Just focusing on what we as a business can control, and focusing on what I personally can control and not what I can So I can't control that the tourism industry is not hiring it all right now. Of course
they're not. Of course they're not. But what I can control is for industries that are that they're having a really good experience, that my team is checking in with our customers and making sure that we're doing all that we can for them, and that we set up the internal processes and motivations that make that happen.
Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work. Date. Before we get started on today's show, I just wanted
to do a little call out for listener questions. I wanted to experiment with a new format on the Tuesday episodes where I answer any questions that you, as a listener have on your mind about work and productivity and particularly this new world of work, so I'd love it if you could send me through anything that's on your mind. My email address is Amantha at Inventium dot com dot au and that's also in the.
Show notes, so I look forward to hearing from you.
Okay, let's get on to today's guest.
Who is Kendra Banks.
Kendra is the managing director for Australia and New Zealand at Seek and if you live in Australia you've probably used sink at some point in your career and for overseas listeners. Seek is Australia's number one employment marketplace, which Kendra heads up.
So I loved catching up with Kendra.
She's such an inspiring female and really thinks deeply about how to provide a great experience to employees during this time of remote work.
So we talk about.
That, we talk about how her leadership team is making decisions and as you can imagine as an employment website, it's been a pretty tumultuous few months thanks to COVID and the huge rise in unemployments, so I love getting insight into how Kendra and her leadership team are making their most important decisions right now, and we cover a stack of other things from homeschooling and juggling three kids and trying to work at the same time and even
providing a limited cares leave. So on that note, let's head to Kendra to hear about how she works.
Kendra, Welcome to the show.
Thank you great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Now to paint a picture.
And I've been starting all interviews this way during COVID. Can you tell me where you are and what level of lockdown or IO or not are you in?
Yes, so I can tell you.
I am in the suburbs of Melbourne and it is the end of July twenty twenty, so we are in pretty much for lockdown. I am sitting at my chair in my home office, where I've been sitting most days for the past four and a half months, so looking out my window.
And so you've been working from home for a decent chunk of time. I'm about the same. I think I'm on about five months. And I want to.
Know how has the way you approach your work on a day to day basis changed from making the shift from I would imagine like, were you in the office almost one hundred percent of the time previously.
Yes, I was, so I work for a SEKH.
I run the Australia New Zealand businesses for SEKH and for those of your listeners who don't know, SEEKH is a technology company for the recruitment industry and for job seekers, so we run job boards and recruitment technology, career advice, talent platforms, et cetera. So, being a technology company, were actually quite enabled to work from home, and a lot of people at seek would work from home quite often,
but I personally didn't. As a people leader, I really like the kind of face to face, in person interaction of leading my team as individuals, as groups, as project teams, et cetera. So I worked from home I don't know, maybe once every two or three months. And when I did, I mean I was literally sitting at the desk in my son's bedroom under his bunk bed. That was that was my home office setup prior to COVID. So when COVID hit, the first thing I had to do was
set up a desk. So yeah, we've advanced on that front in the last last five months.
For sure.
That's good. Good to hear You've got a desk that certainly helps. So yeah, I guess.
Being a people leader how did you go about making the transition from literally seeing everyone and presumably your team and the teams under those leaders pretty much every day to having no face to face contact, Like, how have you gone about I guess compensating for that loss?
Well, like most organizations, we started off by pretty much transferring everything we were doing in person onto Zoom, and we started off just replicating that exact same in off as schedule on Zoom. Now that meant we had still lots of virtual face to face contact, but we probably weren't optimizing for a new kind of remote working setup because having a lot of one to ones in big
meetings on Zoom it gets very tiring very quickly. That we all found that Zoom fatigue is very real, and also you're not really taking advantage of all the tools and different ways of working that being remote technology affords you.
So, what have been the biggest and most impactful changes that you've made on that front?
Then?
