Omnifia Meets Thomas Forstner

Ivor Colson: [00:00:00] So hello everyone and welcome to Omni FIA Meets. In each episode, you'll meet an HR people, ops or future of work leader and learn how they are overcoming challenges and inspiring workplace success through unique insights, stories, and opinions. So I'm Iva Colson. I'm co-founder of Omni fia, and today I'm really excited to introduce Thomas Forner from du, where he's the Senior Director of People and Talent.

Ivor Colson: Really happy to have you here, Thomas. How are you doing? 

Thomas Forstner: Doing good. Thanks for having me. 

Ivor Colson: So 

Ivor Colson: let's dive straight in. Before we get started, I'd like to ask an icebreaker question. So, which is, if you weren't working in and people and talent, what would you actually be doing as a job?

Ivor Colson: And it could be anything for me. I would actually ditch rainy London [00:01:00] and become a surfing instructor. , but maybe that wouldn't be the best type of thing to do in, in England. How about you, Thomas? 

Thomas Forstner: Well, starting instructor sounds sounds really cool. For, for me, I for the past 10 years have always played with the idea of becoming a full-time novelist.

Thomas Forstner: So I do write in my spare time short stories sort of the odd. Book manuscript, if you can call it that, like lazy excuse for one. But that's sort of going on on the side. I guess. I still pursue that, that dream to just Just let it all go. Move to a, a country where probably there's lots of surfing instructors around and just devote my, go off my time, full time to to, to, to, to writing.

Ivor Colson: Amazing. I love that. Let's get stuck in. So much has kind of changed over the last couple of years to kind of put it lightly and one of those things I think is how companies are really prioritizing employee well. and I was wondering what's your kind of view on employee wellbeing and how are you kind of taking care [00:02:00] of it at du?

Thomas Forstner: Yeah. So you're absolutely right. During the, during the pandemic, of course wellbeing became this massive buzzword. Effectively, my, my sense has been that a lot of companies were you know, running around saying, oh my God, you know people are burning out and we need to do something. And that led to, I think, a lot of good things being done, but none of them were, were really done strategically.

Thomas Forstner: and people maybe, you know, put in, in, in place some kind of wellbeing platform. Spent a couple of thousand to sort of have that done with. But, but really wellbeing, if you don't define the term very well, you know, it, it can really mean anything. It can mean, you know, how much choice do you have in terms of where you work from or how you work or when you work.

Thomas Forstner: It can mean things like Emotional support. It can mean physical wellbeing. It can mean how much support are you getting with your finances when there's like an inflation going on and so on. So the, the way that we've been trying to Go about it at J in, you know, [00:03:00] making, ensuring that we are actually taking care of employee wellbeing is, first of all defining what we actually mean.

Thomas Forstner: And the way that we're currently defining wellbeing is in these three buckets, physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, and financial wellbeing. Once we have that, then we can actually say, okay, this is the definition that we're currently taking of wellbeing as opposed to, let's say, engagement, which for us is a larger construct of which wellbeing is one part of.

Thomas Forstner: But then we can actually measure, okay, well what, what is. The physical, like mental and, and financial wellbeing, at least sort of self-reported general baseline in the team at the moment. And, and what should it actually be? And then, you know, you, you would simply work by, in trying to, to bridge the gap if people are you know, reporting as, as our folks did, for example, that.

Thomas Forstner: You know, there, there's a ton of meetings in there in their nine to five, and that means that a lot of people tend to actually work later than they usually would. Then, you know, an initiative that is quite far away from what the sort of classic wellbeing initiatives would be, but still, Extremely [00:04:00] valuable is to say, okay, do we have some kind of framework or flow for what should be the proverbial email or Slack message or loom recording or what should be a, a sync meeting?

Thomas Forstner: So through defining it like that, we kind of did lots of initiatives throughout 2022. Just tighten screws to make sure that people are fully enabled to deliver excellent work with low destruction. That ultimately also means, you know, increasing wellbeing. That is partly benefits like private health insurance and mental wellbeing platforms and access to therapy, et cetera.

Thomas Forstner: But it's also all of these other things that don't necessarily at face value have much to do with wellbeing, but do, depending on how you. 

Ivor Colson: No, I think that's really interesting. I think a lot of us haven't even heard of kind of burnouts before the pandemic, but now it seems to be everywhere. That's like a key word that everyone seems to be using.

Ivor Colson: And I think the meeting frequency, there's been quite a lot of research that's actually [00:05:00] indicated. All the meetings that we're having actually links directly to a higher likelihood of, of burnout. And I think the free pronged approach you've got to wellbeing is, is really interesting. So now with trends like quiet, quitting, kind of sweeping the world, And a new era of hybrid work upon us.

