Welcome to the For Love and Money podcast, the show where business and social purpose meet to inspire a movement for positive change. Here's your host, Carolyn Butler-Madden. My guest today is Danielle Owen-Whitford, a former corporate executive. She founded Startup Pioneer in 2018 to improve our mental health by tackling the crippling issue of workplace burnout and improving positive psychology.
So Pioneer's purpose is to unleash everyone's potential to be happier, healthier and more productive at work. Their world-first solution uses artificial intelligence informed by evidence-based psychology to identify signs of burnout and to provide tech-assisted early intervention. It's ahead of its time and And Pioneer is award-winning solution is now the only product in the market that can provide real-time mental health data to meet new safety regulations and ESG reporting requirements.
And it's gaining strong interest across both large and small Australian businesses. So Pioneer's app won the social impact category of the 2022 Australian Good Design Awards and was recognized as a world-changing idea by Fast Company in 2021. Danielle in this interview shares her own personal story which inspired her to build something to help prevent others from going through what she did.
We talk about, well she talks about toxic productivity, what it is and why it's happening and she shares her vision of positive productivity in the the workplace, but also pioneer his big ambitions to reduce the impact on the health system. This is a great example of purpose-driven AI-powered innovation that can have such a positive impact on our lives. I hope you enjoy listening to our interview. Danielle, welcome to the For Love and Money podcast. Thank you,
Carolyn. Great to be here. So first question I'd like to kick off with is, in your view, is there a role for love in business? Absolutely. I think there's a role for love in business. I think it comes down to what's your definition of love. When I talk to people about love, and I don't do it very often at work, I must admit. No, really? A little bit, maybe more than I think now that I'm thinking about it. I'm joking. I'm joking.
I think we often think about romantic love when we're talking about love. And I just think that there's such a broader application. So I will often talk about, I love what I do. I love this. So I think it's an important for me expression of how I feel feel towards something. So I do think there's a role. I think there's an appropriate role, maybe because we confuse it with romantic love, what we think about it like romantic love. Sometimes people could feel a little bit uncomfortable with it.
People that aren't as emotionally driven or perhaps as emotionally intelligent or connected to their emotions might find it uncomfortable. And I'm sorry, that's a super long answer, but yes, I think there's a role. You do not need to apologize for super long answers. And it wasn't super long either. But thank you. Thank you for that.
So I'd love, Danielle, if you can briefly share where you are today, because we're going to go dive into it deeper later, but briefly share where you are today with Pioneer and then give us your backstory. Like, you know, what brought you to this point? Sure. So I am the founder and CEO of Pioneer. Pioneer is a tech company that's using AI to prevent workplace burnout and to create positive mental health and productivity and essentially psychologically safe environments for people to work in.
And I came about this from my own personal experience, essentially. So my background is large corporates. I spent 20 years running retail networks, call centers, and large-scale transformation, which I loved, coming back to the word of love, totally loved it. I was that really annoying person that would sit in the corner and say, can't we do this differently? Can't we do this better?
What about this? And so transformation gave me the opportunity to evolve businesses and help people develop and get greater experiences and products to customers. And I just really loved it and was doing that but burnt out in 2016. Missed all the warning signs. I was not hidden. I was very public and very sort of present and visible, but yet I missed the signs and my company missed the signs and so I quit. I was like, done, I'm done, I'm stepping out.
So I stepped out and had some time out with my kids who I was a single mum at the time and I was really reflecting on how this had happened and most importantly, how I could have prevented it. And that led me to what became Hynera because I realized that language was such an incredible insight to what was happening for that individual. And I would see emails and I would say, oh, that person's having a tough day or, oh, I hope that person's okay.
And I would pick up the phone and I'd say, hey, Carolyn, how are you doing? Let's have a chat. And so what I was doing manually was what I wanted to automate for the system. So I wanted to have a system that could understand someone was escalating and needed some help in real time and they could get the right help to them because they were the two issues that I thought had led to my situation. And in research with others and academic research realized that was quite common.
So that's what led me to Pioneer and I guess became the foundation and mission of what we were trying to achieve. And we realized starting out that it wasn't enough to help the individual because the the individual worked within a context and within an environment and within a system. So we needed to be able to help change the system and create safe and healthy systems to create safe, healthy, productive individuals. And so that's what Pioneer does now.
That's amazing. And I just go back a bit because you said you would be able to look at an email and pick up those sort of little alerts that something might not be quite right. And I guess if we go back even further, because more and more of our communication is online, especially as, you know, more and more of our work is remote. But, you know, in the old days, you'd talk to people and you could pick up on those cues, couldn't you?