I wouldn't say there are big changes. We've been optimizing kind of as we go, and probably that's the most important changes that we check in every few weeks on how we're going From a team. Rhythm's perspective is this still the do we still need this many meetings? Do we need that meeting? Do we need another one? Which of our meetings could we be doing asynchronously using email
or slack instead? Which check insul should we increase because we're seeing collaborations start to fade in certain areas, So I'd say that that really regular retroing of how we're working has been critical. The other point I think is just making everything shorter and sharper when it's on zoom, so we'll do you know, it was a forty five minute check in, it moved to half an hour, it
moved to twenty minutes. Making everything as tight as tight as it it can be, to just give people, give everyone a bit more flexibility in how they're managing their day.
And how have you managed to tighten it?
Like how do you go from a forty five minute meeting to a twenty minute meeting?
Well, I think making them more frequent. So we found shorter and more frequent has been better as a team being very specific about what we wanted to talk about with which group, when being a little bit more rigorous around well, what's the agenda for this meeting? Who needs to be here, what aren't we going to discuss here?
And you know, fortunately we work in a very trusted collaborative environment, so with a team with higher levels of trust, I think you can shortcut to the heart of an issue more quickly.
I love the idea of shorter meetings.
I was reading some research from Microsoft a couple of weeks ago that shows that at the thirty minute mark in a video call like Zoom or whatever platform people are using, that is when the brain starts to officially fatigue. So I love that you've got them down to twenty minutes. That would certainly be in line with the research.
And I wish it's not every meeting. That's a few of our meetings.
That research was fascinating and I think just so interesting because you know, we're learning more about how the brain works when you're on Zoom and on calls like this all the time, and it's not it's not optimal.
It's not it's not and something else like do you can't remember that this was in some of Microsoft research, but I've read it in other psych journals that one of the things that make zoom calls more fatiguing is that most people don't hide the view of themselves. So there's all this impression management going on, like looking at how you're looking when you're talking, not from a vanity point of view, but just kind of going, oh, do I look oka my expressions okay?
Inappropriate and so forth.
And I'm curious, like, do you hide yourself view on video conferences?
No? I don't.
I've read that same thing and maybe I should. One of the things I actually find hardest as a leader over the past few or have found hard over the past few months, is understanding how you're landing. So you know, if I was doing an all staff meeting with you know, say four or five hundred people in the room, we would do that in person. Yes, we might have some people watching on zoom, but most people would be in
the room. And so as you're explaining, you can kind of see are people along with you, are they not along with you? Are they understanding? Do they look confused?
Do they look bored? And when you're doing big meetings on zoom or a webinar, you have no idea, you know, So I actually find I need to look at myself to I don't know, create some kind of energy, I guess, and make sure that I'm coming across with energy and to sort of self correct in some of these meetings because otherwise there's just no feedback loop.
That is really interesting, isn't it. How else have you compensated for that? Because I can completely relate. I do a lot of virtual keynotes speaking, and I mean previously I or my keynotes were face to face and you get, you know, live reactions from the audience, the things like a joke's landing even but you have no idea when it's when it's virtual. So are there other sort of tricks that you've been using to get a sense as to how things are landing and the reaction that you're getting.
Well, one of the things it's I'm not sure it's a trick we've used, but it's something we've found is we use the slide oh app or website for questions for Q and A during an all staff meeting. And whereas when we started using slider where you can post questions anonymously, it was very much a pure questions list. What we found over the past few months is it's almost becoming like a comment feed of the meeting, so people will say things like, oh, really liked that point you made.
About that or.
Interesting, still wondering about X y Z. So it's a little bit hard to kind of watch that live feed while you're presenting in the meeting, but that has created some feedback in those big webinar type sessions. The dangerous side is then sometimes anonymously people will write something not so nice, and you know that can get you a
bit off track as you're presenting. So we're trying to manage what's the way to create a feedback leap during those meetings without sending them down rabbit hole or taking them off track.
Yeah.
I find the chatbox function in zoom just critical whenever I'm doing virtual keynotes, and yeah, I encourage people to just taste, you know, comment on what you're thinking or if I haven't explained something clearly, just ask as.
I go along.