Ivor Colson: How do you go about creating an engaged working environment? And you kind of touched on it before with your previous answer, and it's a higher type of construct. How is that something that you kind of approach at at. . 

Thomas Forstner: It's very interesting you mentioned, you know burnout, quiet, quitting, et cetera. I, I generally want to you know, again, make, make a distinction between what, what seems like a, a bit of a buzz term and what's an actual, you know, thing that is defined that you can, can deal with.

Thomas Forstner: For example, you know, burnout has been a syndrome that has been around for, for decades in, you know, scientific literature and is something that, you know, has only recently gained more recognition in, let's say, a clinical [00:06:00] sense. My personal view on quiet quitting is that right now that for me doesn't really get over the idea of a, of a fad, right?

Thomas Forstner: It's basically just another way of saying people who you know, didn't like their job will put minimum work in the fact that that now has a snazzy two word title doesn't really change the fact that that's probably also been around for a long time. And when we talk about engagement, There, there's actually quite a lot of research to suggest that, you know, a lot of people that do suffer from burnout actually are highly engaged in their business.

Thomas Forstner: So people think that these two are like diametrical opposites. But again, you've gotta be really sure you know, you know when, when, if you're listening to this and dealing with, you know, you want to like increase engagement or you want to fix burnout, like make sure you know what you're actually trying to to test.

Thomas Forstner: And for us, the way that we are going about, you know, creating an engaged working environment is by. Effectively doing two things. Number one you know, what do we think engagement actually means? There's lots of things that go into it, but really for us it is the outcome [00:07:00] of a balanced value proposition.

Thomas Forstner: So in simple terms, you give something to. , your employer, right? Your skills, your labor, your time, quite a lot of time in fact, and you expect to get something in return, right? If that give, get balance is not met, then we would assume that people become less engaged. So if you have that general balance, then the question is, well, what is your value proposition?

Thomas Forstner: It doesn't need to be like a massive exercise that, that you do. We kind of survived more or less on, on a napkin. For this for a lot of 2022, which is that well, what do we expect? We probably ex have higher expectations being that we're a fast growing startup you know, higher expectations than maybe most, let's say, like larger companies, although maybe larger companies would probably disagree.

Thomas Forstner: But, you know, in exchange we should also offer a higher baseline of return, right? So really good. Compensation, great growth, great and fast growth opportunities. Really flexible choice driven environment. And, you know the classic benefits that you have that can, you know, keep up with larger companies of of [00:08:00] our size.

Thomas Forstner: And then the question is really, is that balance? Are we asking In other words, the world from people, but we're not giving them anything in return. You can only survive on like the, the mission of changing the world in a startup for so long. But once you have a, a view of that, then you know, you again go by measuring a baseline.

Thomas Forstner: You could, most companies do this through an engagement survey, for example. Yes, that's also self-reported, but you know, you can sort of fill that up with other things if you're saying, okay is do we currently, let's say, have a compensation philosophy in place? And with that rank, let's say compensation on the one side of developer positions, like higher or lower, do we currently have a career framework in place?

Thomas Forstner: Do we have a performance framework in place? Do we have a policy on where people can and cannot work from? And for how long do we have something to account for, location, policy, and so on and so forth? Effectively, how many of your questions that. People are, are having, are actually answered. And once we established that baseline the way that we went about it in 22 2, it's effectively revamping and, and upgrading every single part [00:09:00] of that value proposition by putting a lot of the things that I talked about in place, having a performance grid.

Thomas Forstner: It gives people a quarter on quarter sense of how much they are delivering over delivering, under, delivering against the expectations of the business. Having a philosophy on, you know, how we compensate. Given that we have a distributed team in lots of different countries having an actual strategy for benefits rather than just.

Thomas Forstner: Saying like, Ooh, this looks nice. Let's spend like 5K on putting that in place and having, you know, as many answers as possible on your, where can you work for, how long can you work from there? Who can work from there? And all that. Just creating clarity and then measuring consecutively in your service.

Thomas Forstner: Does this somehow actually have a feedback loop? So if we're doing this, does this increase engagement in this regard by our definition? And that's, you know, worked quite well for us. And it is a relatively. Product led approach. We're just looking at employees as our end users and as the things that we're doing in develop proposition, as the features that we're offering to them, we're offering the wrong feature.[00:10:00] 

Thomas Forstner: We're probably, you know, building for the wrong thing. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. And you? Yeah. 

Ivor Colson: It was interesting how you kind of talked about how burnout's been around for such a long time, and actually I think the first use of it. Goes back to Shakespeare's sonics. 

Ivor Colson: Burnout was used for the first time, and then we kind of saw this kind of evolution of the concept. And in the 1980s, maslak came out with this survey to understand burnout in the workforce. So there's been a real kind of evolution there with the term, and I think it's kind of evolved in the last couple of years as well.

