeed. Voice America Empowerment dot com. Alis Cortez is a speaker and engagement and development catalyst. She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization.

39:47 She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite a last to speak to your organization, please visit her at w dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. Many of us define our lives by what has already happened. It's a past tense series of events. Do you long for something else? You don't have to live solely in this reality. Tune in for to Win Within with hosts Strom, Thomas and Strom and his guests are here to introduce you to your true self. It's time to emerge from your box and take a beautiful journey of self love and discovery. You'll find yourself exactly where you need to be to Win Within. Airs live every Thursday of four pm Eastern time one pm Pacific time on Voice America Empowerment. Do we really have a full understanding as to whindly do certain things and function the way that we do? There are many different aspects of trauma and you can learn more about them and how to overcome the symptoms by tuning in to Trauma Talk with host as Rena Rose Scott. On Trauma Talk as Rena and her special guest expert in Clients, we'll discuss the different results of trauma and some effective methods in resolving and healing from them.

41:06 Listen live every Tuesday at ninety percent the time New and Eastern Time on Voice America Empowerment. Friend us on Facebook to keep up with what's empowering the world Voice America Empowerment. This is Working on Purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, please call in to one triple eight three four six nine one four one. Again, that's one triple eight three four six nine one four one. You may also send an email to Elise ali se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to Working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. If you're just tuning in, My guest is David Perks, who is the founder and CEO of pay Complain, a platform for customers, peers, and managers to give direct feedback to the people and organizations they interact with so that customer service levels and employee performance are maintained at the highest possible levels in real time. I'm your host, Alice Cortez. So, David, that was a tremendous rendition of what you've established as a platform. I'm terribly impressed, and so glad I found you, and so glad I get to share this with our listeners across the globe. I'm certainly a fan. And one of the things that you also said there as you were talking about your platform is this move towards the gig economy, And of course I recognize that from the Free Agent Nation book that Dan Pink wrote years ago, but I'd like it if you could talk a

42:37 bit about what you know of the gig economy and what it is you're trying to address in it. YEP. So the gig economy is growing, and it's not just the likes of zero resource organizations like Uber and Airbnb and the likes of those, but it's the you serve contingent workers, temporary workers, contracts as consultants in an enterprise that's growing at the expense of normal salary workers. And so we see a future where many more individuals are going to be deriving their income from the gig economy and their own endeavors as an individual, and depending on the statue, believe already that might be affecting forty to fifty percent of the workforce in the in the US that are involved in the gig economy in some way, shape or form. And we think there's some changes in behavior that are required that we're trying to drive there from the organization and from the individual. And so from the organization, what we see and we've surveyed a lot to cover this. Most organizations exclude non salaried staff from performance

44:07 management and performance improvements, and so those staff are not getting through the organization assessment. They're not getting learning resources, they're not getting opportunities that are assigned necessarily aligned to their purpose. They might be getting those things through chance, but they're not getting those things through design. And we think that the mindset of organizations who are using gig economy workers needs to be a stewardship mindset that whilst that gig economy worker is working for my organization, I am responsible for they for their development, and for helping them to do their best work, as opposed to hands off kind of approach of we a high fee or a significant daily rate and expect that they bring the skills necessary to the transaction.

45:08 So there's that element from the individual perspective. What we've noticed is that when workers enter the gig economy, there's a high likelihood that they will enter at a certain level the level that they're performing at at the time, and that they will remain at that level for their entire subsequent time in the gig economy, rather than developing themselves and so we see that in the gig economy, you need to be the CEO of yourself, and that you need to take control of your own product, which is you and the value of that product, and we provide the tool set to do that. Again, David, there's so much wonderful alignment here. Anybody who's listening to my show a little bit knows that I'm horribly interested in artificial intelligence and robotics and how the workforce will need to continue to evolve their own skill sets to be able to play more in that arena and complement that that technology and continue to develop their skills so that they're they're viable. And I certainly see that what you're up to helps enable that, and I really really appreciate and I applaud that that's tremendous for me. Thank you. Yeah, I'm so glad I found you, and you've already mentioned it, but this whole notion you and I were chatting on the phone, that you know, without the feedback, the risk is that the worker stagnates without progressing, which is just what you've already surfaced.