So it does become more difficult. I mean, from the physical live interaction, even just to a person looking at email, it becomes more difficult. And so I'm assuming workplaces are unintentionally becoming less safe. Because of that? Would that be? Well, I think it's a different way of looking at it. So the way Pioneer works in our system work is we use conversation intelligence.
So essentially, we use everyday language in chat systems that you just do as you're working away to understand how you're tracking and how we can support you and amplify what's going really well and all that sort of stuff. The one thing about written communications is it's quite easily misinterpreted.
So people can get very triggered very quickly when that wasn't the intent of the sender so that that is one thing we have to be aware of communication and I think also now because of the way that we work we work in a hybrid fashion or remote fashion we tend to work in a very asynchronous way so you can send a message off to someone and they don't read it for a couple of hours so if they read it a couple of hours later and they have a problem and they pick up
the phone to you and you're like like, oh, hang on, what? That was two hours ago. So I think the asynchronous nature of the way that we work, the distributed teams nature, because most organizations are working in some way of hybrid, if roles can work in that way. And then the third thing, the reliance on communication, text-based communication, messaging communication, creates a different environment for us to be aware of in terms of how we communicate effectively.
But then also, how do we deal with some of the bigger issues. So how do we deal with conflict? How do we deal with decision maker? How do we deal with relationships within teams? Because at the end of the day, we're all people and it doesn't matter what technology you throw at people or what systems or processes, people are people and we're all different. So being able to deal with people and the different requirements of people is the challenge.
And I think our workplace has made that more difficult. All right. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of Pioneer, which I really can't wait for you to share because it is really cool and interesting, but I want to talk about the problem more because you shared with me your story and you said you didn't recognize the signs in yourself. Nobody around you recognized the signs. How are we missing that? And that, That, I imagine, is becoming more common because so many people are stressed.
I saw a stat, I think, on your website, which is 40% of people said burnout was a reason for leaving their job in 2021. Yeah. What's going on? I think there's a couple of things at play. So the first thing I'd say is there is a difference between stress and burnout. And sometimes people get confused and there's the interplay between the two. A lot of people are stressed and stress can lead to burnout, particularly if it's not managed. It will often sometimes lead to that state.
And I'm pretty sure that's what happened with me. It was a chronic buildup because the doctor said to me, this doesn't happen overnight, right? This is a buildup of many, many years of stuff happening. So there is a difference. And I would encourage people, if they're starting to feel that they're burnt out, to absolutely just have a look into what is stress and what is burnout and get some help. You don't have to suffer, I think is the very important message.
So that's one thing. I think be clear on what it is. The burnout really is, by the time we get to burnout, it's not just that you're tired and you're fatigued. But you're starting to have other kind of symptoms, right? So emotionally, you're not connecting with people anymore. You lose your tolerance for what was happening previously that you would have been totally fine. You lose your motivation.
So that was the stuff that was happening to me. Actually, I was losing my tolerance for things that I would have been totally fine with before. I was losing my motivation to do the work that I needed to do. I was finding it difficult to connect. Not that I was finding it difficult to connect, but I felt myself withdrawing. So I wasn't connecting. I knew I was withdrawing from people, from situations, stuff like that.
So when that's happening consistently, that's more likely to get into the burnout territory. Really disrupted, lack of sleep, all of that stuff, right? So that's when you're kind of getting into the burnout territory. So I wouldn't sort of be clear on which one it is firstly. But the second thing that we have now, again, that we didn't have even when I was burning is that we've had a consistent sort of five years of no relief. So the stress and the.
Challenge for us as human beings in our society is just continuing to ratchet up. So we started with, if you're in Australia, you've had bushfires or floods or anything, right? Because of the country that we live in. Then we've had COVID on top of that and all of the uncertainty and the fear around a pandemic. And then we came out of that into economic uncertainty.
So we've had job losses and we've had companies going out of business and we've had a lot of pressure for people to perform and to be productive. And most organizations, I believe, see productivity as toxic productivity. They just drive people to do more. So we've just had a constant sort of barrage of relentless things thrown at us. So there's been no time to recover. There's no downtime. And the tools that were not there eight years ago for me are still not there eight years later.
So that's, I think, why we're seeing such record instances of burnout.