Ivor Colson: At on NiFi we kind of define engagement as a level of enthusiasm and connection employees have with their organization, but obviously that's very kind of subjective and you kind of talked about the performance grids that you had as well. I wondered kind of what data. Actually goes in there. Would you be able to share that?

Thomas Forstner: [00:11:00] Of course. So the, we're not reinventing the wheel with with that grid. A lot of companies, they can measure, you know, a person's sort of like help. Good. Quote unquote, a person is on site of like two a axis. You've seen this like in, in HR in general for a long time. You've got like nine box grids and all of these things.

Thomas Forstner: The question is just really how well are these a axis defined? So for us the, the way that that grid looks and, and the inputs that are coming in, in simple terms, is what do you do and how do you do it? So the what do you do basically comes from objectives and key results. So at the beginning of the quarter, you set some targets, let's say make this many hires, reach this sales quarter, build this feature and then you have some kind of objective criteria, how it's measured, whether you have succeeded against that that target.

Thomas Forstner: Based on that you can land some there on, on one axis, and the other one is, In combination with our career framework. So we have what we call career maps. Some other folks call it career tracks or leveling frameworks, or whatever you wanna wanna say. So it's effectively skills that we expect from people at [00:12:00] their level.

Thomas Forstner: And those skills really define how we conduct ourselves. It's in alignment with our values. We've got four core values and they're just made more specific for the day-to-day of the role. We would argue that you only are. Doing a good job. If you are great on the what, great on the how. I think Netflix caused this, you know, not, not hiring.

Thomas Forstner: Brilliant. Into the business. That's a similar idea there, because we're obviously a startup. We would say that somebody who's say in the middle of the grid is actually perfectly aligned with the with the skills that they can do and how difficult the tasks are that we're asking for them and, and how they're doing it.

Thomas Forstner: So this brings a little bit, not to bring too many, like ideas into it, but that's the general idea of flow state, which is, you know, if you know what you can do, matches. Aid your interest, but b also, you know, how how difficult it's, 

Ivor Colson: that's really interesting. Yeah. I think listeners will find that kind of level of insight particularly useful.

Ivor Colson: So thanks for sharing that. So what, what are your kind of key focus areas for 2023? . 

Thomas Forstner: That's an interesting one because right now in the business [00:13:00] we're focusing on annual planning a lot, and we're in sort of the final stretches of, of doing that. For anybody who's listening you know, if, if you're not having a seat at the table when these conversations are going on Make sure you ask why.

Thomas Forstner: Because every company builds two things. They're building a product and they're building themselves in most companies, whether you know it or not. The, the people team is the the operations team in general. They are the ones that build the company. And typically you have like 90% of your workforce that focuses on product, 10% on the on the company itself, that's fine, but even though that's proportional, you need to make sure you actually get a say in, well, what company do we want?

Thomas Forstner: Build what customer read employee. Do we want to build for who's the type of person that we want to attract? And that will guide pretty much everything that you're gonna do. Otherwise, you're just always gonna play catch up and focus on these disparate projects that all like, don't actually connect and you're just always gonna be reactive.

Thomas Forstner: So for us in in 2023, our focus is a lot on [00:14:00] sustainability of the team that we that we have. So what do we mean when we say stability? Sustainability. That for us means that quality and scalability. So is it good and will it be good if we're, let's say like double the team size, which, you know, in a, in a startup on a scale up can happen quite, quite quickly.

Thomas Forstner: If you want a number to, to measure this what a lot of investors look at when they care about capital efficiency is revenue per employee. It's a bit of a blunt force metric. But you can look at this to essentially say, okay, is my do, do I have, you know, let's say a good level of of team members in the business for, you know, the amount of revenue that the company is is generat.

Thomas Forstner: Now that doesn't sound very like wellbeing and engagement focused, but actually it very much is once you cascade it down to actual things that you're gonna do. Because if you're saying, okay you know, I want to make sure that I have sort of this amount of efficiency level, that means that, okay, for the people that are in the business today, are they, you know, Enabled to work as well as they could.

Thomas Forstner: Do they have, you know the, do we have [00:15:00] the right ratio of individual contributors to managers, for example? Yeah. Is there like one manager that has like way too many people deal with and they can't give like an individual person enough, enough things? Does everybody actually know? Particularly well what targets they're supposed to achieve.

Thomas Forstner: Are they well set or are they sort of in the dark? And it kind of always shifts sort of from, from, from week to week. Granted those things shouldn't exist in the first place, but as we all know, you know, the, the larger you grow, the less you sort of lose sight of, you know, how every individual is doing.

