Do you wake up on Monday morning excitant for the week ahead, or do you have to drag yourself out of bed dreading the fact that you have a whole five days of work until the next weekend. With employee engagement flatlining across the globe, most leaders know or who are now starting to realize just how important an engaged
workforce is. Phil Chambers thinks a lot about employee engagement, and not just because he co founded Pecon, an employee engagement software company which has recently been acquired by Workday. Phil wanted to empower leaders with real time, actionable data on how their decisions were impacting their staff.
My company, Inventim.
Has used Pecon to track our own employee engagement for several years, and when I got connected to Phil, I jumped at the chance to have him on how I work and pick his brains about how he thinks about engagement at work. So outs Phil use his own technology to lead and motivate his team? And how does he deliberately reduce virtual meetings an employee engagement killer, I must say at pecon? And how did Phil use his partner's documentary filmmaking skills to boost employee engagement. My name is
doctor amanthe Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him, and this is how I work, a show about how to help you.
Do your best work.
So I'm always interested in why founders pick the ideas that they do when it comes to starting a brand new company that they will probably dedicate the next decade of their life too.
And specifically I wanted.
To know how did Phil approach goal setting, particularly in those early days at Pecon.
I think half of the trick to starting a new business is to really, you know, pick an area that's going to be big in five years, which is harder than it sounds, right, But so the challenge that you have when you start a new business is often that, you know, we sort of approached it with great gusto, and we actually we wrote some goals on the board on the first day, so second to January twenty fifteen, went out to the stationary shop, bought some pens and
some of that funny plastic paper that sticks on walls, and then we kind of wrote down a product vision for the next five years, which was surprisingly precedent, and you know, and a lot of it turned out to be true, but I think the difficulty with goal setting then came a little bit later, and that was really
once we'd hired the first team. We were around sort of eight to ten people, and it became I think we've probably had more people than we had tasks at the time, and it became quite hard to really focus everyone on one thing that they could do. And I think that, you know, we there was a bit of frustration around around the team, around you know, why weren't
we being successful instantly. You know, there's a lot of startup you know stories which just blow up in nine months and then they're you know, they're got a billion dollar evaluation. But it wasn't like that a peak on
at all. You know, we had a sort of methodical way of prototyping, and none of us were domain experts in what we were trying to do, which I think gave us a sort of unique set of issues in the fact that we didn't really have any customers, and without any customers, you can't really.
Do any learning. And if you're not doing any learning, then you don't really know what to build.
So we we sort of sat down and scratched our heads about this, and so rather than it turned into a lot of the fly situation, we said, you know, my co founder Dan came to this idea of putting a big blackboard in the office with the sort of four stages of what we call peak happiness at the time. And this was really, you know, ultimately what you would know as sort of sales stages these days.
Right.
It was effectively a pipeline view of the world, except that the ultimate goal wasn't to sell these initial companies anything. In fact, we explicitly decided, no, we're not interested in making money here. We just want to get twenty companies that would be very disappointed if they couldn't use Peakon by the end of the first year. And then we
just simply printed out the logos of these companies. So and then we just said to everybody who worked to peak On at the Simeon said, the only thing that anybody needs to focus on is moving logos along this board.
So if you're kind of unsure of what to do when you come.
In in the morning, have a look at the board and either get some new logos for the board or move the logos that we have along the board, which basically meant, you know, working with those customers to get them to a state where they deployed use Pekan were happy with it.
And that was incredibly powerful, right because every single morning we came in and we all stood around this blackboard and then we just talked around what was going on with these logos, and suddenly, you know, we went from sort of pointing things each other about why things weren't working to getting this incredible momentum. And you know, some of those customers, when I look back at photographs of those board, were some you know, ultimately inflection points in
the growth of the business. And you know, one of the logos on that board was Delivery Hero, which at the time I think was a three hundred person startup in Berlin. But you know, ultimately, as you may know, became, you know, one of the world's most successful stories in food delivery and had a five billion IPO and is now a top top thirty tax company in Germany. So little did we know at the time, but that the work that we were doing there was was pivotal to the future of the company.