46:37 I can tell you that in the coaching work that I do, I oftentimes run into people with either two situations. One is they do need to continue to develop their skills and their competencies to progress, either they've been asked to do so or their board. Or two. In many cases, especially with women, they frankly need to develop their confidence in order to take on more And it seems to me that your tool would be able to address and give information on both those fronts. Yeah, in fact, we won't have time to talk about it today, but we've done some really insightful work about performance achievements based on gender, and so the techniques and methods that a female worker needs to adopt versus a male worker, and suffice it to say that depending on gender requires the persons to take a different approach. And so we're coaching females and working with an organization called Headheart and Brain in the UK to coach females to achieve performance in a different way than we're coaching males to achieve performance.

47:50 And that's based upon patterns of behavior that we've been able to use artificial intelligence and data minding to surface. So it's a fascinating area. The other thing that we've started to do, and this is based upon some insights from Josh Person and David Rockett and your Leadership Institute. We are in the midst of building micro learning into the platform as well as the feedback aspect, and so what we will do with that is joining up the experience of receiving feedback and and observation to also then having the resources available to address that if there's a learning need or or an adjustment required in actually providing the training resources on platform. And so that is very much geared towards enabling the independent worker or the gig worker to control our destiny all on one platform the way that they choose, at the pace that they choose. Wow. Another point of brilliant, Stevid, when does the spigot stop of brilliance? I'm just wondering, wonderful? You know, really, we probably need to see about how wing you come back and see if you can share some of these things with our listeners. They're all incredibly pertnitch in my listenership and it would be well received.

49:20 So we'll talk about that at another time, But for what's left of the session, a couple more things I would like to get out of you if I can, David. One of the things that you also mentioned when we first spoke was that you are interested in helping workers stay true to their passion. How did you help them do that? Well, I think the first thing is uncovering the passion. So I've actually found that, you know, when you ask an individual about their purpose and their passion, quite quite often there's an uncomfortable silence after that. And so you know, prompting that thought to really get precise about why you're why is where we start and then aligning all of these signals to that and saying, okay, well, how do we you know, fast track your your path to to to resolving your why is where the platform comes in and crowdsourcing all of the input that's necessary, you know, to take you along that fast path. So that's really the paradigm for us is crowdsourcing these signals, aggregating them all into one stream for the individual, no matter where they're coming from, and then allowing that individual to progress and to see their progress in real time all of the time.

50:47 Wow. Another big fat wow. Now what I don't know that I fully understand is crowdsourcing the signals. Would you say more about that? Yeah? So what we do is we provide a feed back ID and that ID is unique to you. And so what that can be used for is on my business card, it's in my email signatures, as a button, it can be on any report that I produce. It's a way of saying I am open for your feedback, I would like it, and this is the means by which you can give it to me directly and privately. And so there are fifty five touch points that we've identified that would be appropriate to prompt for feedback, and so what we do is we feedback enable all of those so that you can capture signals at any of those touch points with any individual in private, in real time, David process or anything you have not thought through on this. There's a lot on our back club that we're that we're striving to do at least, but we're really pleased with the performance of the platform so far and we can see that it's making a difference and that's what's driving us, you know, each day too, to make it easier to use, to make it impactful, and to broaden the awareness of it.

52:15 Splendid Well, we're almost at a time and if my listeners know that I'd like to give my guests the last word here, So you know, the show, David is about helping listeners across the globe more meaningfully and productively connect with their work and equipping Origination to do the same for their employees. Given that, how would you like to leave our listeners today? What would you like to leave them with? I think there's two calls to action. One is to think about the feedback that you need to get to do your best work every day, and if you're not getting that, to ask for it, and you can use our platform, or you can use any other means that you like to do that. And the second is set yourself a challenge to share something that you've noticed that would help someone to improve that performance, and to do that every day. And if you do those two things, then your impact on the world and the impact that you're making on the world will very quickly increase. What a fantastic way to finish, David. I am so hopelessly glad I found you. We are absolutely of like minds on so many ways, really impressed with the work that you're doing. Want to help evangelize it. I'm a fan. I look forward to other conversations with you and staying in touch. Thank you for being with us and sharing your wisdom, your passion, your heart, all of it. Thank you, thanks so much for the opportunity at least. If you want to learn more about the work David and his team at pay Compliment are doing, visit their website. It is simply pay compliment dot com, pay C O, M,

53:46 P, L, I, M ANDT dot com. Join us next week when we talk with Mac Pritchard of Pritcher Communications, who will share what he's learned to help job seekers utilize unique ways to find the job they really want. See then, remember that work is at least one third of our life, so let's work on purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host Alice Cortez, every Wednesday at six pm Eastern Time three pm Pacific Time on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. This week, find your life's purpose at work.