Yeah, it is tricky though to kind of monitor that and stay on point and on message. But yeah, I like the sound of what you're doing and using slide over that. Yeah, similar function to zoom chat absolutely, Yeah, exactly. I want to come back to what you said about how you're doing regular retros of essentially reviewing how you're working and whether you've got like the right frequency the right duration of you know, meetings and catch ups and
so forth. Can you take me through, like specifically what happens in one of those retros, Like is there almost like an agenda of specific questions that you're asking or is it more organic than that? And is this like with your team of direct reports. I'd love to kind of get some more details there.
Sure, So it's with my team of direct reports and also really in every team through the business. So being a software engineering business at our core, we use a lot of the agile methodologies and retros are you know, I think have come from that that kind of agile methodology world. So what we would do in person is make it it was very unstructured, you know, the board with post it notes, what's going well, what could be improved, ideas for the future, kind of stick up the post
it notes and then group them up and discuss. Just yesterday, in fact, with my direct reports, we were running a retro and we use Miro, which has a post it note type functionality, so we could replicate that approach to retros very easily through Miro.
Yesterday, we did ask specific questions.
They were about how because we were kind of reviewing the financial year. What were our achievements during the year. What was disappointing as a team? How are we working well together as a team. What could we be doing differently when we look ahead to the next year. What are going to be the key elements that drive success for us? So sometimes will use specific questions, other times will make it much more general. What's going well? What could be better?
I want to ask more from an individual perspective. Now that you are so far into working from home and that's like a complete one eighty for you, what are some of the things that you're finding useful in terms of your own productivity and your own energy levels? Like are there certain rituals or routines that you've incorporated into incorporated into your day? Like what's serving you right now?
Yeah, it's a great question. It's been changing a lot through the past few months, depending on what's happening with school. So I have three kids, they're five, ten, and twelve, and depending on whether they're on school holidays or homeschooling or at school, all three of which have happened in the last five months and then gone back again, that
drives what the house is like. So you know what the consistent pieces for me are creating a really clear dividing line between when I'm at home and when I'm at work, and using this office space I've created as a this is my this is my territory. Kids, you're not allowed in unless you knock kind of routine. And that also has helped me psychologically. So when I'm in the office, I'm in the office at work, and when I am not physically in the office, I am at
home with the family, with the kids. So that psychological dividing line is helpful. I've also been, you know, like a lot of people, I think, trying to force myself outdoors every day, just getting the fresh air, having a walk, clearing the head. I probably didn't realize how much commuting and being at the office and going out for lunch or going out to get a coffee gives you the
opportunity to be outdoors and in the fresh air. And if I don't force myself outside, I can actually sit, you know, within my office and go back and forth to the kitchen in the bathroom and not go anywhere else for nine hours straight. So I really need to make sure I build in those breaks and as much as possible to try to take them outside.
And I'm curious with almost like training your children about the boundaries.
How have you done that?
Like, I've got a six and a half year old at home, and I'm lucky that I've got some help, but i don't know, like how respectful she's going to be a boundary. It's like, for example, right now, as we're recording this, she's upstairs doing virtual schooling with the most wonderful nanny Tudor that is helping me out, and I've just said to them, Hey, I'm recording an interview, so just try to stay out of the studio.
Between eleven and twelve. And I think that's going to be fine.
But if it was frankly on her own, I'm sure i'd get an important question about her toy lion or unicorn or something some emergency like that.
Yes, And look, that's part of the benefit and joy of being at home, right is that you can have those little interactions during the day. So you know, when I say there's a kind of boundary, you know they are allowed to come in, and they do. They do so a bit respectfully and they try to be quiet when they when they walk in because they know that mum's on a meeting or mum's on a call. So I've tried to set this that, you know, maybe every
week there's one or two meetings. I really don't want anyone to come in, you know, if I'm presenting to the board or you know, this this podcast for example, I really don't want to be disturbed, and then I'll really, I'll put a sticker on the door. Otherwise, you know,
if they come in, that's kind of fine. It's it's it's one of the nice things about this forced remote working as we're all getting a little bit of an insight into each other's personal and home lives, which just humanizes everybody.
I think.
I know, I've really enjoyed that as well.
And I want to know, like, in terms of almost like chunking out your day, particularly during homeschooling, have you started to develop different rhythms where you'll be doing some work and then some homeschooling or time with the kids and then work again, or you sort of still you know, Okay, I'm at work for the next eight night hours and then I'm you know, back to being a mountain.
