Omnifia Meets Mikael Nilsson

Ivor Colson: hello everyone and welcome to Omnifia Meets. In each episode, you'll meet in the HR people ops or future of work leader and learn how they're overcoming challenges and inspiring workplace success through unique insights, stories, and opinions. So, I'm Ivor Colson. I'm co-founder of Omni fia. and today I'm really excited to introduce Macau Nielsen from Speech Mat, where he's the VP of people.

Ivor Colson: Really happy to have you here, Macal, how are you 

Mikael Nilsson: doing? Yeah, I'm doing well. Awesome to be here. Looking forward to this one. Awesome. So 

Ivor Colson: let's dive straight in. So before we get started, I like to ask a bit of an icebreaker question. So what is the kind of worst job you've ever had? For me, it was probably when I was working in catering and I was actually [00:01:00] working back to back 14 hour shifts and it's probably best, I don't build the company there, but although it was kind of maybe the most physically demanding jobs I've ever done, the good things were the, the camaraderie with teammates and that's something I'll kind of always look back.

Ivor Colson: Quite fondly. How about you? 

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, I, I've thought about this question a lot and we've actually used it as icebreakers at work too. And we had a work event yesterday where we actually talked about this specific thing. So okay. I've done some prep but ultimately I don't dislike any of the jobs that I've had.

Mikael Nilsson: I, I was never truly unhappy in anything because there's, there's always either. New things to learn or like you said, great people to be surrounded with and, and that just makes most job bearable. So that's a, a non-answer to your question, but I, I'll get to an answer shortly. I, I have also tried a lot, so I've in the summers I did forklift driving when I was younger.

Mikael Nilsson: I've. You know, paid my dues in hospitality. Like, like you, I did five, five years, I [00:02:00] think, when I first moved to London. So I've done a lot of that before beginning my journey as an HR person. But I guess the bottom of the list was selling strawberries for an entire summer. So an entire school holiday, nine and a half weeks holiday.

Mikael Nilsson: I had one day. In that time, I thought including weekends, I was just vlogging strawberry playing layout on my own. Outside of supermarket, was there good customer demand, at least. Sweets love their strawberries, but they're also very particular about the strawberries. I learned a lot about customer support and dealing with complaints.

Mikael Nilsson: And just to top it off, I didn't actually eat strawberries myself at the time. I didn't like them, so I couldn't even benefit from that, but my friends and family did. So 

Ivor Colson: no perks really for the job. For yourself, , 

Mikael Nilsson: pretty much zero fresh air, I guess. Yeah, that's about. That's 

Ivor Colson: really cool. Okay, so kicking on, so one of the things that's kind of, I guess risen up the agenda amongst executives is, I would [00:03:00] say employee wellbeing.

Ivor Colson: And I think that's kind of reflected perhaps in the demand of tools and services in the space. So I wanted to kind of ask. How are you approaching employee wellbeing at speech matters? 

Mikael Nilsson: And it's definitely also reflected in my LinkedIn email inbox. I would say there's a lot of these products out in the market and, and service around.

Mikael Nilsson: It's, I think it's it's almost hard to define it to begin with, and I think companies define it differently. So how we see wellbeing is, is what I will speak of here. Maybe that's not a scientific way or, or even the way you look at it. As we, when we sit down and think about how do we want to support wellbeing and what is it, we look through four lenses.

Mikael Nilsson: So it's the, the mental, physical, financial wellbeing, and we, we tag on community at the end, which is maybe a little bit less easy to define again, but it's that feeling of belonging to something and spending time with people be that remotely online or, or actually. [00:04:00] So in those four areas, we, if I break them down, I don't think we do anything groundbreaking, but what I really like is that we do all of it.

Mikael Nilsson: So the whole package, I think, supports people quite well. So for mental health we, we have real good mental health and counseling coverage included in. Private health insurance, and I think we realized that it's nice to do events at work and bring in speakers, but these issues, if they flare up, are so personal and they're obviously something that professionals need to deal with.

Mikael Nilsson: So we just want to give people the opportunity to leverage that. Yeah. And another, yeah, we have mental health first aiders that have actually paid off having, like we've been able to pick up a few issues and deal with them that way. And the final thing is it's a small thing. , we have something called Focus Friday.

Mikael Nilsson: So today is a, a focus Friday for me, which means we wrap up the week having no meetings unless it's something absolutely critical. But everyone gets that time to just focus on disturb work and get something done by the end of the week. [00:05:00] And I think that was the helps. So 

Ivor Colson: so to interrupt your, your focus part, 

Mikael Nilsson: No, it's, but this is critical, I would say, speaking to you so you fall into that

Mikael Nilsson: And then physical stuff we do in-person remote yoga session to get people moving. Massages. And again, the the private health insurance and we really went above and beyond on that. And it sounds maybe like a box tick exercise, but it's really not. When you get, when you get an insurance that really work, you know that it looks after your people no matter what happens to them, small things or, or, or bigger physical ailments, I guess can all be taken care of.

Mikael Nilsson: So that's on the fiscal front financially. This is, this, I feel, is something that people have and companies have really started to act on more in recent years. And you see more people offering this service just to help people with their personal finances. And it's clear and obvious that.

Mikael Nilsson: Whatever's going on in someone's life will be deeply personal. It'll be something that we need a bespoke solution for. Yeah. So in our case, we basically just offer [00:06:00] free independent financial advisory services to our employees. So that's really cool. Yeah. Whatever they talk about, it's up to them. If they follow up, that's kind of covered and included, so it's, it's more or less un, you know Yeah, is unlimited support on that front, and I think that's been very popular and especially now when we see rising inflation cost of living crisis mortgage.

Mikael Nilsson: Payments going up there. There's a lot for people. And even though we're lucky, like yourself, I work in tech, we're not, you know, we're generally not the worst off in terms of salaries in our, in our sectors, but there's still a lot for people. So we've increased, we've doubled our, our offering here, actually in terms of how much we have.