That's so cool.
Now I know that creating an MVP or minimum viable product was really important in the early days, and that Peacon, which is a tech product, started as a piece of paper.
Can you talk to me about that? Yeah, I think it was.
It was really a function of the fact we didn't have a technical team initially, so we were four co founders, but only two of us had managed to extract ourselves from our current job at the time, and you know, with the best word in the world. Although we had computer sides, backgrounds weren't that coding skills were a bit rusty. So we sort of set out to read a lot
of the research you know in history. Peak on is based on organizational psychology, as you know, but it's implemented in a way that hadn't really been.
Done in companies before. So we used some off the shelf tools.
We said, okay, how could we sort of build a model of what we're trying to do here without actually productizing it in software. So we collected some survey data using type form, which you know, a freely available tool equivalent to sort of survey Monkey, and then we use this open source package called r which I'm sure a lot of psychologists in the audience may be familiar with.
It's a statistical analysis package. So we produced various different analyzes of the data we've collected, and then we packaged them up into a PDF file, which ultimately was paper right print out, and then we'd go to these companies and we literally go with the printer out and say, you know, is this useful? Do you find this few of the data interesting? You know what's good, what's bad?
What would you like to see? And that led to a sort of very rapid iteration of prototyping, whereby we could go through effectively like seventy versions of the initial peak on product, but without actually having to code any of it. And then we when we settled on something that was working and customers were like, oh, there's genuinely
quite good insights here. At some point we took the sort of difficult decisions, right, it's now time to build this into software, and that's kind of when the first version of the dashboard came out.
Now, a benefit that you offer staff is unlimited paid leave. That is something that you're still doing.
Correct, So we've been acquired by Workday, so I think it's available in some markets now and not in others.
So there is a you know, various you know, international rules around this.
Yeah, it certainly something that we tried it Inventium a few years ago.
We ran it for about three.
And a half years old up and I think, and you'll leave or you know, in terms of how much leave people were taking in Australia, the mandated required and your leave is four weeks, we averaged about five and
a half after we did unlimited leave. But then we sort of we ran into a few issues about three and a half years in where you know, we got so much media coverage in Australia for the policy that people started to listen to the messages around the policy that the media was saying, rather than the original intent was just take enough leave so that you feel balanced, like you're leading a balanced life.
As opposed to just take lots of leave.
So we ended up replacing that with a four day week, which we've been doing now for a year.
But I'm personally interested, how did.
You use unlimited leave, Like what's your approach to taking holidays?
So me personally, I mean it was it's an interesting challenge actually, you know, particularly as the CEO of a company. I initially, you know, used it judiciously and then it became harder and harder to take enough holiday as the company got bigger, and I think but ultimately, like, I don't think anybody works effectively if they're burnt out or haven't taken enough leave. So it's really really something I
try and do. And for me, it was more around, you know, making sure you had a holiday at a frequent enough interval to sort of recharge, even if it's not such a long time. And I think there's sort of the comfort of unlimitedly is you don't have that thought in the back of your mind of like, oh, well, if I do this, then I won't be able to you know what, if I feel in three months.
Time, I won't have an option.
I don't think we want any employees to feel like that, right, So that's completely counterproductive. You don't want people to be thinking about leave like that. So for me, it's a great policy. And yeah, I think you have to ignore the sort of media hyperpoil around unlimited leave and do your own kind of education internally around how.
You expect, why, why you're doing something right.
I think I think that's the important right employees, it's it's kind of useless to build. You can build the best benefits package in the world, but if you don't sort of also do the education piece around why in your company you've put this in not generally then then I don't often things, I don't these think these things land in the right way. So I think that's it's
something definitely we learn over time. You know that people you know, didn't necessarily understand all of the benefits package, and people don't necessarily understand stock options or you know, all of these other these great things, So you have to also do a lot of work in applying them and educating them as to how they apply in the in the different regional markets. Yes, how are you fanning the four day work work week working out?