And the identification of them takes expertise like it takes a doctor or a mental health professional or a counselor or someone with some sort of psych background training experience to go hang on a second this is what's going on over there and workplaces are not filled with those people so that kind of creates the perfect storm where more and more people are now starting to burn out because a we don't have the systems in place to identify and support them and secondly the pressure is on
and the pressure is relentless. And the third thing I would add to that is the pace of change has accelerated enormously. So technology has now caused us to learn and master things far more quickly than we ever would have before. We would have had time to absorb information, to practice, to then apply, to learn from, like we would have been able to do that. Now we don't have that. Our learning ability is expected to be exponentially faster.
So we have to master something faster and workplaces expect that and we expect that. So that is all contributing, I think, to what we're seeing is significantly higher rates of burnout, but with the lack of ability to get ahead of and manage. So that 40% figure from 2021 is probably quite significantly higher today, given those three factors that you talk about. And the story, your story that you shared with me was when you hit that breaking point, that was it. There was no discussion.
It was, I'm done. I'm out. Can you share a little bit about that?
Because I think managers need to hear that and need to understand you know what the consequences can be yeah i think if i reflect on my situation i was feeling not great for a long time so as i said sleep was disturbed i had been withdrawing from my family and my friends mostly so my work had become kind of tunneled vision it was my work all my children that was it there was nothing else and that because i was in survival mode and I started to have some
physical things, not big ones, just little ones. And the doctor was like, oh, I'm a bit worried you might be experiencing this. And I'm like, oh, that doesn't exist. I thought it was a pretend. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I still hear myself say it and go, I didn't think it was real because I had no reference. No one I knew around me had had this experience and I just thought I was weak and I couldn't cope and what's wrong with me.
And so that kind of started to happen and then that that progressed and that just got worse and worse and worse and to the point where I didn't I wasn't conscious of things starting to happen until the point as you mentioned that I had been doing a board paper over the weekend again weekend late nights right and they were well aware of how I was working I had to work to get that stuff done done.
I'd done a board paper over the weekend and I affronted up to my boss's office on a Monday morning and I said, I'm done and handed him over the report. And he said, okay, the report's done. I said, no, I'm done. Done. And I wasn't conscious of doing that. That was not what I intended to talk to him about. And then I probably burst into tears, which I've never in my whole 20 years ever cried at work like that.
And he was as shocked as I was. And he was a fantastic, fantastic, is a fantastic man and was a fantastic boss and was like, put the report down and said, talk to me. Are you okay? What's going on? And I kind of just said, I can't, I can't keep doing this. I just can't. Like there was, and I couldn't even have the language. I couldn't even articulate why I just knew I couldn't do it.
And so I gave my notice and I gave six months notice because I'm a good corporate citizen and I wanted to finish the work that my team and I were doing. And we were really on the track to achieving an amazing outcome, which we did. So I gave the notice, but I just knew at that point that I was done. In reflection, as I was saying to you, were there things that could have prevented that? Absolutely.
And that was not my only option. But in that particular moment, it was the only option that I could consider that I could survive from because I was totally in survival mode. And the giving of the six months notice and allowing to wind things down was my way of giving to the company to show them that I was actually doing the job, which I was, of course, and I was always going to do the job.
But there were many moments up until that point and then post that point that it could have been a different outcome, but it wasn't. And I didn't know even how to ask for that, to be fair to the organization. I didn't know how to ask for it. I didn't know what I wanted. I just knew that it had to change. And I knew in my gut, like in my very soul, I knew that something had to change. And again, I don't remember ever having an experience like that.
And your situation wouldn't be unique, what you've experienced. Obviously, that's why you've built Pioneer. No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I think the difference between then and now is that people seem to be more open to discussing it.
There's definitely a lot more support around in terms of material pros and cons to that because then you know that overwhelms people but the no it's not an uncommon story it's not an uncommon experience I would have hoped that you know we'd learnt enough from the last eight years to address that but I'm not seeing enough evidence that things are actually changing. And you talked about toxic productivity. Can you flesh that out a little bit?
Yeah, it's the drive to do more as the measure of productivity. So if we think back, a lot of the measures of productivity came out of that industrial era, production lines, doing X amount of tasks and X amount of time equals X amount of value to the company. And that was valid. You know, if you're on a production line, that's an absolutely valid way of measuring It's repeat work, it's rote work, it's how quickly you can, how efficient you can be. That's entirely appropriate.
If we think about the way that a lot of us work now, not everyone, but a lot of roles these days, I would say are considered knowledge roles, particularly with the rise of technology and all that sort of stuff. Knowledge roles cannot be measured in a do more sense because doing more does not necessarily mean it's quality work or it's actually the role that you've been hired to do or the role that your organization needs you to do.
