[ANNOUNCER]: Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness not just the obvious symptom, our hosts James and Coby.

[COBY]: Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]: No that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]: Hey thanks for joining us. I’m Coby, he’s James, and today we’re going to do something a bit different we’re going to answer some questions posed to us by you, our faithful listeners.

[JAMES]: Yeah it’s kind of cool. We’ve gotten some really interesting questions through LinkedIn and different places that we’ve been chatting with folks. And we’ve got a bunch of really interesting questions, so what I’m hoping is we’ll be able to get through a bunch of them today, as we kind of work our way through. But I really wanted to focus on… we spent some time kind of figuring out what ones are going to be to give us some really cool discussions. So we’re hoping that you really enjoy this different format. And if you want to post some questions to us connect with us on LinkedIn, check out the company page. Coby will put some information in the show notes so that you can find different ways to engage with us.

[COBY]: Absolutely. And again you can always just email us at info@roman3.ca, but yeah I’ll make sure that information is in the show notes, and we’d love to hear from people that enjoy the podcast and we just love to hear more questions. Because it’s nice for us to talk about stuff that you care about, not just stuff that we care about. All right…

[JAMES]: You mean its not all about me?

[COBY]: No, not this one time. All right so let’s just jump into the first question. So I’ll impose this one to you James. Okay, what is the best way to begin to investigate workplace culture?

[JAMES]: Yeah this is a cool one, because we talk a lot about how you build a workplace culture. We talk about our Hierarchy and we talk about the different elements to it. But how do you actually start to investigate that? so I’m going to talk about this one from a consultant perspective. Because these are the tools that we use when we’re working with clients to investigate their workplace culture. But whether you are, maybe you’re an external consultant like us doing these types of investigations, or interested in doing these types of investigations, or you are working internally and you want to investigate your own workplace culture, the process is going to be largely the same. So the best, the short answer to a long setup, is that what we look for is first identifying what the pain point is with the client. So a great example is a recent conversation that I had with a prospective client. And we’re going through and they’re identifying all the problems, as they see them, the challenge with pain points is just your pain, its a symptom of something else, so we need to resolve that pain point, but we also need to, if we’re actually ever going to fix something, we need to figure out what the root cause is. And the best way that we have for really starting that investigation and gathering the most rich data that’s going to give us some really good intelligence about how the workplace culture actually operates is by looking at three different areas. We look at the Policy, the Practice, and the Perception. So for instance, this particular company has some very ambitious growth goals. They’ve recently acquired another site and they are constructing another site. And they’re actually looking at doubling their staffing requirements over the next year or so. And the big problem that they’re having is that they have had really high employee turnover, especially on their new hires. So what we need to do is fix that problem for them, but the only way that we’re going to actually resolve the pain is by actually looking at what’s causing it. And that’s what I want to talk about with this one is really the best thing that you can do is identify whether it’s a Policy, a Practice, or a Perception problem.

[COBY]: Yeah and this is kind of something that is really important for different organizations to be aware of, and for different consultants, and everything like that, to be really thinking about. Is that sometimes we see the pain point as not the symptom, but as the cause. Like people are just leaving, people don’t want to stay, or the moral is bad, and we can’t… and we have to fix that as a specific issue. But going at a lot of these issues head on tends to be trying. You’re really trying to address the wrong thing. I mean that’s actually kind of the whole philosophy behind why we call the podcast ‘Diagnosing The Workplace’ because you want to help identify that a lot of the major pain points that companies experience, that leadership experience, are often because we’re trying to tackle the symptom, instead of the actual cause. And kind of a fundamental breakdown of where a lot of, like 99% of most of the problems that kind of come from the workplace tend to fall into those three categories. Is it a Policy issue? Do you not have rules to govern or rules that will create stability and transparency around on this is? It about the Practice? Are we actually doing things either in line with the policies, or how are we actually… how is this really playing out day to day, person to person? And the perspective, how does how do people see this? How do employees understand this what is the general thoughts around this issue, and around how they understand and how the stuff it plays out? Because sometimes it’s a matter of knowing, again, where the pain point is. But also, what part of the Policy, Practice, and perspective is actually causing it?