Thomas Forstner: So a lot of that focus on sustainability means, you know, making sure that managers are trained, making sure that. All of the processes that we do, everything from the interview process to onboarding, to performance measurement, all of this is scalable and works at like 300 people, just as well as it works at 100 people.

Thomas Forstner: So that's a lot of the the, the areas that we're looking at for for 2023. 

Ivor Colson: That's interesting. That's, that's quite a big challenge. Understanding how that kind of scales up and ensuring kind of efficiency when it does. And I think something that's quite it's happened in the last kind of couple [00:16:00] of years is people are becoming aware of the link between wellbeing and things like costs, like burnout, for example, has a big impact.

Ivor Colson: Costs of a business because people become inefficient and unengaged with their role. And this kind of link is becoming quite well known, I think, in, in different industries now and different companies. So I guess to start to wrap up, I'm a big kind of tech lover and I really love and enjoy hearing different opinions on how technology innovation will impact.

Ivor Colson: The workplace in, in different ways. How do you kind of see tech playing a role in the future of HR and, and people ops? 

Thomas Forstner: Yeah, so. What I'm seeing at the moment is the entire profession is reinventing itself really. So you have this classic idea that I think a lot of people still have of, you know, human resources, [00:17:00] which in, in itself is a terrible term.

Thomas Forstner: As like this sort of, you know, reactive, mostly admin led. Kind of, kind of role that, you know, gets, gets involved if there's a grievance or a dispute. Don't get me wrong, that's obviously always gonna be part of managing, like employee relations. But more and more especially over the pandemic and I think particularly in sort of startup world that that, that I, I'm in.

Thomas Forstner: It's much more project and product management. So this idea of people as a product people as a product is, is becoming much more pervasive in there. So thinking, like, thinking of employees as end users, thinking of your benefits, as your features, thinking of you know, the, the things that you want to deliver delivers like a, a people roadmap.

Thomas Forstner: And all these projects are things that you can work in, in an agile way on. So once you have this sort of mindset, it changes. Everything, what you're supposed to prioritize, how are you supposed to work? And when I think about technology within that, it means that admin should get relegated to really quite a [00:18:00] low quite, quite a low list on quite a low bullet on the, on the priority list.

Thomas Forstner: So when I consider purchasing new technology for for the people team at j I typically think of you. How much percent of manual work does this currently make for my talent partners or my people partners that that report into me? And how much time is actually getting getting saved? By it?

Thomas Forstner: My assumption would be that the amount of tools that people will purchase in the next year will decrease. It will probably kind of merge into sort of like larger Tools that do a lot of things at the same time. Yeah. But the expectation of what these things can do, whether it's like a performance management and the and engagement survey tool, those will be quite.

Thomas Forstner: Quite high. And as a result, we are, for example, quite, quite lean on the amount of technology that we use. But the ones that we do, do, they have met very high bars for, for us in terms of how much do we actually expect them to solve for us. We're not gonna buy something and spend, you know, 10, 10 k on it with like limited [00:19:00] spend that, you know we're then gonna have to like, actively maintain for for a long.

Ivor Colson: Yeah. And that's a nice segue into the, the last question, which is a quick fire round. What is one thing you would love to see automated in the tasks that you do or your team does? 

Thomas Forstner: Data entry is my answer. So, you know, even, even if you try to reduce the amount of things that that you have.

Thomas Forstner: technology in people teams is nowhere near as sophisticated as it is in marketing teams, for example, or sales. So as a result, you're still, like, you find yourself probably everybody can relate with, like manually inputting stuff multiple times because systems do not talk to each other. And that is incredibly annoying.

Thomas Forstner: And it also leads to like lot of data, right? The, the, the idea of like reporting is gonna become more and. Important, right? More and more leadership teams will want to have like insights from, okay, how's the team doing? Give me something tangible, gimme something objective. And [00:20:00] oftentimes you pool this from multiple sources.

Thomas Forstner: Having to do that manually if the expectation is there is a tedious job. And yeah, it involves a lot of spreadsheet work and and time. And, you know, if I could have some, some wishful thinking, I think the number one thing that I'd like to wish could be automated. You know, the, the reporting at the data entry, 

Ivor Colson: Yeah, I find that absolutely baffling, that so much is manual in the HR space.

Ivor Colson: And, and when we look at something like the marketing space, like it used to be very much kind of manual and data entry. Now you have so many kind of digital tools to kind of automate the reporting process, for example, with Google Analytics. But that's not the case in kind of the people op space and, and what is typically or traditionally known as as hr.