So we apply old metrics to current working and future working, which then creates this toxic environment of you must do more to be effective, and yet all the doing more does is having a negative effect on people. So I see this repeatedly. People are like, teams are productive. I'm like, tell me how you measure productive. They've done this many meetings or they've done this many emails or they're working this many hours. I'm like, well, how does that achieve their objective? Like,
what is the objective and how are you measuring it? And that bit is missing. And so when you have a measure that's missing and organizations are set up to achieve measures, you'll go for whatever measure that you have. And so we've seen this repeatedly. So we labeled it toxic productivity because it is absolutely having a negative impact on our employees and our employees' mental health.
And that's not just people at the frontline doing the work. That's managers as well as executives, as well as boards, because boards are asked for. Measures of success of their companies to provide to their shareholders. And they're like, well, here's what we think productivity is. So it's actually a problem with the whole system. And so through our research, we understood that this was driving a very poor outcome.
And then we saw from our data that wellbeing and productivity was so closely aligned.
And indeed, you need wellbeing, mental wellbeing and mental clarity to be able to be productive in a knowledge role and so we started going well can we measure that and can we then apply that to an organization and can that be the new measure of productivity because if you have a measure for organizations to work towards you're much more likely to achieve a positive outcome so that's why we labeled a toxic productivity we were very
deliberate in the word toxic and then very very deliberate in the antidote to that, which we believe is positive, which will have a positive impact on the employee, positive impact on the company, positive impact on the community, but most importantly, a positive impact on the health system. Because we have people going into the health system in record numbers. And what we want to be able to do is we want to reduce the load on the health system and we want to help people.
And so if we have metrics to be able to do that at work, we're more likely to reduce the impact on the health system. That's amazing, Danielle. And, you know, you're highlighting, God, like we've got old systems for completely different styles of work and roles and output expectations. And we're still applying those default factory settings that we've always used. And so you're talking about moving from toxic productivity to positive productivity.
Yeah, we call it positive productivity. And we talk about it as the intersection between well-being and productivity and one feet to the other. So, and this came about, as I said, because we saw in our data what we considered the flow state. So, the flow state when you're being super efficient and effective and getting loads done at a high quality level. And we're like, wow, that's cool. That's actually what we need everyone to be in. But flow states, they flow.
You can't always be in a flow state. So we're like, well, can we measure that, understand when you're coming out of it to help you reset and get back into it? And if we can do that at scale, then you've got fundamentally more productive humans, which means you've got a fundamentally more productive organization in terms of quality output. So that's what we've been working on for the last two years. Actually, we've been working on the measure. We've been testing in a market.
We've been doing all the academic research ourselves. And now we've partnered up with our research buddies at University of Sydney, which is where I am actually. And we're working with them to measure this positive productivity and to make sure that the instrument that we're using is valid, is reliable, is a strong efficacy. And then we can use that in environmental, social and governance reporting. So ESG, which ASX listed companies now must.
Report on on a regular basis. There's not a lot in the S phase for wellbeing and productivity. So we want these to be the preeminent S measure in Australia and globally. And if we can get it to that level, then all of a sudden organizations will be measuring productivity in terms of their people's mental wellness, as well as their output.
And that is a game changer that will absolutely absolutely change the fabric of how we approach our people in workplaces and how we measure the impact of the work that they do in workplaces. Oh my God, I absolutely love your ambition. I love that you've also taken it, you know, not just to the employee, not just to the organisation, but to, and not just to teams, but to the health system as well.
Well, I think my background, as I said, in large-scale transformation, to transform a system, you need to understand all of the levers and which levers will you pull at which time to create the outcome. And one of the issues we've had with all of the well-being programs that we've had to date and the employee assistance programs is that they only deal with part of the symptoms. They're not looking at the fundamental problem that's causing the symptom.
And you could only really have then a small impact. So they're targeted at individuals, but an individual is never going to be able to change the entire system around them without a whole lot of support from the system. So we're like, well, fine. And there's a lot of companies doing really good work in that area, but that's not where we're interested. What we're interested in is the work practices and the systems that allow that individual to be safe and to thrive.
And so I've applied all of my 20 years of transformation and my degrees and all of that to say well how do we change the system because only when we change the system will we get sustainable results otherwise we'll get an uptick like we've seen so many times and then it'll all just kind of fall apart when the person that's driving that walked away and that has come from from my experience too, I've had many transformations or sort of project implementation stuff that I've
done that has gone super well while I've been there. And then I've walked away and it's fallen apart because we haven't had the right infrastructure and we didn't really address the systemic issue. So that's from years of learning and making the mistakes that I've gone, aha, over here, we need to address it at that level. It makes it fundamentally more more difficult. Don't get me wrong. It is harder. It is longer. It is way more stressful.