[JAMES]: Yeah and this was a real ‘Aha’ moment when my conversation with this prospective client, because they had spent a lot of time making sure that their policies… they’ve got great… they’ve got great policies, they have the framework of what they want to do. They’ve got very clear… clearly written recruitment policies, they’ve got a process for their pre-screening interview process. And then once a person is hired there’s an onboarding process. Like I was honestly a little surprised at how much they had put together already, because unfortunately a lot of small businesses that we work with don’t have the frameworks in place and we need to kind of set up a lot of these frameworks. But understanding how Policy, Practice, and Perception really influence the workplace was a key moment for our conversation. Because they had been focusing on one of them, and they were fairly confident that their managers understood the policies, and were implementing them. But you can have the best policies in the world, and you can have managers who actively… who understand the intent of the policies, and are doing their best to carry out those policies. But if the perception from employees is that the policies are not equitable, or they’re not fair, or they’re not sufficient… I mean we talk about Competitive, Sufficient, and Equitable all the time. If the perception is that the policies are faulty, or that there’s a discrepancy in how the policies are implemented, unfortunately it doesn’t matter how good your policies are. Because perception shapes reality. What we perceive to be real, is how, is what we respond to.

[COBY]: Yeah and because like a lot of the time when we look at the time we spend on things, like the policies, we kind of have this “If we build it, they will come” mentality. That putting it on paper kind of creates the success. You know we see that a lot with like mission statements, and value statements, and stuff like that. Especially around ‘culture is our mission statement’, and that a whole other conversation.

[JAMES]: Get off the soapbox.

[COBY]: Get off the soapbox, but the idea is if you put it down on paper then it’s real, and ‘if you build it they will come’ and it will solve our problems. But that’s again a very important step in the success you’re looking for. But that is not the end step. So it is really important to understand… not just understand the policy, understand the practice, understand the perception, but understand their alignment. And how important that is because the alignment between those three things is very telling about your organization’s areas of vulnerability. And when we talk about Policy, Practice, and Perception in our training, and our certification courses, we refer to them as the 3 Accessibilities. Because they are the three things that you need to make your culture accessible. You need to make sure that the Policies protect and are transparent, for both the company’s best interests and for ideal employee performance. Make sure that the Practice is accessible, and consistent, and reliable, and something that is kind of standardized. And that employees understand… that both managers understand the Perception and employees understand their Perception. And that makes the ability for all the other stuff to kind of come into place. So if you want to have accessibility, you need to have the 3 Accessibilities of Policy, Practice, and Perception.

[JAMES]: And so answering the question: what can you do, or how do you start investigating your workplace culture? This is the best advice that we can give you, without giving you our entire business model. But these are the tools, this is how we approach our work. And if you are internal operations, it’s how we would encourage you to approach investigating your workplace. So if your problem is around recruitment, then look at your policies that relate to recruitment. If you’re having trouble bringing people in, just attracting people, then there’s probably something… if your policies are fine, and your processes are fine, then where… what is the problem? And it’s likely either in the Practice that people are not adhering to those policies, or it’s in the Perception. Somehow what you’ve said is not resonating with your target demographic the way that you think it is. And so their perception of what you offer is different, and that unfortunately that perception is going to shape whether or not they’re going to apply to work with you.

[COBY]: Yeah and what’s great about those three things too is that they… part of the investigation can be very evidence-based, and very tangible and practical. And that’s one of the things that we do is we create these tools to utilize for that, because again it’s not just about having the rough idea of where about… where the pain points lie. It’s also about collecting, investigating, collecting the intelligence you need in order to have actionable outcomes that will resolve the root cause, and then alleviate the symptoms.

[JAMES]: Awesome. So we can probably keep talking about this for a while, but let’s jump into another question because we want to get through as many of these as we can in our, well as if we want to keep it to a 35 to 45 minute podcast. So I’ve got one for you Coby,  ‘We have a professional development program at our company but it does not seem to be producing much in the way of higher skill and talent’. So I guess the question is, what can we do about that?

[COBY]: Yeah right, so that is a good question. Because like again, I could talk about training and professional development for years. So okay, I’ll try and limit this to a small, to a small answer. I think a lot of it comes down to the kind of expectations that the… going back to culture, that the culture has on employees. Because a lot of the ways… because talent, and development, and professional development is often thought of as boxes to check for performance evaluation. There not necessarily thought of as kind of your main engine to improve performance and outcomes, which is what it really should be. And I think again it kind of comes down to that expectations placed on employees, and sometimes a nice way to think about it is about… what the expectation is that is on employees by leadership, or just kind of by the culture in general. Is it that employees need to be continuously working in order to get the best work done? Or is it about employees making sure that they are improving and becoming better today than they were yesterday? Because a lot of ways it… there seems to be a more common view about that more, continuously working being busy which is a very traditional kind of mindset. And because the idea is that if a person’s occupied in their work then they’re naturally, or kind of like through osmosis I guess, developing new skills and experience. But there’s a fundamental problem with that. Just because we get better, and more efficient at doing certain tasks doesn’t mean that we actually create new skills, or create a more well-rounded sense of abilities. It just kind of means that we’re just working faster. But again, I think a good way to think about it too is maybe about the idea of what we call ‘the difference between Being Busy and Becoming Better’. Now we have we have a video that kind of digs into this in a little bit more detail, I want to rehash the whole video, but largely it’s about how you define Being Busy and define Becoming Better. Because Being Busy is using as much time as you can with the tasks that you have. And Becoming Better is using your time to continuously improve yourself and your performance with the tasks that you have. Because, again, most of us want to encourage our employees to be better, but in reality a lot of times our training policies, as we talked before, and expectations placed on people, prioritizes kind of the unproductive or unsupported training, which kind of reinforces complacency. And that’s often why we don’t seem to have… our training development programs are not producing the level of highly skilled and talented people that we want to have. Because we’re really not leveraging and using training properly. Or not creating a culture where training and development, and becoming better, is kind of the main outcome.