Yeah.
I've been lucky in the since that my husband has been doing more of the homeschool support, so I have been able to just lock myself and say, I'm working. You know, these are my work hours. But that's I would say, been the exception, not the norm for most people I'm working with. And it's been interesting how we have had to adapt our business working rhythms around that, because it's just not if somebody is trying to homeschool, it's just not possible to work at the same time.
And I think at the beginning maybe some people thought they could kind of do both in parallel. Oh, we'll just sit my child next to me. I'm sure it's going to be fine. They'll just get on with their work. It clearly has not been so, you know, for some people it's hit not that hard, like for me because
my husband's helping a lot. For other people, maybe their kids are older and much more self sufficient and it hasn't been really impacting their day today, some people this has been just enormously disruptive to their ability to work from home. And actually, as a team, we have had to as a business, we've been spending a lot of time prioritizing around that because for people's well being, their
mental health, their well being. Expecting them to homeschool and be as exactly productive as they were without homeschool is not good. And if you want to keep somebody happy, motivated and able to cope with life, putting pressure on them to deliver at the same rate as they were before homeschool is not the right approach. So we've been telling people we have a carers leave policy. We've made
that basically unlimited during this COVID time. If you need to take cares leave, whether it's half a day, a couple hours here, a day, a full week, just take it because we would rather you focus on what's important to you and then when you're able to work, focus on work.
Wow. That is amazing. So unlimited care isly Wow.
I don't think I've come across any other companies in Australia doing that, not that I.
Know of whether companies are saying it or not. I think for a lot of people, it's just sort of become reality because you just can't. It is just not possible to do both at the same time. And I think that's what this whole lockdown situation is teaching all of us. We knew it right, anybody who's tried to have carrying responsibilities and work at the same time has known, but this has made it very obvious.
Definitely, definitely, And for those that aren't taking cares leave but are kind of trying to juggle homeschool and work, are there strategies that you've heard are working for people or even a there's strategies that you're using as a leader within the business to help people kind of get through this very crazy time.
We've been really trying to help people feel successful at what they do. So if you're trying to homeschool and care and work at the same time, you feel unsuccessful at all three. So some people have divided up their days. Maybe they spend a couple hours in the morning focusing on homeschool and then they work for a good four hour chunk and in that time somebody else looks after the kids, or you know, the kids have a bit more screen time than perhaps they did in the past.
Whatever works for that family. So, you know, I think probably the more, the more deliberate chunking up of the day is what's helping helping a lot of people.
Yeah, I think that that sounds very sensible, and I mean, look, there is so much stress and I imagine for you, like given what Seeks business is, is that like Seek is thriving when there's lots of employment opportunities going on, and obviously that's not going so well at the moment in Australia.
I imagine it must.
Have been a very stressful few months for you. How have you gone personally about managing the stress and uncertainty given the business that Seek is in and given you your leading this company.
Yes, well it's it has been a roller coaster, that's for sure. So when COVID hit, you know, the easiest way to track what's happening on our business is just the number of job ads on the site, and the job ads on the website fell by about seventy percent within a matter of two weeks, so it's really really dramatic. But then that was in April and since then we have seen a steady, steady improvement and actually in some
areas we bounce back quite quickly. So I think there's some parts of the economy where they actually let go of people very quickly and are now having to hire back quickly. So now we're tracking at about thirty percent below where we were pre COVID, So that's obviously still not ideal from an economic perspective, but it's not it's
it's not that dire number we saw in April. The flip side of that is our purpose as a business is to help people live more fulfilling and productive working lives, and if we look at it from the job seeker perspective, what we're doing is more sortant than ever right now. So we've been really motivated by the role that we play in helping the labor market work and in helping job seekers stand out find the right role for them
consider different careers. That's another area we've been focusing on recently. And while our hiring activity is down, that side of our marketplace is unfortunately stronger than ever.
That's interesting.