However, if we are truly going to see the impact, then that's the way that we must, we must, must, must address them. Love it. And that's leadership, right? People throw around the leadership word so loosely, but this is what I see as leadership. When you see a fundamental problem and you seek to create that change, not just of the symptom, but of the system that creates it.
So am I right in understanding that Pioneer is tackling the symptoms while you are in the background trying to change the system? Essentially, yeah, that's a really good way of explaining it. We take the systems approach. So we work with multiple stakeholders. And I talked about the levers levers of the system. We've identified, well, what are the levers that contribute to a successful organization or non-successful, but what are the levers in an organization?
That's going to be revenue, that's going to be cost, that's going to be people, that's going to be measures, that's going to be markets. So we've looked at all of those and said, well, to change the system, you must address each one of those in some way, shape or form in an appropriate sequence even, or simultaneously. So we've taken that approach and we've said, right, how do we build a technology solution? That addresses all of that because technology allows you to scale.
So that's the beauty of technology. So the early days, and we're still in the early days to a certain degree, we do a lot of work with our customers. I have lots of conversations. I do lots of checking in with them. I manually go through and check data and stuff like that. So there's a lot of manual work still happening, but the technology allows you to scale that particular system. So that's what what the Pioneer platform does. And through that, we're able then to help with the symptoms.
So we're able to coach people to improve wellbeing and productivity. We're able to coach managers to improve that by leading a performance team. So we say to them, we show the manager, your team is surviving, stable or thriving. And here's what you need to do to address that. So straight through, no surveys, no action planning, no expecting a manager that has no skill in this area to do it. We do it for you. We understand it from the data of your team.
And we say to you, this is what you need to do. Same at the organizational level. So we'll show an executive team or an HR team. Here's where your risks are. Here's where you need to address it. And all of that is done from the conversational language that's happening within the organization. So that's how we're addressing the system at the multiple level. And then we give the board a number. So the board says, well, how's my positive productivity score going?
And everything that the organization is doing is layering up to shifting that result. This is brilliant on so many levels. And I love, you know, there's this whole conversation around technology and AI and, oh my God, they're going to take over our jobs. But this is just such a wonderful example of where, where you apply technology to solve problems so that you can operate at a higher level and solve system problems and change. I love it, love it, love it.
Enjoying the podcast? If you're looking for more inspiration, head to our website, thecauseeffects.com.au for more resources on how you can start using your business as a force for good. Or buy the For Love and Money book. Every copy sold allows us to protect one square metre of rainforest. Help us save 10,000 square metres by 2025. Can you share with our listeners, explain Pioneer. Tell us about Indie. Give them the bells and whistles.
I will give you the bells and whistles. Can I make one comment on technology and AI though, before I do that? So I talk about this a lot. I am a massive fan of technology. And the reason is because I said it can scale and it can do amazing things. My philosophy of technology is very much about technology augmenting us as human beings. Because I I totally agree with you. Technology should make us better. It should not replace us.
So I think the way that you design the technology and the way you implement it is critical here. So for all of your listeners, my advice on technology is, number one, be super clear on the problem. What is the problem that you're trying to solve? And therefore, you can find the technology that suits that problem, not, oh, my God, this is an amazing technology. Let me throw it at something. So be very, very clear on the problem that you're trying to solve.
Secondly, make sure that you're getting ethical and responsible technology. So it's ethical, AI, responsible, whatever you're looking at. It could be VR, it could be AR, it could be AI, whatever. But make sure it's responsible and ethical. And then the third thing is I would absolutely make sure that when you're applying technology, remember, technology is about people. It does not matter what technology you buy unless the person uses it.
And if the person doesn't use it, then it's a waste of technology. So we spend so much time worrying about that technology, we forget that technology is actually about people. And how do we get people to use the technology, feel comfortable and safe with it? So I wanted to make that comment on tech before we move on. That's brilliant. That's great advice.
Well, people are very fearful of it when it's awesome. It's like when we had the horse and cart and we looked at the car and we went, oh, my God. Amazing, right? right? So I think embrace it, embrace it in the way that works for you. Now, Ayanira and Indie, because I've taken a lot of those principles into Indie. So Indie is an app. It's the Microsoft Teams app, or it's the Slack app, depending on which chat system that you use, does the same thing.