[JAMES]: Yeah and I always enjoy talking about Busy versus Better because I remember one of the very first training programs that we did years ago, in kind of introducing this topic, we had a great… I’ve been shamelessly stealing this analogy that they shared with us. One of our participants, in explaining this, they kind of rehashed it back to us of: “well it’s the difference between having 25 years of experience or having one year of experience 25 times”. Which I love that description. Because it gets to the heart of, you know people can be busy in one job for a long period of time, and never really progress beyond the basic ability to what they should have learned in that first year, right? If you’re not constantly pushing people to be better, if you’re focused on… and we see this a lot with remote work, of monitoring people’s productivity, of key logging software, which I just have a fundamental, visceral reaction to, that I will try to reign it in. But these expectations that we put on people whether it’s monitoring their time, like I remember in jobs where the expectation was nobody leaves before the CEO leaves. So for 30 minutes  I’m just sitting on Facebook, sitting in front of my computer just praying that the CEO’s gonna get off their ass and leave in the next 15 minutes, so I can go home. These expectations that we, that people have to be busy and we have to monitor people being busy, are shooting ourselves in the foot. And especially if we want to create a learning culture where people are progressing. Where they are building professional skills and development. Where we are encouraging them to actually give their best and to become better.

[COBY]: Yeah and I think that a good sign of kind of whether or not you have a culture that is reinforcing people to be Busy or reinforcing or enforcing them to become Better, is kind of… what is the standard, or what is the governing philosophy from managers. Is it that the managers want people to work in the way that they’re comfortable managing, or do they want them to work in a way that will produce the best outputs, even if it looks a little bit different for every person? Because going back to an early podcast, we talked about Work From Home, is it a problem or the solution? The idea is one of the fundamental things that came up from that conversation was around the idea of; a lot of the push back to the office was like 15% a realistic operational requirements and better employee performance, and 85% managers comfort level with people being in the office. And they had a hard… they’re uncomfortable managing people from homes. They wanted them back to the office, so that it was easier on them. And you know, that kind of mentality is like, one of the major red flags for a company that reinforces Busy. Because it’s about how the work ‘looks’, it’s about how people… what people working should look like, rather than are we pushing people to become better at what they’re already good at. And allowing people to kind of have things a bit different, but as long as they’re performing the best work, the best way possible, then  we’re supportive of it not always looking the same, and standardized for everybody. So I think there’s a lot at play when it comes to the Busy versus Better, because I do think though that there’s a lot of signs out there, a lot of common trends are really just a big red flag for reinforcing the wrong thing.

[JAMES]: I really like that analogy of the managers wanting their own comfort level, because a lot of what we see, unfortunately, is because of the manager. Managers have the biggest impact on an employee’s…  their experience day to day. The person who is your direct supervisor,  who is managing you, they have a tremendous amount of influence on how you engage with work. And when they are focused on their comfort rather than your productivity it creates a whole host of problems. But it kind of leads us back into this whole training, learning culture piece. Because a learning culture needs to not only be from a employee training and development perspective, we need a learning culture when it comes to management skills as well. We often, a lot of times we confuse… and we’ve talked about this many times the difference between management skills and leadership skills, and you can find excellent, excellent resources out there around how to become a better leader. But how do you actually train managers is something that a lot of people gloss over. And it’s incredibly frustrating because of the impact that managers have on the day-to-day, the impact that they have on the workplace culture, and the impact that they have on the employee experience. And yet we tend to overlook this crucial aspect of, are we actually training people to be a good manager?