Mikael Nilsson: So now anyone who can do it, anyone who wants to do it, can do it, and, and they won't run out the sessions. That's, yeah, that's really cool. And then finally, and just ask questions, and I'm talking a lot, but I mentioned community as the last one. So, so we really believe in the power of getting together ideally in [00:07:00] person as much, as much as we can, and we're spread acro across the globe.

Mikael Nilsson: So we're based in the uk. Cambridge and London, but we have offices in Czech Republic, Indian us. So every opportunity we get, we get people together we fly them together. We make sure that people in the smaller hubs so that the Czech Indian, London, and and US officers have have the budgets and the opportunities and encouragement to form their own little groups and their own communities so they feel like they belong to something at all times.

Mikael Nilsson: This is maybe really basic stuff again. When we are working more away from each other, when we are spread across the globe, you just need to focus more and make more of a conscious effort to bring people together in different ways. Yeah, so it's, we, we keep it on this list of wellbeing targets or, or lenses that we look at this through to, to remind ourselves that we have to do it.

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, 

Ivor Colson: you say it is basic, but I would say that's an incredibly comprehensive view of kind of wellbeing and [00:08:00] particularly with looking at it physically, mentally financially, but also the community side of things. And I feel like that maybe there wasn't kind of such a focus on a lot of companies before the pandemic, and that is something I kind of really kind of struggled.

Ivor Colson: During the, the pandemic is that kind of lack of community and lack of kind of connection to a lot of my teammates. And I think a lot of other people and listeners would probably kind of share those, those thoughts as well. So I kind of wanted to, to also ask you what are your thoughts on kind of trends like quiet, quitting and what are the best ways to create like a, an engaged working environment in 2022 and, and.

Ivor Colson: I 

Mikael Nilsson: am not really on board. I was on board with a great resignation. I think what we saw in terms of the relationship between employees and employer, the, the rise of remote working and, you know, giving people more options to easily change jobs and all, all of that, and people just reassessing their [00:09:00] purpose in the pandemic.

Mikael Nilsson: What am I doing? Do I really want to work in HR for the rest of my life or do I really want to be a software engineer? Whatever it was. Mm-hmm. and that I totally bought into. And I think that was real, that that wasn't just a very successful branding exercise, quite quitting. I think even the person that wrote about it has.

Mikael Nilsson: Backtracked a bit, or I can't remember exactly. I remember reading something about it, but I, I just don't feel that this is anything new. Hmm. People don't feel, and we completely agree. Yeah. Engagement in this conversation. People don't feel engaged and they leave their jobs and they, they start zoning out.

Mikael Nilsson: Like, I get it. That's, but there's not nothing new. I don't think we need a brand for that, that. Running a company, getting people excited to be there, looking after them, having a purpose, having a mission, all those things. Yeah. Quite quitting. Wasn't needed as a brand. Yeah. For that term. I 

Ivor Colson: agree. Like I think people have always kind of, you know, been unengaged in their, their jobs [00:10:00] since day do. And that's nothing, nothing new. So yeah, that's, that's, that's cool. What are, what are like, what about employees that are highly engaged and are top perform.

Ivor Colson: How do you ensure that you keep them in speech matrix and, and at the company? 

Mikael Nilsson: So, I'm gonna stop using the word basic, but, but I like something, I like simplicity. And I think even though it's not a new book, Daniel Pink's book drive that just. It tells us that we should think about this as autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Mikael Nilsson: I can't remember if it's that order or not, but having it in those buckets to think about what really drives people, what makes 'em excited, and what ultimately can help make them good performers. That really makes sense to me. And I would say I use that a lot both when planning. People, strategies and actions and laying out plans for, for, for the year or the years ahead in how I want to shape a culture but also in [00:11:00] how I, how I coach leaders in the business.

Mikael Nilsson: Be that, be that, you know, manager, senior leaders or whatever. Because I, I believe in the simplicity of this and it just helps people think, okay, am I doing. Autonomy thing right at the moment. Am I communicating a clear purpose? Am I allowing people to master their craft, whatever they do for this business?

Mikael Nilsson: And just having those three as a tick box exercise, I think it's really helpful. And I, as I said, I, I genuinely believe that it works because if we go to something, we use Culture CultureAmp, for example, for our engagement surveys. Yeah. If we break that down, a lot of those questions fit into. Three buckets.

Mikael Nilsson: Right. So, so that makes a lot of sense to me. And I, if we think about what, what we are doing I think it's, it's exactly what I mentioned there, which is using our culture survey to listen to people, what they're saying in these three areas and coming up with very clear and transparent strategies for how, how to make them more engaged with, with the purpose.

Mikael Nilsson: [00:12:00] How to allow them to grow as professionals and humans here. And also how we give them the right level of autonomy. We don't, we don't wanna make people feel that they're completely left their own devices and unsupported, but to feel like they can grow from making their own decisions. Yeah. Yeah. That 

Ivor Colson: resonates a lot with me.

Ivor Colson: Like whenever I've moved jobs, it's always been down to lack of autonomy and like, kind of career progression. Like I feel like I've hit the ceiling. So then I've felt like I've had to move maybe to, to get that kind of new I, a new, new kind of perspective there. 

Mikael Nilsson: Do you think, do you think that the manager or manager's, leadership, whatever, do you think they could have done something differently then to, to make you stay or handle the situation better with clear communications or different conversations?

Mikael Nilsson: I think, 

Ivor Colson: For sure, like if I go back to. To one of those roles. It was, I don't even think they had engagement surveys and they [00:13:00] kind of asked me what I kind of wanted to achieve next. So it was a real kind of lack of, attention to employees in the company and what they actually want to achieve going forward for the next, one or two years.