It's kind of nice to hear about you connecting it back to purpose. I think one of the biggest questions I've been getting from clients and just people connecting with me is about losing motivation to you know, kind of get up and do their job and you know, go to work, that kind of thing, go to work.
But it's interesting, I think.
Like, you know, one of the easiest things theoretically is to go, Okay, we'll just reconnect back to either your company's purpose hopefully that resonates and hopefully you are working for a purpose driven organization, or to reconnect back to your own purpose and your own values, which again hopefully people are at least sort of somewhat in touch.
With absolutely And that's just so we have really we have really leaned on our purpose and seeks very purpose driven, and we're also very people focused. And this has been a really hard time for all of our people, for everybody, not just Seeks people, everybody, and so particularly for leaders, but also just as anyone in the business. To look after each other has become a bigger part of everybody's
stay today. And that's that's also I think driven, driven motivation and driven support over the last few months.
It's really nice to hear I want to know for you because I imagine you must have days like where you're like, oh my goodness, how like works works really hard and stressful at the moment, Like how do you overcome those feelings when you're just.
Kind of not having a great day or not having a great morning.
Well, look, I mean I get a lot of energy from work.
I really enjoy my job, I enjoy the team love working for SEK and the purpose that we have, and so I do remind myself of that, and you have to put things in perspective. You know, there's people across Australia and across the world right now who are literally trying to save lives right there are people with much more dramatically stressful jobs than I have right now. So
I think a bit of perspective is quite useful. But then within that, just focusing on what we as a business can control, and focusing on what I personally can control and not what I can So I can't control that the tourism industry is not hiring it all right now.
Of course they're not. Of course they're not. But what I can control is for industries that are that they're having a really good experience, that my team is checking in with our customers and making sure that we're doing all that we can for them, and that we set up the internal processes and motivations that make that happen.
I think that's so good to remember.
Just like in psychology, psychologists talk about people having an internal locus of control or an external locus of control, either sort of seeing things within your life as you know, within your control or seeing things as happening to you.
And I certainly think, you know, the more people can shift having that internal locus of control in terms of how they see their work right now when the rest of the world there's so much uncertainty that you know, really no one can predict what is going to happen.
That it's it's a pretty good way to stay engaged and energized, that's for sure.
Yeah.
And the other thing I find, which you might as solve, you if you have a six year old, small children are very good for distraction, right, Well, if you want, you know, I can go spend a few minutes with my youngest. Here's five, and he the biggest problem he was having the other day was he wanted to put socks on his truck. Do trucks thro sucks? Not normally, So this was not a very This is not an easy problem to solve. You know, we solved it. We put sight on that truck.
Yeah.
The problem I was given to solve this morning is, Mom, can we make a plane today that will fly? And I said, oh, yeah, Like, let's go to the office and get some paper. We'll make a paper plan. She said, no, Mum, that can fly us like a real one off the ground, and can we do that before breakfast?
Please?
Very good.
If you succeed in that today, can I come over it and then we can just all go for it and go somewhere.
That would be great.
I know I'll keep you posting. Something I read when I was researching with this podcast is you've said that you've deliberately tended to choose the riskier path, and I think you know, sort of relating to your career, and I wanted to know, I guess, an example of that, or maybe a couple of examples of that, and.
How you have gone about.
Doing that, because I'd say that that probably doesn't come naturally to a lot of people.
Yes, so I've spoken about taking a risk your path, and as you say, largely around my own career, and that's always been for me because I think I'm quite an ambitious, career driven person and the riskier usually takes you further. And so the challenge is that is obviously, how do you create confidence in taking the risky path and how do you kind of control that worry because you know, you start to question yourself, are you're making the wrong decision or you're going to fail. What happens
if I fail? Et cetera. That's the kind of the mental game you need to play with the with taking a riskier path. To share a couple of examples, some of them are not positive examples, and actually I think the less positive examples are ones that built my confidence more so. For example, I started my career in strategy consulting, and I had worked with a big nonprofit organization as a client, and I thought that I wanted to work in the not for profit world.
And I went to.