Ivor Colson: And we're outta time. Thank you so much for, for joining. Thomas. I really enjoyed the chat and I did thanks tuning and speak to 

Thomas Forstner: thanks so much.[00:21:00] 

Ivor Colson: [00:00:00] So hello everyone and welcome to Omni FIA Meets. In each episode, you'll meet an HR people, ops or future of work leader and learn how they are overcoming challenges and inspiring workplace success through unique insights, stories, and opinions. So I'm Iva Colson. I'm co-founder of Omni fia, and today I'm really excited to introduce Thomas Forner from du, where he's the Senior Director of People and Talent.

Ivor Colson: Really happy to have you here, Thomas. How are you doing? 

Thomas Forstner: Doing good. Thanks for having me. 

Ivor Colson: So 

Ivor Colson: let's dive straight in. Before we get started, I'd like to ask an icebreaker question. So, which is, if you weren't working in and people and talent, what would you actually be doing as a job?

Ivor Colson: And it could be anything for me. I would actually ditch rainy London [00:01:00] and become a surfing instructor. , but maybe that wouldn't be the best type of thing to do in, in England. How about you, Thomas? 

Thomas Forstner: Well, starting instructor sounds sounds really cool. For, for me, I for the past 10 years have always played with the idea of becoming a full-time novelist.

Thomas Forstner: So I do write in my spare time short stories sort of the odd. Book manuscript, if you can call it that, like lazy excuse for one. But that's sort of going on on the side. I guess. I still pursue that, that dream to just Just let it all go. Move to a, a country where probably there's lots of surfing instructors around and just devote my, go off my time, full time to to, to, to, to writing.

Ivor Colson: Amazing. I love that. Let's get stuck in. So much has kind of changed over the last couple of years to kind of put it lightly and one of those things I think is how companies are really prioritizing employee well. and I was wondering what's your kind of view on employee wellbeing and how are you kind of taking care [00:02:00] of it at du?

Thomas Forstner: Yeah. So you're absolutely right. During the, during the pandemic, of course wellbeing became this massive buzzword. Effectively, my, my sense has been that a lot of companies were you know, running around saying, oh my God, you know people are burning out and we need to do something. And that led to, I think, a lot of good things being done, but none of them were, were really done strategically.

Thomas Forstner: and people maybe, you know, put in, in, in place some kind of wellbeing platform. Spent a couple of thousand to sort of have that done with. But, but really wellbeing, if you don't define the term very well, you know, it, it can really mean anything. It can mean, you know, how much choice do you have in terms of where you work from or how you work or when you work.

Thomas Forstner: It can mean things like Emotional support. It can mean physical wellbeing. It can mean how much support are you getting with your finances when there's like an inflation going on and so on. So the, the way that we've been trying to Go about it at J in, you know, [00:03:00] making, ensuring that we are actually taking care of employee wellbeing is, first of all defining what we actually mean.

Thomas Forstner: And the way that we're currently defining wellbeing is in these three buckets, physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, and financial wellbeing. Once we have that, then we can actually say, okay, this is the definition that we're currently taking of wellbeing as opposed to, let's say, engagement, which for us is a larger construct of which wellbeing is one part of.

Thomas Forstner: But then we can actually measure, okay, well what, what is. The physical, like mental and, and financial wellbeing, at least sort of self-reported general baseline in the team at the moment. And, and what should it actually be? And then, you know, you, you would simply work by, in trying to, to bridge the gap if people are you know, reporting as, as our folks did, for example, that.

Thomas Forstner: You know, there, there's a ton of meetings in there in their nine to five, and that means that a lot of people tend to actually work later than they usually would. Then, you know, an initiative that is quite far away from what the sort of classic wellbeing initiatives would be, but still, Extremely [00:04:00] valuable is to say, okay, do we have some kind of framework or flow for what should be the proverbial email or Slack message or loom recording or what should be a, a sync meeting?

Thomas Forstner: So through defining it like that, we kind of did lots of initiatives throughout 2022. Just tighten screws to make sure that people are fully enabled to deliver excellent work with low destruction. That ultimately also means, you know, increasing wellbeing. That is partly benefits like private health insurance and mental wellbeing platforms and access to therapy, et cetera.

Thomas Forstner: But it's also all of these other things that don't necessarily at face value have much to do with wellbeing, but do, depending on how you. 

Ivor Colson: No, I think that's really interesting. I think a lot of us haven't even heard of kind of burnouts before the pandemic, but now it seems to be everywhere. That's like a key word that everyone seems to be using.

Ivor Colson: And I think the meeting frequency, there's been quite a lot of research that's actually [00:05:00] indicated. All the meetings that we're having actually links directly to a higher likelihood of, of burnout. And I think the free pronged approach you've got to wellbeing is, is really interesting. So now with trends like quiet, quitting, kind of sweeping the world, And a new era of hybrid work upon us.