Ivor Colson: And then the business wasn't kind of, Scaling in, in the kind of Way I'd, I kind of hoped it would. And I kind of just got really impatient and, and chose to, to leave that, that position. So I wanted to just, just learn. And that's like my, one of the key things to my mindsets is just always learning new things and kind of new skills

Ivor Colson: so. . So, yeah. If that gives you kind of answer to your, your question. 

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah. And, and I think, I like the concept of stay interviews. People have different opinions on that, but I think as a, as a framework and as a reminder that we should have these very frank conversations with employees and, and make sure that they're employee driven are really important.

Mikael Nilsson: So, making mm-hmm. often push managers when they say this person is. To ask them, we need [00:14:00] to keep them. Okay. Have you had that conversation with them to ask what, you know, what, from 12 months from now, what needs to be true for you to still be happy, for you to still be engaged and for you to, when a, when a message appears in your LinkedIn inbox about a new job, for you to ignore that and.

Mikael Nilsson: and just framing it that way. I think a lot of managers appreciate that be because they go, oh yeah, that's, I just makes it a thing that I have to do and I can do that. That's not complicated. Yeah. And it makes the employee speak rather than me guessing. So I, I have found that really useful. I know that even have people in speech in the, in our people doing that, that don't like the concept, but but, but I do and I think it works.

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, 

Ivor Colson: I think people, like managers as well kind of take their teams for granted as well. They think their teams are always gonna be there. It's not at the top of the agenda to actually keep people really engaged, I would say, and like stop people from actually leaving a company. But actually when an, an employee does leave this results in, I think a [00:15:00] cost of around 16% on top of payroll overall in the company.

Ivor Colson: Gartner came out with some statistics recently that employee turnover is around 20 to 24% this year in 2022, which is incredibly high. Mm-hmm. . So yeah, switching gears and, and kind of looking forwards, what are your kind of key focus areas in 2023? 

Mikael Nilsson: So just a bit of background, I guess, on speech might help with the context.

Mikael Nilsson: So speech mats is a, we are, Speech recognition company. We are about 170 people at the moment. As I said, we're spread across the globe, but the majority of those are in the, in the uk. I joined in January this year. And before that I would say that the, the people function Was very small or had, hadn't quite matured in, in, in line with the company growth.

Mikael Nilsson: So my job was really to come in and build a people and a talent function. There was no in-house recruitment at all at speech, even though we had [00:16:00] growth at that point, 110, maybe a hundred people, roughly. So we have come in and, and basically made sure that we put all the building blocks in place so that when we continue to grow, things don't break.

Mikael Nilsson: Essentially. Culture, people processes. So there's been a lot of that. I think. You have Matt, Brad Burnett, the people collective. He, he talks a lot about people debt. And I think we had some people debt that we had to pay back enable for, for us to be able to, to grow. So that's been a big focus.

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah. So there's a lot. You know, introducing new processes around recruitment or pay reviews or performance reviews or, or onboarding or mm-hmm. The community aspects. So, so we, we've done a lot of that. And I think for 2023 we iterate and build out even more of the people products. So big thing for us is to.

Mikael Nilsson: Iterate on the review cycles that we do. It feels like one of those problems that no HR team has ever cracked and never will. Like how, [00:17:00] how do you make this the perfect price? This doesn't exist. We've seen Google, they've, I think it's this year, like they've released a whole new framework and they always looked at.

Mikael Nilsson: like someone who's really done well in this area, but they themselves felt like, no, we haven't actually, we need to support people's development better. And that's kinda where we are too. Whereas we have a funk, we have a process that helps us make decisions and all that I don't think is value adding enough.

Mikael Nilsson: The people experience from an employee perspective isn't. . Yeah, it's not valuable enough I think for how much effort we put into it. So we want to redesign that. So we're doing that from the bottom up. We're running a, a design sprint at the moment with a people operations team to really understand what do the employees want, what does the business need, and how do we meet in the middle with something?

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, so that's a big one. Another one is articulating our leadership philosophy. So we have a lot of managers, we have hired them or promoted them into those roles and hand on heart. I can't say that we have. Done everything we [00:18:00] can to support them in being the type of managers that we want. Which isn't really fair because one day, you know, I might come and give feedback and say, well, you're not doing the thing that I'm expecting you to.

Mikael Nilsson: You've never told. Oh yeah, fair enough. That's not a great decision to be in. So I think what we want to do is articulate everything that is existing more as like a, an unwritten social contract in the business, but really articulating that so we can scale that. And that's we. Directly support people to be those managers that we want.

Mikael Nilsson: Building the, the frameworks, the support networks, the training, the coaching that they need, because a business very much fails if all your managers fails would say, you know, you, you, you stand forward with good managers because I can say whatever I want. From my position, but the fact is I only lead a team of five, six people or whatever it is at the moment.

Mikael Nilsson: Whereas the managers are there every day, they're the frontline of how every [00:19:00] employee experience their day to day. So if we don't support them, we are missing a trick. And again, this is obvious, but we, I think a lot of startup scale labs and even bigger companies, they just take things for granted. They expect managers to act in a certain way, but don't invest enough in helping them.

Mikael Nilsson: So that's a huge . 

Ivor Colson: Yeah. So how do you actually go about supporting those? , those managers, like, how, how do you, like, help them in, in their roles? 

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, so again, we, we take very much like I guess design thinking lights approach to how we work. So we have, for this specific area, we have worked with an external trainer who's come in and done.

Mikael Nilsson: Management training that we've designed together how that would look. So it was four, four modules that was, you know, spread out over a few months. So we did a trial of that first. We got some feedbacks, we tweaked it. We delivered, we delivered another cohort that has now captured all, all of the managers and getting feedback from that, having Okay.