Work for that client, a big, big NGO, and sort of through the twelve to eighteen months that I was there, I had this like gradual realization just wasn't the right place for me. And so after about eighteen months, I left, and it took me a really long time to find the next job. I looked back on that decision, and you know, I could beat myself up about that decision, but it was actually because I had made that wrong decision that I felt more confident in the next decision I made.
You know, I knew that that wasn't the path for me.
And therefore, even though and that had been a risk to take that path, but because it wasn't the right path, I knew much more clearly what the right path was. And you know, the next place I ended up worked really well. I thrived, stayed there a long time. So I think maybe because that was early in my career and I made a not great decision but made it through to the other side, that built my confidence that it's okay to make the wrong decision. You know, a
career is not a one way path. You can always take a step back, you can always take a different turn. Getting something wrong actually can help you build your confidence more in which what the right direction is?
What did you learn about decision making?
Like how do you make those big decisions for yourself now, like presumably in a completely different way to how you did, you know, back.
When you took that job early in your career.
I think I've probably learned to ask for help a lot more. And when I say ask for help, I
mean just getting different perspectives on a decision. So you know, for example, I'm part of a network of other tech business leaders from a lot of US based leaders or some others from international and we meet monthly to discuss different questions and that could be a business question or a personal question or strategic question, and quite often people bring personal career decisions to that group just to talk through and get different perspectives on whether what people think
of that move, what would be the upside, what would be the downside, what would be the risks of that? And I think, you know, obviously there's no one right choice in a career. It depends on the situation, it depends on you know what's right for you as an individual, and sore for me, hearing lots of different perspectives on
decisions has made a big difference. And when I've had turning points, when I've had to make big decisions in the last five or ten years about my career, I have reached out to as many people as I could who I thought would have an interesting point of view on that decision, either because they knew me, or because they knew they'd been in a similar role or they'd faced a similar turning point, And just collecting those perspectives I've found really helpful.
I can definitely relate to that.
I think it's such a big one to try to remove emotion from the decision, and one of the places where I got that piece of advice from my favorite book on decision making that I've read, called Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath, and they say, you know, think about how you can remove emotion from decision because typically if you're feeling quite a motive about a decision, you tend to make worse decisions. And you know, something like career, I mean that triggers all sorts of emotions for people
making a big career move. So I love the idea of sourcing other people's points of view because they simply won't have the emotional attachment that you have. And then I guess another strategy something I've used occasionally is you know, if, for example, like they just aren't people that you can ask for advice, maybe it's a highly confidential decision or
something like that. Is to say, well, if my best friend or if this leader that I respect were faced with this decision, what would they do in this situation? And I found that a very helpful question to ask.
That is a great question.
I love that idea of taking out the emotion, and I think that that even applies in business decisions. Right, So you can be quite wetted people as individuals get quite wetted to the things they've worked on for a long time, and maybe you know a project isn't going that well, but it's hard to let go because you actually feel quite emotional about the work that you've done and the commitment you've put into it and how hard you've worked for it, even though the rational business decision
could be to stop or change or modify it quite dramatically. So I'm a really big believer in having lots of different points of view on any decision, as much as you can do that in your personal life, but also from a business perspective, And I'm wondering.
With the decisions that you have to make as a leadership team, like, are there strategies that you would deliberately use to make better decisions or try to remove emotion from some of the big decisions, because I would imagine, like during March and April there would have been some very emotional decisions to make as a business.
There were, yeah, and look some of them were a lot of them were around our people in terms of how quickly we were going to mandate working from home, and we ended up going more on the earlier side of businesses to say no, you know, everyone just work from home. This is very uncertain, let's see what's panning out.
But also how we dealt with our customers. So on the hiring side, we've One of the key decisions we had was around how much support we give to customers who have pre purchased advertising packages with us, So they would have said, oh, you know, across the next year, we're going to hire five hundred people, so we'll buy this kind of level of investment with you. Now for a lot of those customers, that five hundred dropped to nearly zero, you know, overnight, and so how we dealt
with that was really important. Probably the key approach we use in making decisions, which was relevant there, but I think is relevant for other decisions as well, is setting up what are the principles we're using to make this decision and which are the most important. So in that case, we had different factors to look at. We had obviously a financial factor. If we were going to refund customers a lot of money, that was going to be a significant financial impact. We had are we looking short term
or long term? Is it better to keep the long term loyalty or of a customer or the short term financial gain? What are our competitors doing, and what you know, if we're in our customer's shoes, what would we want to see? And we decided that our most important principle there was we wanted to be proactive with whatever we offered. We didn't want to have customers coming to us and asking. We wanted to be proactive. And once we decided that principle,
that forced everything else into place. There's only so many things we can do proactively. There's only so many things we can do quickly and simply. And if we wanted to err on the side of generosity because we'd rather keep the customer for the long term, then actually there was only a handful of options that would even make sense.