And Indie uses conversation intelligence, as I said, to understand how that person, how you're doing and basically coach you in real time or coach you in a digital way to help you you improve your performance and by improving performance we're talking about improving productivity and reducing psychological risk at work so the legislation has changed in Australia and across all states and now psychosocial safety is as important and is a requirement
of doing business as its physical safety so if we remember you know 10 years ago 20 years ago people were routinely injured at work. They would hurt their back. Slips, trips, and falls was a massive one. If you work on a construction site, something can fall on you. There was very little physical safety protection. And so, fair work and safe work went, right, this is ridiculous. Let's do something. Now, they've done the same with psychological safety at work.
And that's called psychosocial hazards. So, creating an environment where people feel socially and emotionally safe So the system that we've built is helping people reduce psychological risk as well as improving productivity. And language, as I said, is such an amazing way of doing that. So the app connects to chat systems. It's 100% private and confidential. So if I'm an employee, I choose to opt into what my company has bought me and Indy then works with me directly.
As a manager, Indy gives me a sense of my team and coaches me for the team. And then at the organization level, it does kind of the same thing. The two areas that we were really trying to disrupt in creating a technology like this This was, as I said, from my own personal experience and loads of research, we don't understand what's happening for people in real time.
We ask people to complete surveys. They don't do them. And they don't want to tell the company what's going on, which I think is fair in most instances. So you can't really get a sense of a person until something bad happens. So Indy is there in real time. There's no surveys. It's literally just sitting there like a spell checker. It's probably all grammarly is the best way to ever think about it.
Then the second thing we wanted to disrupt was people don't know where to go for help if they need help so indy identifies something's going on positive or negative whatever it is and then gets you what it thinks is the right help for the behavioral pattern that it's seeing for you and we partner with experts so we partner with psychologists and experts that provide evidence-based content for us to get to the individual so that's the beauty of our system and we're able to scale that.
We're able to support people globally and we have big customers and small customers. So ANZ Bank was one of our first customers right through to a small business of five people and data is aggregated and anonymized for managers to provide safety and confidentiality and the system just continues to evolve the more that we learn to be able to create safe workplaces. I love it. And I imagine initially there's some reservations.
I know you've said it's anonymised, but I imagine every time you go into a new workplace, there must be resistance. How do you, you can say it's anonymised, but how do you get over it? And what's the end state when people eventually do opt in? Yeah, really good questions. It is. It's the first thing. It's the first thing that everyone says is, oh, someone will be reading my messages.
My observation is people are more concerned about someone telling other people about their messages than someone actually reading them. So we apply a very human approach to how we implement this. So we work with the leaders of the organization.
And the one thing that I do routinely, regardless of the size of the the organization is that I run a demo for the managers and I run a demo for the employees because employees will always go and talk to their boss first about what is this and shall I use it. So we always start with leaders and I show them my team's dashboard. So we use our product. I show them my company. I'm like, here's my company. Here's what you can see. But more importantly, here's what you can't see.
So you can't see that it's me here or it's, you know, oh, my designer here or my head of tech there. So I show them our company dashboard and immediately you see people visibly relaxed because they go, oh, great. So they're not going to dob on me to my boss. It's a very, very big concern. You're not going to tell my boss. You're not going to tell HR. Once they realize that, then people start to relax and they start to become a bit curious.
Oh, this is cool. What nudges will I get and what information and what day is the maestro and how can I do something about that? So it switches to curiosity pretty quickly. And then we have different responses depending on the way people learn. So the nudge is essentially a micro learnings that we're sending to people. Some people love to get direct messages from Indy in their chat systems. They love to read it from Indy and go, yes, awesome, Indy, thank you,
I'll do that. Other people never want to receive a direct message. They want to go to the dashboard and they want to look at it all at once and they want to look at their data and they want to do their own reporting. So we cater for all sorts of learning styles. Some people are much more visual than others. so you can absorb the information in the way that works for you. But most importantly is that you get that information at the right time.
Even that little micro learning, you might not do the recommendation straight away, but the act of reading it for that five seconds is a break and is allowing your body's cortisol levels to start to reset and to prevent escalation of something nasty. That's, yeah, it's just, I love it on so many levels. And I'm also curious to understand, you talked about ANZ being your first client or one of your first clients, and I've seen some of your other clients.
What does it say about the companies who are actually using Indy and Pioneer that they are going on the front foot? I mean, that they actually care enough about their employees' well-being to implement something like this. What does it tell you about their identity? Yeah, absolutely. And look, shout out to the ANZ team. They've been incredible. From day one, they tested the MVP of the product. They directed us as to how to build it safely and securely for a cyber aware organization.