Mikael Nilsson: Closed off that second cohort. We've now got [00:20:00] every manager who's gone through the training together and whiteboard a brainstormed session around. , what do you need? What, what else do you need? How do we help you? How do you think we can do that for you? We take that away and then the people team has a good idea of what.

Mikael Nilsson: What we think it should look like in terms of outcomes, and then we are building bespoke programs to make this happen. So we are in, we are right in the thick of this at the moment. We've just closed a brainstorming workshop with the managers a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, so it's work in progress but really exciting and I can't wait.

Mikael Nilsson: Sounds like you've 

Ivor Colson: done a hell of a lot since joining in January, . 

Mikael Nilsson: Well, I hope my I hope RCO is listening because it's the review cycle time, but uh, , , no, I, I'm really happy timing then. I'm really happy with the, with the team that we've built. We've got some exceptional people. , both the HR side and the recruitment side.

Mikael Nilsson: And we have a lot of fun when we work, we work hard and we're doing some great work. So I'm, I'm really proud of, of the team. So [00:21:00] 

Ivor Colson: looking kind of like at a different angle, I guess, how do you see, and like you are really well positioned to, to kind of talk about this. How do you see kind of technology.

Ivor Colson: Impacting hr. Yeah. What, what is 

Mikael Nilsson: your take there? It's super interesting. And immediately my mind goes to the more menial tasks. I, I have to try and elevate my thinking and I think a bit bigger picture. And if I apply what we do, which is speak, speech recognition technology, I think there's.

Mikael Nilsson: excellent areas of opportunities that although they sound pretty crazy, shouldn't be too far away. Yes. So if we say that we deploy our, let's say we deploy our speech recognition technology in a recruitment scenario. So I'm sitting here, I'm interviewing you. We are in this room, a virtual room. As part of that room, we could both have an interview coach.

Mikael Nilsson: That interview coach is, is built on the speech recognition technology that we plug into this. [00:22:00] So in real time it understands what we're saying. It analyzes it really fast, and along the way coaches us both. So it levels the playing field because you get advice. I get advice because the, ultimately the purpose of an interview situation.

Mikael Nilsson: is to get to the bottom of whether you will work well together or not. Mm-hmm. . So it could take away some of this power imbalance and the actions that we sometimes see in interview situation, and it just helps us. So, so I can go in as the employer, have a job description, I plug that into the system and it just tells me, well, have you actually speaking, have you, have you asked questions about these competencies?

Mikael Nilsson: Or you've, you seem to have forgotten this one. you should dig a little deeper because the answer was superficial. Whatever, someone who just does that. So think the best ever recruiter that you've come across and the best ever coach that you've come across, combine them into one in real time in an interview situation for both of us would be incredible.

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, I'd, 

Ivor Colson: I'd buy that in a heartbeat. [00:23:00] Hiring is so difficult. It's such a skill and there's so much nuance in it and it's very difficult to firstly find the person, but then when you are kind of, you know, speaking with that person to actually, I dunno, talk about the role and the way that's kind of really exciting and this type of thing.

Ivor Colson: And then yeah, that would, that would be absolutely amazing. 

Mikael Nilsson: And then af and after the call, it kind of, it summarizes it and it gives you advice and it, you know, You said you wanted to ask these things, you didn't, you should probably follow up or you mentioned these things. Make sure you send some evidence of how you've done that in the past.

Mikael Nilsson: It would make the process so much better. I think that 

Ivor Colson: there's been some research around speech recognition for identifying when someone's feeling down and depressed as well, and that is quite accurate in that sense. So I think. , we've really just touched the, the surface with speech processing.

Ivor Colson: It's, it's gonna be really interesting in the next kind of five to 10 years, I 

Mikael Nilsson: would say. Yeah. And, and likewise, [00:24:00] it's similar, but if you can deploy this, Everywhere in an organization. So it's live at all times. It listens into conversations. Yeah. It reads your emails, it reads your slacks or your team's messages and, and helps managers.

Mikael Nilsson: Imagine if, if you are my manager and we're sitting down and we're having our one-to-ones throughout the year and every single one-to-ones, this technology is switched on. Mm-hmm. and it says, It sounded like you talked about a goal here or an objective. Should I, should I follow up with you? Should I get the information you need or yeah.

Mikael Nilsson: Michael, you asked, you kindly asked your boss here for some development tips on public speaking. Yeah. Should I find a course for you on this? So basically the technology in all cases are here to superpower us and just to help us. And I think what we do in speech recognition definitely has a lot of potential in the employment.

Mikael Nilsson: Scenario. So I'm really, I'm really excited. Even just this morning I read some of the new, was it G P [00:25:00] T four now? Maybe? Yeah, yeah. Some of that conversational writing and you know, on the smallest prompt, being able to write something that is better than I, I'm a. English is my second language, but still you know, something that is, is much better than, than what I could write this.

Mikael Nilsson: It's amazing. So we need to leverage this to superpower us. Yeah. In and that, that yeah. Includes in the employment situation. Yeah. I could talk to you 

Ivor Colson: forever about this. But we're kind of coming out of running out of time. So last question then. It's quickfire one. Yeah. What is one thing that you'd like to see automated today?

Ivor Colson: In the HR people 

Mikael Nilsson: space. Unfortunately, I'm probably on the same same on the same track as I was before making hiring decisions. Yes. So just having someone who can make that decision at the end of an Indue process and you know that it's accurate. I mean that person who cracks that is a billionaire in no time, but I feel that it's not crackable.

Mikael Nilsson: I, 

Ivor Colson: I, I would disagree. I would say, I would think that's, that's gonna come quite soon, actually, [00:26:00] five to 10 years. But I'm, I'm an optimist about these, these types of technology things. So on that, we're outta time. Thank you so much for joining Mac. I really enjoyed the chat and I hope the listeners did 

Mikael Nilsson: too.

Ivor Colson: Thank you very much, chairs for tuning in and speak soon. Thanks soon.