[COBY]: Yeah and we’ve talked about this in some of our webinars and our other videos, around the idea, like a lot of the reason why managers… or why someone gets promoted, a lot of reasons why they get promoted is because either they showed aptitude for the skills of the job they were currently working. Like they were an engineer and they were a great engineer, so they wanted to promote the person to help other people be great Engineers. Or they promoted because well they’ve been around for a long time they have seniority, and it’s kind of like it’s owed to them. Well those are again the two most common reasons study over study has shown, Gallup has done a lot around showing how influential those two things are. But neither of those two things are any real reason why someone should be put into a managerial role. Because especially if they show aptitude in their old job, the skills of their old job, well they’re not using those skills anymore, right? They’re using totally new skills, and if we don’t prepare them and train them to manage people with the new skills that they need, they’re going to default back to the skills that they’re comfortable with. And that’s how you get a manager that gets into weeds and is micromanaging because they’re more comfortable doing the work, than empowering and inspiring and supporting others to do the work. So we end up setting a lot of these people, that could become great managers, are set up to fail because we we think that they’ll figure it out on their own. Or that they’ll wake up on their first day as the manager with these new skills downloaded in their mind, not realizing we as organization need to be the ones that train them, and prepare them, that allow them to be successful. And I think that I like the idea of the learning culture, and learning organizations, because when you have when you have an organization that is about, our greatest asset is about training and making people be better today than they were yesterday, and that stuff then the desire and the ability to train people and make them stronger employees is kind of interwoven into the everyday. It’s expected. How could you be successful if we don’t prepare you for it? That’s a ridiculous idea. So a lot of the ways, when we have these professional development programs, going back to the original question, if we have these programs they may be good on paper, but if they’re not producing results that we want, when we don’t use them effectively. Or then  they’re designed to actually just become metrics to check, rather than a vehicle to empower and create high performing employees, which is in my opinion is what training development should be about. Mostly about building high capacity employees, through a lot through allowing them to kind of be in a culture that it is not just expected that you’re going to be trained, but in it’s encouraged. And we want you to use the training once you have it.

[JAMES]: And that’s the crux of it too. It needs to be used. I don’t know how many times we’ve talked with people about training and it’s like ‘Yeah I get professional training, you know I get so much money for professional development every year, but I just take courses to use up the money, but I’m never actually able to use these new skills that I’ve developed’, that the company has invested in this person to develop. They don’t take advantage of it. It’s ludicrous to me. Anyways, I think we’ve gone a little long on this one. Both of us have had our respective soap boxes in the first two questions. So let’s try to keep the momentum going with another question.

[COBY]: Yeah you’re right. I mean, so maybe this format may not be the best timing wise. But we’ll see how it all cuts together and how people respond to it.

[JAMES]: Or maybe not just pick the questions that are the biggest triggers for us.

[COBY]: Maybe it’s about question selection. Maybe that’s the answer right there. okay so I’ll ask you the next one, okay? So this question says “You talk a lot about the old ways of doing things, so what are the main old ways of doing things that we need to avoid?'”. So I think this is in reference to some of our earlier conversations around you know, kind of the shedding the 90s mentality.

[JAMES]: Yeah it’s the Antiquated Assumptions,, right? It’s… oh man, okay. How to do this briefly? So there are a few… I’m going to pick, kind of I think, my top biggest irritants and try to focus in on those. And the first one for me, we’ve used the analogy before, around talent development, around talent acquisition, of the difference between mining for talent and farming for talent. And I love this analogy because the Antiquated Assumption that we’re trying to fight against in this case, is the idea that the best way find… you have to find the diamond in the rough, right? Your recruitment efforts are all about finding the right person, polishing that diamond, and putting them into a place where they can shine. Which is not a fundamentally bad approach, it’s a fundamentally limited approach. And it’s part of why we’re seeing a lot of problems with talent acquisition, talent retention, is because everybody is looking for that perfect diamond that they can put on a pedestal and point to and say that wonderful person is producing and they are the ideal, and they are everything that we ever wanted, and we didn’t have to invest in them. I think it’s the biggest pet peeve. But that doesn’t work, that mentality will run out just as mining activities are a limited resource, eventually you will hit the end of what you can produce from a single mine. Instead we need to take a more of a farming approach to our talent development and talent acquisition. We need to create the conditions, we need to prepare the soil to create the conditions where people can grow and become the best versions of themselves. And this is a lot of what we talk, I mean this comes really nicely on the heels of the last question that I talked about, you know a learning culture, and the difference between Being Busy versus Being Better. If we take an approach to our talent acquisition strategy of farming for talent, of creating the conditions where we can develop internally, it not only is a more sustainable source of high potential employees, it’s also an excellent way to show in your employees that you care about them, that they are valued, that they have opportunities with you, and it can go a long ways towards actually reducing the amount of turnover that you ultimately have, and reducing the number of times that you have to actually go out to the market and search for somebody. So developing a learning culture and taking this farming approach, rather than just a mining for the diamond in the rough, will be a far more sustainable activity. And it is a much better approach than the antiquated mining piece.