Ivor Colson: How do you go about creating an engaged working environment? And you kind of touched on it before with your previous answer, and it's a higher type of construct. How is that something that you kind of approach at at. . 

Thomas Forstner: It's very interesting you mentioned, you know burnout, quiet, quitting, et cetera. I, I generally want to you know, again, make, make a distinction between what, what seems like a, a bit of a buzz term and what's an actual, you know, thing that is defined that you can, can deal with.

Thomas Forstner: For example, you know, burnout has been a syndrome that has been around for, for decades in, you know, scientific literature and is something that, you know, has only recently gained more recognition in, let's say, a clinical [00:06:00] sense. My personal view on quiet quitting is that right now that for me doesn't really get over the idea of a, of a fad, right?

Thomas Forstner: It's basically just another way of saying people who you know, didn't like their job will put minimum work in the fact that that now has a snazzy two word title doesn't really change the fact that that's probably also been around for a long time. And when we talk about engagement, There, there's actually quite a lot of research to suggest that, you know, a lot of people that do suffer from burnout actually are highly engaged in their business.

Thomas Forstner: So people think that these two are like diametrical opposites. But again, you've gotta be really sure you know, you know when, when, if you're listening to this and dealing with, you know, you want to like increase engagement or you want to fix burnout, like make sure you know what you're actually trying to to test.

Thomas Forstner: And for us, the way that we are going about, you know, creating an engaged working environment is by. Effectively doing two things. Number one you know, what do we think engagement actually means? There's lots of things that go into it, but really for us it is the outcome [00:07:00] of a balanced value proposition.

Thomas Forstner: So in simple terms, you give something to. , your employer, right? Your skills, your labor, your time, quite a lot of time in fact, and you expect to get something in return, right? If that give, get balance is not met, then we would assume that people become less engaged. So if you have that general balance, then the question is, well, what is your value proposition?

Thomas Forstner: It doesn't need to be like a massive exercise that, that you do. We kind of survived more or less on, on a napkin. For this for a lot of 2022, which is that well, what do we expect? We probably ex have higher expectations being that we're a fast growing startup you know, higher expectations than maybe most, let's say, like larger companies, although maybe larger companies would probably disagree.

Thomas Forstner: But, you know, in exchange we should also offer a higher baseline of return, right? So really good. Compensation, great growth, great and fast growth opportunities. Really flexible choice driven environment. And, you know the classic benefits that you have that can, you know, keep up with larger companies of of [00:08:00] our size.

Thomas Forstner: And then the question is really, is that balance? Are we asking In other words, the world from people, but we're not giving them anything in return. You can only survive on like the, the mission of changing the world in a startup for so long. But once you have a, a view of that, then you know, you again go by measuring a baseline.

Thomas Forstner: You could, most companies do this through an engagement survey, for example. Yes, that's also self-reported, but you know, you can sort of fill that up with other things if you're saying, okay is do we currently, let's say, have a compensation philosophy in place? And with that rank, let's say compensation on the one side of developer positions, like higher or lower, do we currently have a career framework in place?

Thomas Forstner: Do we have a performance framework in place? Do we have a policy on where people can and cannot work from? And for how long do we have something to account for, location, policy, and so on and so forth? Effectively, how many of your questions that. People are, are having, are actually answered. And once we established that baseline the way that we went about it in 22 2, it's effectively revamping and, and upgrading every single part [00:09:00] of that value proposition by putting a lot of the things that I talked about in place, having a performance grid.

Thomas Forstner: It gives people a quarter on quarter sense of how much they are delivering over delivering, under, delivering against the expectations of the business. Having a philosophy on, you know, how we compensate. Given that we have a distributed team in lots of different countries having an actual strategy for benefits rather than just.

Thomas Forstner: Saying like, Ooh, this looks nice. Let's spend like 5K on putting that in place and having, you know, as many answers as possible on your, where can you work for, how long can you work from there? Who can work from there? And all that. Just creating clarity and then measuring consecutively in your service.

Thomas Forstner: Does this somehow actually have a feedback loop? So if we're doing this, does this increase engagement in this regard by our definition? And that's, you know, worked quite well for us. And it is a relatively. Product led approach. We're just looking at employees as our end users and as the things that we're doing in develop proposition, as the features that we're offering to them, we're offering the wrong feature.[00:10:00] 

Thomas Forstner: We're probably, you know, building for the wrong thing. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. And you? Yeah. 

Ivor Colson: It was interesting how you kind of talked about how burnout's been around for such a long time, and actually I think the first use of it. Goes back to Shakespeare's sonics. 

Ivor Colson: Burnout was used for the first time, and then we kind of saw this kind of evolution of the concept. And in the 1980s, maslak came out with this survey to understand burnout in the workforce. So there's been a real kind of evolution there with the term, and I think it's kind of evolved in the last couple of years as well.