Ivor Colson: hello everyone and welcome to Omnifia Meets. In each episode, you'll meet in the HR people ops or future of work leader and learn how they're overcoming challenges and inspiring workplace success through unique insights, stories, and opinions. So, I'm Ivor Colson. I'm co-founder of Omni fia. and today I'm really excited to introduce Macau Nielsen from Speech Mat, where he's the VP of people.

Ivor Colson: Really happy to have you here, Macal, how are you 

Mikael Nilsson: doing? Yeah, I'm doing well. Awesome to be here. Looking forward to this one. Awesome. So 

Ivor Colson: let's dive straight in. So before we get started, I like to ask a bit of an icebreaker question. So what is the kind of worst job you've ever had? For me, it was probably when I was working in catering and I was actually [00:01:00] working back to back 14 hour shifts and it's probably best, I don't build the company there, but although it was kind of maybe the most physically demanding jobs I've ever done, the good things were the, the camaraderie with teammates and that's something I'll kind of always look back.

Ivor Colson: Quite fondly. How about you? 

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, I, I've thought about this question a lot and we've actually used it as icebreakers at work too. And we had a work event yesterday where we actually talked about this specific thing. So okay. I've done some prep but ultimately I don't dislike any of the jobs that I've had.

Mikael Nilsson: I, I was never truly unhappy in anything because there's, there's always either. New things to learn or like you said, great people to be surrounded with and, and that just makes most job bearable. So that's a, a non-answer to your question, but I, I'll get to an answer shortly. I, I have also tried a lot, so I've in the summers I did forklift driving when I was younger.

Mikael Nilsson: I've. You know, paid my dues in hospitality. Like, like you, I did five, five years, I [00:02:00] think, when I first moved to London. So I've done a lot of that before beginning my journey as an HR person. But I guess the bottom of the list was selling strawberries for an entire summer. So an entire school holiday, nine and a half weeks holiday.

Mikael Nilsson: I had one day. In that time, I thought including weekends, I was just vlogging strawberry playing layout on my own. Outside of supermarket, was there good customer demand, at least. Sweets love their strawberries, but they're also very particular about the strawberries. I learned a lot about customer support and dealing with complaints.

Mikael Nilsson: And just to top it off, I didn't actually eat strawberries myself at the time. I didn't like them, so I couldn't even benefit from that, but my friends and family did. So 

Ivor Colson: no perks really for the job. For yourself, , 

Mikael Nilsson: pretty much zero fresh air, I guess. Yeah, that's about. That's 

Ivor Colson: really cool. Okay, so kicking on, so one of the things that's kind of, I guess risen up the agenda amongst executives is, I would [00:03:00] say employee wellbeing.

Ivor Colson: And I think that's kind of reflected perhaps in the demand of tools and services in the space. So I wanted to kind of ask. How are you approaching employee wellbeing at speech matters? 

Mikael Nilsson: And it's definitely also reflected in my LinkedIn email inbox. I would say there's a lot of these products out in the market and, and service around.

Mikael Nilsson: It's, I think it's it's almost hard to define it to begin with, and I think companies define it differently. So how we see wellbeing is, is what I will speak of here. Maybe that's not a scientific way or, or even the way you look at it. As we, when we sit down and think about how do we want to support wellbeing and what is it, we look through four lenses.

Mikael Nilsson: So it's the, the mental, physical, financial wellbeing, and we, we tag on community at the end, which is maybe a little bit less easy to define again, but it's that feeling of belonging to something and spending time with people be that remotely online or, or actually. [00:04:00] So in those four areas, we, if I break them down, I don't think we do anything groundbreaking, but what I really like is that we do all of it.

Mikael Nilsson: So the whole package, I think, supports people quite well. So for mental health we, we have real good mental health and counseling coverage included in. Private health insurance, and I think we realized that it's nice to do events at work and bring in speakers, but these issues, if they flare up, are so personal and they're obviously something that professionals need to deal with.

Mikael Nilsson: So we just want to give people the opportunity to leverage that. Yeah. And another, yeah, we have mental health first aiders that have actually paid off having, like we've been able to pick up a few issues and deal with them that way. And the final thing is it's a small thing. , we have something called Focus Friday.

Mikael Nilsson: So today is a, a focus Friday for me, which means we wrap up the week having no meetings unless it's something absolutely critical. But everyone gets that time to just focus on disturb work and get something done by the end of the week. [00:05:00] And I think that was the helps. So 

Ivor Colson: so to interrupt your, your focus part, 

Mikael Nilsson: No, it's, but this is critical, I would say, speaking to you so you fall into that

Mikael Nilsson: And then physical stuff we do in-person remote yoga session to get people moving. Massages. And again, the the private health insurance and we really went above and beyond on that. And it sounds maybe like a box tick exercise, but it's really not. When you get, when you get an insurance that really work, you know that it looks after your people no matter what happens to them, small things or, or, or bigger physical ailments, I guess can all be taken care of.

Mikael Nilsson: So that's on the fiscal front financially. This is, this, I feel, is something that people have and companies have really started to act on more in recent years. And you see more people offering this service just to help people with their personal finances. And it's clear and obvious that.

Mikael Nilsson: Whatever's going on in someone's life will be deeply personal. It'll be something that we need a bespoke solution for. Yeah. So in our case, we basically just offer [00:06:00] free independent financial advisory services to our employees. So that's really cool. Yeah. Whatever they talk about, it's up to them. If they follow up, that's kind of covered and included, so it's, it's more or less un, you know Yeah, is unlimited support on that front, and I think that's been very popular and especially now when we see rising inflation cost of living crisis mortgage.

Mikael Nilsson: Payments going up there. There's a lot for people. And even though we're lucky, like yourself, I work in tech, we're not, you know, we're generally not the worst off in terms of salaries in our, in our sectors, but there's still a lot for people. So we've increased, we've doubled our, our offering here, actually in terms of how much we have.