Then we have loved the four day week, so we all take Fridays off and we've been running it for a year now.
So we ran a six.
Month experiment early on, and certainly we used pecon actually to track some of the metrics that we were hypothesizing around, you know, such as engagement. So with engagement, for example, we're already pretty high. We were in the top ten percent or ninetieth percentile for our industry of management consulting. By the end of the six months, we were in
the top one percent. So we were wrapped about that. Yes, productivity increased by twenty six percent over that period, which which we were actually really impressed with because a lot of the work that we do with inventing is training people and how to work more productively, so we were
already applying a lot of those strategies. And then we also tracked things like collaboration because we were worried that, you know, if people are working less like four normal days, would they be less open to collaboration because there may be more self focus trying to get all their work done.
But that wasn't the case.
Operation was maintained and stress levels, given that for the last half of last year a lot of the team were locked down in Melbourne, stress levels reduced by about eighteen percent, which was also pretty good in amongst you know, the landscape of what was happening outside of Inventium.
That sounds resoundingly successful and you know great that you could measure all that with.
Pecon, I know exactly.
So let's talk a bit about pecon and for listeners are not familiar with pekon, which I assume is quite a lot of people, can you just describe what pecon is?
Can you paint a bit of a picture.
Yeah.
So Peakon is effectively a continuous listening platform allows you to really get the pulse of what's happening with your employees. And then we use machine learning, so we apply that to generate insights and we can deliver those insights to anyone who manages people in your organization, you know, on a continuous basis and really really boil it down to what are the top three things that I should be
working on to approve engagement on my team. But you can also we'll show you like kind of what contributes to that as well, so we'll look at all of the different factors around what motivates people to come to work, and then you can use this also to make predictive insights. So on a macro level, you can look at what's the attrition risk in my organization and if it's high in specific teams or segments, then you can say, well, what can I do to reduce this.
We also look at.
Diversity and inclusion so how you can build a more diverse and inclusive workforce. And we've also got a continuous performance management product called grow, which is really around getting you know, continue to employee development more than anything really about getting a sort of picture of different areas where you want to develop and kind of what the perception of your peers, managers, subordinates is of you in those areas,
and that's not anonymous. So yeah, three different products and in use fire about twelve hundred companies worldwide.
Including Inventium.
Sorry, yes, so we've been using peicon for I'd say at least a couple of you is and we just love it. So you know, every month we're in there looking at the dashboard and certainly alloys OKRs in terms of our goal setting process. And quite a few people in the business have okayrs linked to data that comes out of pecon.
So it's high stakes.
Now I want to know how how does pecon use pecon Like, what is your process for using all this data and getting the most out of it.
We've used peak on data, I would say, to inform most major company decisions ever since we formed the company. And I think it's really a this is a different and almost almost like a management superpower.
I would say, you know, you know, if you get we run weekly.
I don't know about you and Mantha, but it really provides a way that you can get real time feedback on the way that you manage the company and particularly around you know, major events or comms or you know, when you launch initiatives or going through sort of big transformations and you can get pulse of like how is this actually landing with people? So there have been you know, it's been a learning journey for me as a first
time CEO. You know where I've I've stood up at a company all hands meeting and said, you know, expressed a point in a certain way, and then I've got, you know, some pretty pointed feedback and peak on there a couple of days later, and I think it really opens up your eyes to well ultimately would have been a blind spot for you, and enables you to do things differently, to acknowledge, you know, where things haven't gone so well and and course correct as you.
Go, which you know you don't you don't normally get to do.
And I you know, I give the example of the salary model before, but there have been countless incidences I think where you know, we've really been able to pinpoint problems, and particularly as your company gets to multi office or multi country, you know, how do you really know what's going on in any of those offices. With peakon, you do know what's going on and you have a real time view of it.