Ivor Colson: At on NiFi we kind of define engagement as a level of enthusiasm and connection employees have with their organization, but obviously that's very kind of subjective and you kind of talked about the performance grids that you had as well. I wondered kind of what data. Actually goes in there. Would you be able to share that?

Thomas Forstner: [00:11:00] Of course. So the, we're not reinventing the wheel with with that grid. A lot of companies, they can measure, you know, a person's sort of like help. Good. Quote unquote, a person is on site of like two a axis. You've seen this like in, in HR in general for a long time. You've got like nine box grids and all of these things.

Thomas Forstner: The question is just really how well are these a axis defined? So for us the, the way that that grid looks and, and the inputs that are coming in, in simple terms, is what do you do and how do you do it? So the what do you do basically comes from objectives and key results. So at the beginning of the quarter, you set some targets, let's say make this many hires, reach this sales quarter, build this feature and then you have some kind of objective criteria, how it's measured, whether you have succeeded against that that target.

Thomas Forstner: Based on that you can land some there on, on one axis, and the other one is, In combination with our career framework. So we have what we call career maps. Some other folks call it career tracks or leveling frameworks, or whatever you wanna wanna say. So it's effectively skills that we expect from people at [00:12:00] their level.

Thomas Forstner: And those skills really define how we conduct ourselves. It's in alignment with our values. We've got four core values and they're just made more specific for the day-to-day of the role. We would argue that you only are. Doing a good job. If you are great on the what, great on the how. I think Netflix caused this, you know, not, not hiring.

Thomas Forstner: Brilliant. Into the business. That's a similar idea there, because we're obviously a startup. We would say that somebody who's say in the middle of the grid is actually perfectly aligned with the with the skills that they can do and how difficult the tasks are that we're asking for them and, and how they're doing it.

Thomas Forstner: So this brings a little bit, not to bring too many, like ideas into it, but that's the general idea of flow state, which is, you know, if you know what you can do, matches. Aid your interest, but b also, you know, how how difficult it's, 

Ivor Colson: that's really interesting. Yeah. I think listeners will find that kind of level of insight particularly useful.

Ivor Colson: So thanks for sharing that. So what, what are your kind of key focus areas for 2023? . 

Thomas Forstner: That's an interesting one because right now in the business [00:13:00] we're focusing on annual planning a lot, and we're in sort of the final stretches of, of doing that. For anybody who's listening you know, if, if you're not having a seat at the table when these conversations are going on Make sure you ask why.

Thomas Forstner: Because every company builds two things. They're building a product and they're building themselves in most companies, whether you know it or not. The, the people team is the the operations team in general. They are the ones that build the company. And typically you have like 90% of your workforce that focuses on product, 10% on the on the company itself, that's fine, but even though that's proportional, you need to make sure you actually get a say in, well, what company do we want?

Thomas Forstner: Build what customer read employee. Do we want to build for who's the type of person that we want to attract? And that will guide pretty much everything that you're gonna do. Otherwise, you're just always gonna play catch up and focus on these disparate projects that all like, don't actually connect and you're just always gonna be reactive.

Thomas Forstner: So for us in in 2023, our focus is a lot on [00:14:00] sustainability of the team that we that we have. So what do we mean when we say stability? Sustainability. That for us means that quality and scalability. So is it good and will it be good if we're, let's say like double the team size, which, you know, in a, in a startup on a scale up can happen quite, quite quickly.

Thomas Forstner: If you want a number to, to measure this what a lot of investors look at when they care about capital efficiency is revenue per employee. It's a bit of a blunt force metric. But you can look at this to essentially say, okay, is my do, do I have, you know, let's say a good level of of team members in the business for, you know, the amount of revenue that the company is is generat.

Thomas Forstner: Now that doesn't sound very like wellbeing and engagement focused, but actually it very much is once you cascade it down to actual things that you're gonna do. Because if you're saying, okay you know, I want to make sure that I have sort of this amount of efficiency level, that means that, okay, for the people that are in the business today, are they, you know, Enabled to work as well as they could.

Thomas Forstner: Do they have, you know the, do we have [00:15:00] the right ratio of individual contributors to managers, for example? Yeah. Is there like one manager that has like way too many people deal with and they can't give like an individual person enough, enough things? Does everybody actually know? Particularly well what targets they're supposed to achieve.

Thomas Forstner: Are they well set or are they sort of in the dark? And it kind of always shifts sort of from, from, from week to week. Granted those things shouldn't exist in the first place, but as we all know, you know, the, the larger you grow, the less you sort of lose sight of, you know, how every individual is doing.