So we were able to kind of narrow down a very complex, ambiguous question about how we were going to support our customers to a narrower set of options that we could look at and make a decision quickly.
And in terms of deciding on what those principles are and how much each of them will be weighted, is that a group decision or is that something you'd think about before harnessing the collective wisdom of the group to make a decision.
We'd probably you know, there'd probably be one or two people who would lead the structuring up of that thinking, but then we would take it to to a group. So in that case, it would have been my leadership team, but also in consultation with you know, our finance team and executive leadership. Because it was a big, big decision, very symbolic decision in terms of how we relate to
our customers. But I think it helps for one or two people to kind of structure up, well, this is how we're thinking about it, and then you've got kind of a straw man for everyone to look at and debate and discuss, just to keep things flowing quickly.
I want to move on to just general career advice because I feel like people that have got, you know, become really successful in their career have often received a lot of great pieces of advice along the way. And I want to know, what are some of the most impactful, insightful pieces of advice that you've received over your career.
M I think it's such a good question.
And and do you know, I actually think of both the best advice I've gotten and some of the worst advice I've gotten.
Oh yes, excellent.
Tell me.
Some of the I mean, the best, probably the very the most impactful, best piece of advice I had was when I was trying to be I had been in strategy function for some time and really wanted to move into more of an operational function. And this was kind of early two thousands, and somebody advised that I move into digital marketing because digital was going to be big. You know, this is when like Google advertising was kind of just getting started and nobody really understood how it worked.
And I said, oh, we just kind of need somebody who's pretty numerus and can figure stuff out to figure out how we should use this Google tool.
Okay, why not?
Like but that was awesome advice, right obviously set me on a path to a very very very big industry that then I was able to grow my own career in. So I think, you know, more more broadly, I think a good piece of career advice that I've received and heard is to, you know, to be in sectors and businesses that are growing, because as there is growth in a sector and growth in a business, that creates opportunities and you can grow along with that business or that sector.
And having been in digital for twenty ish years, that's been a lot a big part of the story of my own career. Other great career advice I've had has
been around different jobs. You know, if you say to somebody, oh, I'd really like to be in this role one day or in that role one day, the advice needs to be, well, this is very specifically what the hiring manager for that job is going to be looking for, you know, and to be really specific about it, because quite often we say, oh, yeah, you know, you could stretch into that job one day, definitely,
and it's kind of vague. But you know, when the rubber hits the road and you're sitting in that interview, is the hiring manager going to hire you or is there going to be somebody who takes more boxes. In terms of some of the worst advice, you know, I think working parents, and in particular working mothers over the years, get a lot of very bad advice from well meaning people.
The worst advice I ever had was oh, well, now that you're having your second child, you probably want to come back to a job that's a little bit less demanding. Fortunately I didn't take that advice because I had more confidence in myself than that. But I think there's a lot of assumptions made about how parents want to drive their careers, which can be can be detrimental. It is something I watch for a lot.
Yeah, that's interesting. I haven't thought about that one before. And I feel like that is great advice to parents. And you know, let's face particularly mothers that are listening, because that advice is so prevalent, isn't it.
It's very prevalent. And look, that's not to say that parents coming back to work many of that. You make your own choice about what's right for you, right, It's not that slowing down is the wrong choice. It's that to assume that slowing down is the choice for everybody is wrong. Equally, to assume that staying in a similar career path is the right decision for everybody is also wrong. But how do you enable people to look at what's really important for them and to make choices that keep
their options open. If they want to have more options, or if they're very set, then they can go on a path that works for them. I think quite often, at least over the past twenty years, I have heard advice given to me and to other working parents that I think boxes them in.