Mikael Nilsson: So now anyone who can do it, anyone who wants to do it, can do it, and, and they won't run out the sessions. That's, yeah, that's really cool. And then finally, and just ask questions, and I'm talking a lot, but I mentioned community as the last one. So, so we really believe in the power of getting together ideally in [00:07:00] person as much, as much as we can, and we're spread acro across the globe.

Mikael Nilsson: So we're based in the uk. Cambridge and London, but we have offices in Czech Republic, Indian us. So every opportunity we get, we get people together we fly them together. We make sure that people in the smaller hubs so that the Czech Indian, London, and and US officers have have the budgets and the opportunities and encouragement to form their own little groups and their own communities so they feel like they belong to something at all times.

Mikael Nilsson: This is maybe really basic stuff again. When we are working more away from each other, when we are spread across the globe, you just need to focus more and make more of a conscious effort to bring people together in different ways. Yeah, so it's, we, we keep it on this list of wellbeing targets or, or lenses that we look at this through to, to remind ourselves that we have to do it.

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, 

Ivor Colson: you say it is basic, but I would say that's an incredibly comprehensive view of kind of wellbeing and [00:08:00] particularly with looking at it physically, mentally financially, but also the community side of things. And I feel like that maybe there wasn't kind of such a focus on a lot of companies before the pandemic, and that is something I kind of really kind of struggled.

Ivor Colson: During the, the pandemic is that kind of lack of community and lack of kind of connection to a lot of my teammates. And I think a lot of other people and listeners would probably kind of share those, those thoughts as well. So I kind of wanted to, to also ask you what are your thoughts on kind of trends like quiet, quitting and what are the best ways to create like a, an engaged working environment in 2022 and, and.

Ivor Colson: I 

Mikael Nilsson: am not really on board. I was on board with a great resignation. I think what we saw in terms of the relationship between employees and employer, the, the rise of remote working and, you know, giving people more options to easily change jobs and all, all of that, and people just reassessing their [00:09:00] purpose in the pandemic.

Mikael Nilsson: What am I doing? Do I really want to work in HR for the rest of my life or do I really want to be a software engineer? Whatever it was. Mm-hmm. and that I totally bought into. And I think that was real, that that wasn't just a very successful branding exercise, quite quitting. I think even the person that wrote about it has.

Mikael Nilsson: Backtracked a bit, or I can't remember exactly. I remember reading something about it, but I, I just don't feel that this is anything new. Hmm. People don't feel, and we completely agree. Yeah. Engagement in this conversation. People don't feel engaged and they leave their jobs and they, they start zoning out.

Mikael Nilsson: Like, I get it. That's, but there's not nothing new. I don't think we need a brand for that, that. Running a company, getting people excited to be there, looking after them, having a purpose, having a mission, all those things. Yeah. Quite quitting. Wasn't needed as a brand. Yeah. For that term. I 

Ivor Colson: agree. Like I think people have always kind of, you know, been unengaged in their, their jobs [00:10:00] since day do. And that's nothing, nothing new. So yeah, that's, that's, that's cool. What are, what are like, what about employees that are highly engaged and are top perform.

Ivor Colson: How do you ensure that you keep them in speech matrix and, and at the company? 

Mikael Nilsson: So, I'm gonna stop using the word basic, but, but I like something, I like simplicity. And I think even though it's not a new book, Daniel Pink's book drive that just. It tells us that we should think about this as autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Mikael Nilsson: I can't remember if it's that order or not, but having it in those buckets to think about what really drives people, what makes 'em excited, and what ultimately can help make them good performers. That really makes sense to me. And I would say I use that a lot both when planning. People, strategies and actions and laying out plans for, for, for the year or the years ahead in how I want to shape a culture but also in [00:11:00] how I, how I coach leaders in the business.

Mikael Nilsson: Be that, be that, you know, manager, senior leaders or whatever. Because I, I believe in the simplicity of this and it just helps people think, okay, am I doing. Autonomy thing right at the moment. Am I communicating a clear purpose? Am I allowing people to master their craft, whatever they do for this business?

Mikael Nilsson: And just having those three as a tick box exercise, I think it's really helpful. And I, as I said, I, I genuinely believe that it works because if we go to something, we use Culture CultureAmp, for example, for our engagement surveys. Yeah. If we break that down, a lot of those questions fit into. Three buckets.

Mikael Nilsson: Right. So, so that makes a lot of sense to me. And I, if we think about what, what we are doing I think it's, it's exactly what I mentioned there, which is using our culture survey to listen to people, what they're saying in these three areas and coming up with very clear and transparent strategies for how, how to make them more engaged with, with the purpose.

Mikael Nilsson: [00:12:00] How to allow them to grow as professionals and humans here. And also how we give them the right level of autonomy. We don't, we don't wanna make people feel that they're completely left their own devices and unsupported, but to feel like they can grow from making their own decisions. Yeah. Yeah. That 

Ivor Colson: resonates a lot with me.

Ivor Colson: Like whenever I've moved jobs, it's always been down to lack of autonomy and like, kind of career progression. Like I feel like I've hit the ceiling. So then I've felt like I've had to move maybe to, to get that kind of new I, a new, new kind of perspective there. 

Mikael Nilsson: Do you think, do you think that the manager or manager's, leadership, whatever, do you think they could have done something differently then to, to make you stay or handle the situation better with clear communications or different conversations?

Mikael Nilsson: I think, 

Ivor Colson: For sure, like if I go back to. To one of those roles. It was, I don't even think they had engagement surveys and they [00:13:00] kind of asked me what I kind of wanted to achieve next. So it was a real kind of lack of, attention to employees in the company and what they actually want to achieve going forward for the next, one or two years.