So they've been incredible and continue to be a customer. Customer they the organizations and the companies that we've worked with in the past have been extremely people focused so people focused innovative so they're really like comfortable or open to looking at new technology and new approaches and very much understand that connection between productivity and people totally that's where we've been and we've had a lot of people that have helped evolve the product with us over the last couple
of years totally What we've seen now in the last six months, I'd say, because the legislation around psychosocial safety changed at the end of 2022. But it was really only the last six months that I think people kind of realized it, is now we've got a whole new set of interests from people that are really trying to create safe workplaces because,
A, the legislation requires and the regulation requires them to. to. But secondly, I think it's highlighted for them, the lack of safety in their workplaces. And so we have a lot of people now coming and talking to us about safety, talking to us about the board has asked for this, talking about, I've seen people go on stress leave and had been quite open to new ways of doing things. So the companies we're seeing today, we're seeing companies that, yes, are people focused.
Yes, what productivity, because everyone wants productivity as a way of measuring your value. But really, they're trying to genuinely reduce the risk issues in their business. They're trying to look at a way of doing that that's cost effective. They're trying to look at a way that's reliable. So we're seeing much more appetite now for technology in this area. And ChatGPT has highlighted to people what's possible from an AI perspective.
So we're seeing a lot more now of that, which is great, which is really good. It really is. And what kind of traction are you getting on the metrics, like changing the metrics of productivity and bringing organizations along on that? Yeah, so we're definitely starting to see uptick in productivity in the organizations that we work with. So we have a number of ways of measuring it. So we're definitely seeing that shift.
We're also seeing the, and we're trying to get measures around this part, we're seeing that the conversation around risk, around productivity, around wellbeing, mental health. Really lifts the whole organization or lifts the whole team that we're working with. So we're actually looking at measures of impact because I was talking to someone yesterday, has an incredible business, and they measure impact because impact is the number of people that have seen their content and thought about their
content, started discussing their content. We don't measure that at all. So we're starting to see quite a significant amount of sharing of what we're doing and talking about what we're doing, which is having fantastic impact in terms of collaboration collaboration and permission and safety. So that is a significant growth that we're seeing across the organisations that we work with, even to the point of people saying, oh, what did Indy tell me this?
It didn't tell me that. So we're definitely seeing that grow quite significantly. And the reason we want to measure that is because I think that will be a lead indicator of the other stuff that we're measuring. And that's huge. If you're opening up, if you're sparking these conversations conversations where, you know, the, you know, what are the measures of success? And people are starting to engage on different, you know, think about different ways of measuring success. That is massive.
That's huge. Yeah. It's been really interesting to go on the journey with people because we didn't necessarily set out for that to be the intent. The collaboration, the permission, mission, the conversations, the common language we thought may happen, but it wasn't really like a direct objective of the design. So when we started to see it, we were delighted and we thought, okay, let's dial this up.
What we were definitely trying, the design was very much about trust because if people don't trust us, they're not going to use it. So all of our design, all of our user experience, all of our messaging is very much about how How do we build a trust between the individual and the system, individual and indie? How do we build a relationship between the individual and indie? So that's a lot of where our focus was and the rest evolved, which of course we were delighted about.
And that makes so much sense. I was just reading the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer and, you know, they've been reporting on trust for 24 years and the 2024 edition is, the central theme is innovation. Yeah. And yeah, and how businesses, you know, have the opportunity to lead innovation, but there is a trust issue across different sectors. It's actually a fascinating report.
I need to go deeper into it. But yeah, trust is central to actually creating that change and how, you know, how we use technology and other innovation. Yeah. Yeah, and I think it's a great opportunity to engage people more broadly because most people love to be creative. Like I found that. And if you can get people into some sort of creative zone, it actually is a very positive way of building mental wellbeing and building productivity too.
So the ability to be innovative. I think organisations... Are not set up to do that though. So, organizations are set up to manage risk very tightly, to mitigate risk because if you are unpredictable, particularly a listed company like with shareholders, the share market does not reward unpredictability. The share market rewards predictability. They want to know quarter on quarter you'll grow and stuff like that. So, organizations then set up to minimize risk and to minimize unpredictability.
So, of course, innovation it's kind of the opposite right innovation is you want to give people the chance to take some risks and be unpredictable so the trick for companies is how do you do that in a way that doesn't then derail the core of the business and we run that in our own company like we're a tiny tiny little business we have like six or seven people and we still run innovative projects on the side while we're managing our core business so we're updating some of
our models and stuff like that for positive productivity for the psychosocial hazards. We're running all of that manually, independently on the side with experts until we're comfortable that works and then we'll build it into the main system. So we've even had to adopt that process because otherwise it derails your core business. So the organizations that are getting innovation right have figured that out. Yeah.