Thomas Forstner: So a lot of that focus on sustainability means, you know, making sure that managers are trained, making sure that. All of the processes that we do, everything from the interview process to onboarding, to performance measurement, all of this is scalable and works at like 300 people, just as well as it works at 100 people.

Thomas Forstner: So that's a lot of the the, the areas that we're looking at for for 2023. 

Ivor Colson: That's interesting. That's, that's quite a big challenge. Understanding how that kind of scales up and ensuring kind of efficiency when it does. And I think something that's quite it's happened in the last kind of couple [00:16:00] of years is people are becoming aware of the link between wellbeing and things like costs, like burnout, for example, has a big impact.

Ivor Colson: Costs of a business because people become inefficient and unengaged with their role. And this kind of link is becoming quite well known, I think, in, in different industries now and different companies. So I guess to start to wrap up, I'm a big kind of tech lover and I really love and enjoy hearing different opinions on how technology innovation will impact.

Ivor Colson: The workplace in, in different ways. How do you kind of see tech playing a role in the future of HR and, and people ops? 

Thomas Forstner: Yeah, so. What I'm seeing at the moment is the entire profession is reinventing itself really. So you have this classic idea that I think a lot of people still have of, you know, human resources, [00:17:00] which in, in itself is a terrible term.

Thomas Forstner: As like this sort of, you know, reactive, mostly admin led. Kind of, kind of role that, you know, gets, gets involved if there's a grievance or a dispute. Don't get me wrong, that's obviously always gonna be part of managing, like employee relations. But more and more especially over the pandemic and I think particularly in sort of startup world that that, that I, I'm in.

Thomas Forstner: It's much more project and product management. So this idea of people as a product people as a product is, is becoming much more pervasive in there. So thinking, like, thinking of employees as end users, thinking of your benefits, as your features, thinking of you know, the, the things that you want to deliver delivers like a, a people roadmap.

Thomas Forstner: And all these projects are things that you can work in, in an agile way on. So once you have this sort of mindset, it changes. Everything, what you're supposed to prioritize, how are you supposed to work? And when I think about technology within that, it means that admin should get relegated to really quite a [00:18:00] low quite, quite a low list on quite a low bullet on the, on the priority list.

Thomas Forstner: So when I consider purchasing new technology for for the people team at j I typically think of you. How much percent of manual work does this currently make for my talent partners or my people partners that that report into me? And how much time is actually getting getting saved? By it?

Thomas Forstner: My assumption would be that the amount of tools that people will purchase in the next year will decrease. It will probably kind of merge into sort of like larger Tools that do a lot of things at the same time. Yeah. But the expectation of what these things can do, whether it's like a performance management and the and engagement survey tool, those will be quite.

Thomas Forstner: Quite high. And as a result, we are, for example, quite, quite lean on the amount of technology that we use. But the ones that we do, do, they have met very high bars for, for us in terms of how much do we actually expect them to solve for us. We're not gonna buy something and spend, you know, 10, 10 k on it with like limited [00:19:00] spend that, you know we're then gonna have to like, actively maintain for for a long.

Ivor Colson: Yeah. And that's a nice segue into the, the last question, which is a quick fire round. What is one thing you would love to see automated in the tasks that you do or your team does? 

Thomas Forstner: Data entry is my answer. So, you know, even, even if you try to reduce the amount of things that that you have.

Thomas Forstner: technology in people teams is nowhere near as sophisticated as it is in marketing teams, for example, or sales. So as a result, you're still, like, you find yourself probably everybody can relate with, like manually inputting stuff multiple times because systems do not talk to each other. And that is incredibly annoying.

Thomas Forstner: And it also leads to like lot of data, right? The, the, the idea of like reporting is gonna become more and. Important, right? More and more leadership teams will want to have like insights from, okay, how's the team doing? Give me something tangible, gimme something objective. And [00:20:00] oftentimes you pool this from multiple sources.

Thomas Forstner: Having to do that manually if the expectation is there is a tedious job. And yeah, it involves a lot of spreadsheet work and and time. And, you know, if I could have some, some wishful thinking, I think the number one thing that I'd like to wish could be automated. You know, the, the reporting at the data entry, 

Ivor Colson: Yeah, I find that absolutely baffling, that so much is manual in the HR space.

Ivor Colson: And, and when we look at something like the marketing space, like it used to be very much kind of manual and data entry. Now you have so many kind of digital tools to kind of automate the reporting process, for example, with Google Analytics. But that's not the case in kind of the people op space and, and what is typically or traditionally known as as hr.

Ivor Colson: And we're outta time. Thank you so much for, for joining. Thomas. I really enjoyed the chat and I did thanks tuning and speak to 

Thomas Forstner: thanks so much.[00:21:00]