We will be back shortly with Phil hearing about how he used his partner's documentary filmmaking skills to boost employee engagement and also how Phil has reduced virtual meetings at Pecon. Now, if you would like to hear more productivity content, you might want to follow me on some of the social media channels that I'm active on. You can find me on LinkedIn just search for my name Amantha Imba, and also at Twitter at Amantha.
And also I am now.
A little bit more active on Instagram and you can find me there at Amantha. I Are there any other examples you can share where say you've launched an initiative or put out some comms and you've used that data to cause correct or you know, the data showed you something that was really surprising and then you had to act on that.
Yeah, I mean we've got loads of great examples, particularly in the customer base. You know, we we peakle. Customers are using it for a lot of different use cases. I think one that really springs to mind in my mind is kind of in a retail setting. One of our one of our clients wanted to study what would be the effect of giving of paying people the living wage.
Rather than the minimum wage.
Uh. And you know, they actually set up a control group of stores and then kind of you know, did you know, did a pay differential between those two control groups, and they saw that not only did engagement increase in in the sort of group that got the pay rise, but it also led to better customer satisfaction and ultimately to better store profitability. And therefore, you know, you could make the business case for doing that on our on
a on a bigger scale. So I think, you know, we've we've also seen examples of increased engagement link to reduction in safety incidences in the kind of a you know, industrial setting. So there's all sorts of of great outcomes that I think you and measure and I think I think obviously in Mentor you kind of proved it with your you know, your four day work week leading to twenty six percent better productivity, which is an astounding result.
Now I'd love to know what sort of things you do at pecon to maximize employee engagement.
I think that it really starts with the kind of values in the mission of the organization, right, I think ultimately, you know, employee engagement isn't around sort of fads or or you know, sort of perks, even it's really around you, do you find true meaning in your job? And you know that has to be true of sustained long period
of time. And I think you know that the sort of you know, really embedding kind of how how you work and why you come to work into the overall sort of company rhythm and sort of calling that out and you know, in terms of what are great examples
of how we've improved the working life of employees. So you know, in our monthly all hands, you know, we always start start with the mission and we talk about, you know, examples, particularly in our Customer Success team of great initiatives where we've seen customers change things for the better in their organizations because of Peak on data. And I think that's really why people come to work at PEACON.
Now, I know you've done some fun stuff with your partner who's a documentary filmmaker, to do some interesting things around engagement. Can you share some of the things you've done there?
Yeah, Well, we were scratching our heads a little bit when as I guess most companies where when we got through thrown into the first lockdown. So one of the I think genius ideas we came up was twenty six hours Zoomathon, which was kind of modeled on the old charity telethons that don't really had them in Australia, but yeah, yeah, that was a big thing in the UK right where you would have these huge television programs around comic relief
and stuff like that. So we said to all employees is right, everyone can who wants to you can sign up. You get thirty minutes live on Zoom broadcasting to the whole company. We're going to run it for twenty six hours and you can do whatever you want. So I was sort of scratching my head and I was like, okay, So one of my passions is is wildlife photography, and as you mentioned, my partners a sort of documentary filmmaker
in the environmental sphere. So I managed to rig up this live broadcast down the camera thing where I went out into the field at dusk and it all sort of came together at the last minute and I sort of connected this like HDMI capture thing to my phone and then broadcast back to the company and I filmed some munt jack deer and some hairs.
In a field in Norfolk down down the camera.
So it's kind of it was quite stressful because I sort of had to do the commentary and the filming all at the same time, which is now I realized how David Atenborough feels.
That's awesome if we have virtual meetings in general, because I imagine you must have done so much of your work via virtual meetings, zoom, whatever you're using, Like, what have been some of the strategies that you have used to make virtual meetings like suck a little bit less?