Ivor Colson: And then the business wasn't kind of, Scaling in, in the kind of Way I'd, I kind of hoped it would. And I kind of just got really impatient and, and chose to, to leave that, that position. So I wanted to just, just learn. And that's like my, one of the key things to my mindsets is just always learning new things and kind of new skills

Ivor Colson: so. . So, yeah. If that gives you kind of answer to your, your question. 

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah. And, and I think, I like the concept of stay interviews. People have different opinions on that, but I think as a, as a framework and as a reminder that we should have these very frank conversations with employees and, and make sure that they're employee driven are really important.

Mikael Nilsson: So, making mm-hmm. often push managers when they say this person is. To ask them, we need [00:14:00] to keep them. Okay. Have you had that conversation with them to ask what, you know, what, from 12 months from now, what needs to be true for you to still be happy, for you to still be engaged and for you to, when a, when a message appears in your LinkedIn inbox about a new job, for you to ignore that and.

Mikael Nilsson: and just framing it that way. I think a lot of managers appreciate that be because they go, oh yeah, that's, I just makes it a thing that I have to do and I can do that. That's not complicated. Yeah. And it makes the employee speak rather than me guessing. So I, I have found that really useful. I know that even have people in speech in the, in our people doing that, that don't like the concept, but but, but I do and I think it works.

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, 

Ivor Colson: I think people, like managers as well kind of take their teams for granted as well. They think their teams are always gonna be there. It's not at the top of the agenda to actually keep people really engaged, I would say, and like stop people from actually leaving a company. But actually when an, an employee does leave this results in, I think a [00:15:00] cost of around 16% on top of payroll overall in the company.

Ivor Colson: Gartner came out with some statistics recently that employee turnover is around 20 to 24% this year in 2022, which is incredibly high. Mm-hmm. . So yeah, switching gears and, and kind of looking forwards, what are your kind of key focus areas in 2023? 

Mikael Nilsson: So just a bit of background, I guess, on speech might help with the context.

Mikael Nilsson: So speech mats is a, we are, Speech recognition company. We are about 170 people at the moment. As I said, we're spread across the globe, but the majority of those are in the, in the uk. I joined in January this year. And before that I would say that the, the people function Was very small or had, hadn't quite matured in, in, in line with the company growth.

Mikael Nilsson: So my job was really to come in and build a people and a talent function. There was no in-house recruitment at all at speech, even though we had [00:16:00] growth at that point, 110, maybe a hundred people, roughly. So we have come in and, and basically made sure that we put all the building blocks in place so that when we continue to grow, things don't break.

Mikael Nilsson: Essentially. Culture, people processes. So there's been a lot of that. I think. You have Matt, Brad Burnett, the people collective. He, he talks a lot about people debt. And I think we had some people debt that we had to pay back enable for, for us to be able to, to grow. So that's been a big focus.

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah. So there's a lot. You know, introducing new processes around recruitment or pay reviews or performance reviews or, or onboarding or mm-hmm. The community aspects. So, so we, we've done a lot of that. And I think for 2023 we iterate and build out even more of the people products. So big thing for us is to.

Mikael Nilsson: Iterate on the review cycles that we do. It feels like one of those problems that no HR team has ever cracked and never will. Like how, [00:17:00] how do you make this the perfect price? This doesn't exist. We've seen Google, they've, I think it's this year, like they've released a whole new framework and they always looked at.

Mikael Nilsson: like someone who's really done well in this area, but they themselves felt like, no, we haven't actually, we need to support people's development better. And that's kinda where we are too. Whereas we have a funk, we have a process that helps us make decisions and all that I don't think is value adding enough.

Mikael Nilsson: The people experience from an employee perspective isn't. . Yeah, it's not valuable enough I think for how much effort we put into it. So we want to redesign that. So we're doing that from the bottom up. We're running a, a design sprint at the moment with a people operations team to really understand what do the employees want, what does the business need, and how do we meet in the middle with something?

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, so that's a big one. Another one is articulating our leadership philosophy. So we have a lot of managers, we have hired them or promoted them into those roles and hand on heart. I can't say that we have. Done everything we [00:18:00] can to support them in being the type of managers that we want. Which isn't really fair because one day, you know, I might come and give feedback and say, well, you're not doing the thing that I'm expecting you to.

Mikael Nilsson: You've never told. Oh yeah, fair enough. That's not a great decision to be in. So I think what we want to do is articulate everything that is existing more as like a, an unwritten social contract in the business, but really articulating that so we can scale that. And that's we. Directly support people to be those managers that we want.

Mikael Nilsson: Building the, the frameworks, the support networks, the training, the coaching that they need, because a business very much fails if all your managers fails would say, you know, you, you, you stand forward with good managers because I can say whatever I want. From my position, but the fact is I only lead a team of five, six people or whatever it is at the moment.

Mikael Nilsson: Whereas the managers are there every day, they're the frontline of how every [00:19:00] employee experience their day to day. So if we don't support them, we are missing a trick. And again, this is obvious, but we, I think a lot of startup scale labs and even bigger companies, they just take things for granted. They expect managers to act in a certain way, but don't invest enough in helping them.

Mikael Nilsson: So that's a huge . 

Ivor Colson: Yeah. So how do you actually go about supporting those? , those managers, like, how, how do you, like, help them in, in their roles? 

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, so again, we, we take very much like I guess design thinking lights approach to how we work. So we have, for this specific area, we have worked with an external trainer who's come in and done.

Mikael Nilsson: Management training that we've designed together how that would look. So it was four, four modules that was, you know, spread out over a few months. So we did a trial of that first. We got some feedbacks, we tweaked it. We delivered, we delivered another cohort that has now captured all, all of the managers and getting feedback from that, having Okay.

Mikael Nilsson: Closed off that second cohort. We've now got [00:20:00] every manager who's gone through the training together and whiteboard a brainstormed session around. , what do you need? What, what else do you need? How do we help you? How do you think we can do that for you? We take that away and then the people team has a good idea of what.