And on the topic of advice. You mentioned this tech leaders group that sounds like a global group. It's interesting.
I'm part of a similar group, which is we're actually all Melbourne based female founders slash CEOs of businesses in completely different industries. There's a few tech companies, a few manufacturings.
It's very broad.
There's about nine or ten of us and we meet once a month. And now that the rhythm's kind of changed a little bit thanks to COVID. We used to meet face to face once a month and we had a very set structure and still do of how we run that group. So basically we would go around the
table and now virtual table. We would each do essentially a three minute check in where we'd talk about the top and bottom five percent of our life, So what are the best things and the worst things from a work and personal point of view, and also are there any problems, challenges, things that we want the Brains Trust's advice, opinions ideas on.
And then we'd kind of divvy.
Up the rest of the time, which was typically it was a three hour meeting when we're doing face to face, but that's shorter now, and then we'd each kind of generally take the role of facilitator and then we'd divvy up time and go around the room and everyone would give their sort of their ideas and input. And group's been running now for I want to say, three or four years. It's quite an amazing group. I like love it and look forward to sounds fantastic. It's awesome, And
so I'm curious around your group. How does it run, you know, because obviously that would be solely remote I imagine if a lot of the people are faced in the US.
Yes, so it's we catch up for an hour on zoom once a month, so it's much much shorter. Occasionally people will come, will send a question in advance. Let's I'm really struggling with this question. I'd love to discuss it. Or it's kind of like quick round robin at the beginning of the hour. What are the top things, top things on your mind that you would value others perspectives on.
And you know, obviously in the last few months it's been all about COVID and all about workplace culture when it's remote, and how do you deal with the disruption and the shifts in the world. You know, I think that that top five percent bottom five percent is a really great way of surfacing what's on people's minds, because sometimes you say what's going well, what's not going well? And that's really kind of vague, and you know, can go on forever. But top five percent is the real
winners and bottom five percent is the real issues. That's a I like that. I might bring that to our group as well.
And can I ask, you know, I guess, off the top of your head, have there been sort of interesting insights or pieces of advice that have stuck with you from that group during the period of COVID when you know, everything's kind of gone really strange.
It's gone really strange, to be honest, because a lot of them are US based, and the situation in the US from a health and government perspective is very different. A lot of it has been very it's been interesting to hear. It's been much less relevant for the Australian experience. There's a lot more people who are much closer to family members or friends who are very sick or in many cases dying from COVID in the US than there
are here. But beyond that difference, I think we're all really interested in how do you keep a culture, an organizational culture alive when you're all remote all of a sudden. So even businesses that were remote first before COVID would still get together every few months, you know, to have in person social interactions. So what are fun ways to have in person social interactions on Zoom? Yesterday my team was playing pictionary online. That was actually really good fun.
We enjoyed that. I've heard somebody on the call the other week said, there's a farm that has lamas and you can pay them like twenty bucks and they'll have a lama join your Zoom meeting for an hour. You know, there's musicians who you can you know, are trying to sell their services and will join you and play music for you for an hour on your Zoom. You know you can you can have rate them. You know, celebrities
will again. Uh, you know, people are looking for any opportunity, right, you can pay celebrity to pop into your zoom meeting for half an hour. Yeah, just silly things, but I think you know it's seek. It's something we're definitely really thinking about, is how do we make that those cultural connections stay alive when we're not going to see each other often For some some long period of time.
Yeah, definitely, definitely, And I'm looking at the time and we are like we are out of time.
Soay, look. My last my last question for you is for for people that want to connect with Seek and or connect with yourself in some way, what is the best way for people to do that?
Oh?
Absolutely, reach out to me Kbanks at Seek dot com dot au. I'm always happy to hear from otherose with ideas and thoughts and or on all the normal social channels.
Fantastic, fantastic, Kendra. I've love chatting to you and just getting insight into your ways of working.
It's been fascinating. So thank you so much for your time.
Oh, thank you, it was great.
That is it for today's show.
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