Yeah, I mean, try try and reduce them, I would say. I mean, I think the first principle is like can this thing be done asynchronously? I think a lot of people sort of, you know, the meeting is their first tool, and I you know, I think we have to get out of that. And it's fine if you're in the same time zone or a fine ish, but ultimately if you're not, and you know, we work across the globe, it's you know, there are only small hours of overlap.
You know, this is one of.
The ones with the ash Pacific region, but you know, in the evening in Europe, like we're talking to California, and I think, you know, the more of that people do, like the lesson goes to get.
We've you know, lent on a collaboration tools a lot.
I think one of the big standouts for me is a is a tool called Mirro, which is effectively a collaborative whiteboarding tool. I don't know if you've ever used it, Yes, absolutely brilliant.
How do you use miro?
So we use it a lot.
For doing you know, like the kind of meeting that would be like a strategy off site or you know, you know those kind of things where everybody's contributing a lot of ideas and putting them on a page and we're trying to organize them and that that really allows that process to run over multiple days, I think, and people to sort of do that work asynchronously and then
come back together. And I've I've found it to be a really good, I don't know, a really good implementation of that, So would would recommend it.
When you're setting meetings, Phil, how do you decide whether something is worthy of a meeting or whether it can just be an email or you know, done in some other asynchronous fashion.
I think it's relative to the level of discussion that you really want to have around it. I mean, you think you need people to feel included, right or to
be included not feel included. So I think it's getting the right standing meetings in place, you know, and making sure that you have a good structure and the agenda has contributed before and you have a plan for what's coming up so that everyone can get their stuff on there, but not creating you know, a ton of ad hoc you know, in addition to that, unless it's strictly necessary,
and I think that that can be tricky. But I think if you start to talk about this at a senior level in the company, you sort of have to practice what you preach, right and you know, really let everybody know that that's something that you know, as a leader, you're trying to actively reduce and try and trying to
make more time. I think you know when you may have you've obviously kind of taken this to the extreme with a day a week off, but we're also you know, having no meeting Wednesdays, for instance, So just giving people a day where everybody's not going to have meetings so that you can you can clete your calendar and get some more desk work or bookbook done.
Is that's that's quite effective too.
What's been the impact of no meeting Wednesdays?
Well, I think one of one of the nice things around. So there's advantage and disadvantages to working with California, but one of the nice things is the mornings are free. So I think it it just gives you know, people, I think context switching is extremely expensive, right, and I think it really matters like where you put the meetings in the week.
So you know, whether if people.
Have twenty hours of meetings but they're they're dotted around like every other hour, then they're probably going to be half as productive as if you actually organize that. So I think it's you know, particularly true in jobs where you have some you know, complex development work to do or product ideation or those things. It's it's quite hard to switch into a mode where you're kind of in a flow and then then switch out of it to
a completely different topic. So I think the impact really is is a better quality of work when you're you know you're in that zone.
Do you have like a rhythm in terms of how you organize your.
Wakes, so I tend to do my one on one in the mornings with Europe.
Then I have I have a.
You know, two teams really, which is the peak On management team, so we meet once a week. I also have the office the CERCHA team in workday. You know, it's a peak on is like one of the four pillars in that. So we meet on Mondays and then try and you know, keep keep the middle of the day free for customer stuff that comes up, so you know, kind of have a fairly regular schedule and enough. I think I try and keep like enough free time, like thirty percent every week that you can keep on top
of everything else. And I think that's obviously sometimes easier said than done, but that's that works.
For me and it's pretty pretty simple to do.
But then you know, I also do have an EA Laura, who makes my life a lot easier.
That's interesting.
So you keep thirty percent free, how do you do that?
How do that just just really by blocking time?
I think, you know, again, the principle of transparency worked really well as Peacon, so we we always had open calendars as well, which I found from a lot of customers they find that quite shocking. Too, but we were always like you know it really, I think it helps people reason around you know, is this thing that I'm trying to put in your calendar more important than you know,
this other stuff? Or can I be more thoughtful around where I'm going to put this meeting given the other stuff that I can see that you're doing, as in you might need some prep time before, you know, an important podcast interview with.