Mikael Nilsson: What we think it should look like in terms of outcomes, and then we are building bespoke programs to make this happen. So we are in, we are right in the thick of this at the moment. We've just closed a brainstorming workshop with the managers a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, so it's work in progress but really exciting and I can't wait.

Mikael Nilsson: Sounds like you've 

Ivor Colson: done a hell of a lot since joining in January, . 

Mikael Nilsson: Well, I hope my I hope RCO is listening because it's the review cycle time, but uh, , , no, I, I'm really happy timing then. I'm really happy with the, with the team that we've built. We've got some exceptional people. , both the HR side and the recruitment side.

Mikael Nilsson: And we have a lot of fun when we work, we work hard and we're doing some great work. So I'm, I'm really proud of, of the team. So [00:21:00] 

Ivor Colson: looking kind of like at a different angle, I guess, how do you see, and like you are really well positioned to, to kind of talk about this. How do you see kind of technology.

Ivor Colson: Impacting hr. Yeah. What, what is 

Mikael Nilsson: your take there? It's super interesting. And immediately my mind goes to the more menial tasks. I, I have to try and elevate my thinking and I think a bit bigger picture. And if I apply what we do, which is speak, speech recognition technology, I think there's.

Mikael Nilsson: excellent areas of opportunities that although they sound pretty crazy, shouldn't be too far away. Yes. So if we say that we deploy our, let's say we deploy our speech recognition technology in a recruitment scenario. So I'm sitting here, I'm interviewing you. We are in this room, a virtual room. As part of that room, we could both have an interview coach.

Mikael Nilsson: That interview coach is, is built on the speech recognition technology that we plug into this. [00:22:00] So in real time it understands what we're saying. It analyzes it really fast, and along the way coaches us both. So it levels the playing field because you get advice. I get advice because the, ultimately the purpose of an interview situation.

Mikael Nilsson: is to get to the bottom of whether you will work well together or not. Mm-hmm. . So it could take away some of this power imbalance and the actions that we sometimes see in interview situation, and it just helps us. So, so I can go in as the employer, have a job description, I plug that into the system and it just tells me, well, have you actually speaking, have you, have you asked questions about these competencies?

Mikael Nilsson: Or you've, you seem to have forgotten this one. you should dig a little deeper because the answer was superficial. Whatever, someone who just does that. So think the best ever recruiter that you've come across and the best ever coach that you've come across, combine them into one in real time in an interview situation for both of us would be incredible.

Mikael Nilsson: Yeah, I'd, 

Ivor Colson: I'd buy that in a heartbeat. [00:23:00] Hiring is so difficult. It's such a skill and there's so much nuance in it and it's very difficult to firstly find the person, but then when you are kind of, you know, speaking with that person to actually, I dunno, talk about the role and the way that's kind of really exciting and this type of thing.

Ivor Colson: And then yeah, that would, that would be absolutely amazing. 

Mikael Nilsson: And then af and after the call, it kind of, it summarizes it and it gives you advice and it, you know, You said you wanted to ask these things, you didn't, you should probably follow up or you mentioned these things. Make sure you send some evidence of how you've done that in the past.

Mikael Nilsson: It would make the process so much better. I think that 

Ivor Colson: there's been some research around speech recognition for identifying when someone's feeling down and depressed as well, and that is quite accurate in that sense. So I think. , we've really just touched the, the surface with speech processing.

Ivor Colson: It's, it's gonna be really interesting in the next kind of five to 10 years, I 

Mikael Nilsson: would say. Yeah. And, and likewise, [00:24:00] it's similar, but if you can deploy this, Everywhere in an organization. So it's live at all times. It listens into conversations. Yeah. It reads your emails, it reads your slacks or your team's messages and, and helps managers.

Mikael Nilsson: Imagine if, if you are my manager and we're sitting down and we're having our one-to-ones throughout the year and every single one-to-ones, this technology is switched on. Mm-hmm. and it says, It sounded like you talked about a goal here or an objective. Should I, should I follow up with you? Should I get the information you need or yeah.

Mikael Nilsson: Michael, you asked, you kindly asked your boss here for some development tips on public speaking. Yeah. Should I find a course for you on this? So basically the technology in all cases are here to superpower us and just to help us. And I think what we do in speech recognition definitely has a lot of potential in the employment.

Mikael Nilsson: Scenario. So I'm really, I'm really excited. Even just this morning I read some of the new, was it G P [00:25:00] T four now? Maybe? Yeah, yeah. Some of that conversational writing and you know, on the smallest prompt, being able to write something that is better than I, I'm a. English is my second language, but still you know, something that is, is much better than, than what I could write this.

Mikael Nilsson: It's amazing. So we need to leverage this to superpower us. Yeah. In and that, that yeah. Includes in the employment situation. Yeah. I could talk to you 

Ivor Colson: forever about this. But we're kind of coming out of running out of time. So last question then. It's quickfire one. Yeah. What is one thing that you'd like to see automated today?

Ivor Colson: In the HR people 

Mikael Nilsson: space. Unfortunately, I'm probably on the same same on the same track as I was before making hiring decisions. Yes. So just having someone who can make that decision at the end of an Indue process and you know that it's accurate. I mean that person who cracks that is a billionaire in no time, but I feel that it's not crackable.

Mikael Nilsson: I, 

Ivor Colson: I, I would disagree. I would say, I would think that's, that's gonna come quite soon, actually, [00:26:00] five to 10 years. But I'm, I'm an optimist about these, these types of technology things. So on that, we're outta time. Thank you so much for joining Mac. I really enjoyed the chat and I hope the listeners did 

Mikael Nilsson: too.

Ivor Colson: Thank you very much, chairs for tuning in and speak soon. Thanks soon.