They know how can we be innovative over here and then plug it in when time serves or or create a culture of innovation that allows innovation within the core business. They're the ones that are nailing it. The ones that are still trying to figuring out it are kind of catching up. God, that's a whole other episode, isn't it? Like that's a huge subject around innovation. But fascinating. With Pioneer, obviously it works really well for big companies.
What's the sort of smaller size companies that it can add value to with the anonymized element, of course? Yeah, well, we need five and above as a minimum for group data. And we found most organizations want the team data. They want the organizational data. So, as I said, we're working with a group of SIPs who've been absolutely delightful. That's probably the smallest, and even that is hard. So, we typically have customers that are ranging from employee sides of 20 and up.
We have had companies of 15, teams of 15, that works really well. But in 15, usually you can get your arms around people and you can get a good sense. So, we usually find 20 and up.
What I would say to that, though, is people that are working remotely, rather exclusively exclusively remotely it can be a smaller team because when you're working remotely you're not seeing like you're not doing this that much you're not seeing them in the hallway you're not seeing them at the you know kitchen getting lunch so your ability to visually check in on people we rely on our senses a lot to lead and to connect with people so if you don't
have your senses it's very hard to do that so you can have a remote team of 10 and this will add enormous value to you because because you're not seeing your people all the time. Where I'm seeing for managers, it's creating a huge amount of support is that if you have a small team and you're a people-focused leader, you'll be checking in with them all the time. You'll be worried about messaging them. So our system just allows you to do that a little bit less because we're giving you the data.
So from a manager perspective, I had one manager say, oh my God, you've saved me so much. So their mental health was significantly improved because we just kind of did the heavy lifting for them. Yeah, superb. Superb. Superb. I can imagine you're going to have so much interest. You must already have a lot of interest. So tell me, Danielle, five years from now, if you could achieve anything, everything you could possibly hope for your dream like what what would it look like.
My dream is that we've you know we're kind of halving the number of people burning out i've never put a number on it but let's do it right we've halved the number of people that are burning out and we have reduced the impact on the health system like if we take even one percent of people out of the health system that are burning out and by taking out of the health system i mean prevent the escalation of them to the point that they
need to be in the health system because they're triaged and supported earlier, then that is a massive, massive billion dollar impact for our country and our health system.
So that's ideally what we want to be achieving in five years' time, is that we're supporting people within the workplace to prevent the escalation, and therefore they're productive and they're healthy but also we have a health system that then has a bit more capacity and you know less less frequent visits as a as a you know head of emergency told me some years ago when people start to present with physical symptoms that are driven out
of the mental impacts of their work that just continues so they come in with symptoms they think think is a heart attack and it's not, they patch them up, they go back to work, they're then repeated visit, they just keep coming back. And so that's what we're trying to prevent. Break the cycle. Yeah. That's amazing. I love, I love your vision. I love your dream. I'm going to ask you, you, you told me that you'd like to offer a special health check to our listeners.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we're, we're very much driven by impact as much as, as, as profit, you know, because we have to make money as well as, and we want to support people. So we would love to offer your listeners a free health check. So that means that they have have an assessment with Pioneer, we get to know their business and their objectives a little bit more.
We can do a health check on their business in terms of where they're at and where they'd like to be and provide some recommendations. So yeah, I'd love to offer your listeners a free half an hour health check with us. That's amazing. Thank you so much. And we will include a link to that in the show notes. Danielle, thank you. This has been such an enlightening conversation, conversation enlightening and inspiring and motivating. I just, you know, your ambition, I absolutely love it.
The whole thing around systems change and thinking about it from the nitty gritty on the ground to what, you know, what impact you can create. Just, I love it. You know, this is amazing. I hope your business succeeds, you know, to the level that you do get to have above the number of people burning out and reduce the impact on the health system. Thank you so much for taking time out to share your story with us. And I'd like to leave it to you to close it out with any final thoughts.
I would just say thank you. Thank you for having me on here today. Thank you for allowing me to share my story and what we've learned with a broader audience, because then the more of us who know and have the information, the broader the impact can be. So thank you to you. Thank you to the listeners. Hopefully you're still listening. And please, you know, all of us together can make a difference. So please take the time and the opportunity when you can to make a difference.
So I thank you, Carolyn, for doing that today. Music. Thanks for listening to this episode of the For Love and Money podcast. If you'd like to take a deeper dive into the purpose movement, visit us at thecauseeffect.com.au. And remember, doing good is good for business. So if you're not doing good, then what are you doing?