Amantha or what have you.
And I think when you move into a world where you have private calendars, all of that thoughtfulness around around you know what you know people people could could have have, it just goes away, right because I've got no idea what you're doing. So I think as much as possible, I tried to give people access to my schedule at least so they can they can.
Do that now.
I imagine that over the course of your career you would have received a lot of.
Advice, some good, so bad.
I'd love to know, like, what are some pieces of advice, maybe one or two things that have served you really well.
Yeah.
I think that, you know, when you look back at why pecon has been successful, I think it's really around trying to think about, you know, what are the mega trends here that are going to be different in you know, three to five years time. And I think to do that, you sort of it's good to be interested in quite
a lot of different domains. And I think we certainly applied what was happening in the you know, domain of the customer, you know, around customer experience, customer analytics real time to then what might happen to the management of employees with the you know, I guess you look back at it ur fairly obvious extrapolation that you know, to have a great customer experience, you need to have a
great employee experience. But then we were like, well, surely, if people are the most important thing in your business, and you know, the old Jerry Sanders adage profits and profits will follow, then why isn't there the same sort of real time data driven approach to managing and retaining
your best people. And I think that, you know, the more generalized insight there is that you know, by having a having a doing quite a bit of reading around lots of different domains and you know, not necessarily having any sacred cows around the ways things should be done,
then you can you can create yourself an advantage. And I think the fact that we didn't really have any domain expertise meant that many of the things we did at the start, which were sort of heretical, you know, like you were you can only run weekly and it's only our ten questions and that's.
It, and that's the only choice. You know, many many people said, well, okay, well we won't use peak on.
But but then the companies that did saw some great advantages and you know, we managed to build on that. So I think you can carve yourself a niche in that way, and that's been that served as well.
What about bad advice?
Can you think of any advice you've been given that it was just terrible and they did not save you.
Well, I think there's a you know, coming from the startup, Well, there's a lot of celebration around fundraising and you know, raising money and huge rounds and you know, that's just kind of accelerated. And I think we always saw it as well. It wasn't really something to celebrate. You're just giving away more shares in your company. So we never did a party around that or you know, really really
made a big thing about it. I think we, you know, really tried to focus on creating a sustainable business, and I think maybe another piece of bad advice would really be carrying too much around what the competitors are doing. I think that you know, this is quite nuanced, so I think you probably should care about what they're doing in a sort of in the go to market area. But I think in the product area, you know, you know hardly at all. In many ways, you know, just
blindly copying kind of other companies. I think it's terrible advice because you don't really know what's working and what's not working for them.
Now, my final question for you, Phil, for people that want to connect with you and try out pecon, what is the best way that people can do that.
Yeah, well, if you want to connect with me, then I'm on LinkedIn or Phil at pecon dot com. I would be happy to hear from any of your listeners who want to learn a bit more about pecon, and yeah, please get in touch.
Amazing, fantastic, Well, Phil, it has been a pleasure talking to you and an apsolute pleasure using pecon for the last few years as well.
So thank you for creating such an awesome product.
Thanks a lot for having me on the podcast a month, and thanks a lot for using Peacon.
It's been great.
That is it for today. I hope you enjoyed my chat with Phil and he's got your thinking about employee engagement, maybe in some different ways. And if you are not a follower or subscriber of How I Work, now might be the day to hit follow or subscribe wherever you're
listening to this podcast from. I've got some amazing guests coming up in the next few weeks, including author Sally Hepworth, who has a bunch of fascinating productivity tips that she does and uses in her own life, and also Phil Livin, who is the co founder of ever note software that I rely on multiple.
Times a day.
How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Jenna Koda, and thank you to Mattin Nimber who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound awesome.
See you next time.