[COBY]: Yeah and you’re right. The last question and this one really, that one point really does kind of go together nicely. Because and I think you really hit the nail on the head, when it’s a matter of, part of the reason why we want the mining approach, we want to find that fully polished diamonds, we don’t have to invest in this development, or in the kind of the ramp up to them hitting full productivity. We kind of want them to walk in day one and start delivering as if they were there for a long time. And I think that idea of expecting people to kind of be, you know, a fully formed diamond, or fully formed gem, right from the beginning, and finding that perfect person. Is such a fundamental mistake. Its not just an antiquated assumption, it’s just a fundamentally wrong approach. Because one, you are almost… like you’re probably dismissing very viable applicants, that with a small investment and, again a little bit of that farming and nurturing, putting them in the right soil and kind of again, giving them what they need to be successful, could end up becoming the rock stars you’re looking for. But it just requires a little bit of of TLC to allow them to get there. And, you know, the other thing too is that… but then if you’re only chasing the diamonds, then you’re gonna get into potentially, you know, they’re gonna be with you until someone else gives them a better offer. Whereas if you, like I said, if you invest in the person that may need a little bit of TLC, and you kind of have that farming mentality to it, that person is going to remember the care, the loyalty, the time, the investment, and they’re going to be a much harder person for someone else to take away. Because you’ve taken the time to care for them. I think people are afraid that if they do that, the caring piece, the person is just going to leave. And all that time is wasted. I think that may be a big…

[JAMES]: And that is the fear. I mean I can speak from experience, doing you know, more general business coaching and consulting work, that was the feedback that I would hear often. As well ‘what if I spend all of this time, and money, and energy training people, and then they leave?’. Well okay, then we need to look at what else you’re doing, right? If you’re not… if you’re investing in people, and they’re just hitting the road, there are other problems at play. But the other piece is what if you don’t invest in them and they just stay, right?

[COBY]: Yeah I think Richard Branson said that famously.

[JAMES]: Yeah it’s not an original quote, I was struggling to remember who actually said it, but I like that illustration, or that quote. Because you can invest in somebody, and yes it is a bit of a risk. They could, once you help them to develop new skills, they may look for other opportunities. But on the other hand, if you never invest in anybody’s development in your organization, you’re just going to be stuck with the same poor performance that you’re stuck with now.

[COBY]: Yeah you’re going to be stuck with people being busy. And I think that you’re right though. A lot of that, you know, if you are putting the time into developing them, and everything like that, and they’re still walking away. Then you’re right, the odds are there’s more than just your training that’s affecting that. And this kind of goes back to the first question, is it maybe you’re training Policies are very good, but maybe the Practice and Perception of their use, and development, and future with you is what is causing them to leave. Which is why we often talk about culture really is the big picture. Because again, like the talent acquisition piece, lives within culture, but it’s all connected. And the problem is that when we try to pinpoint a specific piece, like you know, I don’t want to invest in people because they’re going to leave. Well that problem doesn’t live in isolation, right? It’s impacted by everything else. Which is why when you look at again the 3 Accessibilities, the Policy, Practice, and Perception, it really does allow for that bigger view of the whole thing. Allows you to see a lot more. Identify, again like you said, where the pain points… or where the actual causes, root cause lies. And not just the symptoms.

[JAMES]: Yeah. The last bit that I wanted to talk about with Antiquated Assumptions is, and I drives me nuts, the idea a lot of these things drive me nuts, the idea that employees are liabilities versus viewing employees as assets. And this is something that we see often and we see still… I mean we are in 2023 right now, we are seeing mass layoffs across virtually every sector, and it’s really a response to companies quote-unquote “tightening the belt”, right? But what it is, is companies with a narrow view of in what their employees… who their employees actually are. Seeing them as a liability to be cut the second that they think they might possibly have a downturn in their stock price, or that you know we’re heading into a recession, so we have to cut all the extra fat, and just run people ragged and run them understaffed, rather than taking the idea that employees are our assets. These companies that are going through these major layoffs, right now are going to turn around in 8, 10, 12, 18 months, whenever the recession actually ends, and start b*tching and whining that they can’t attract people. After they just spent all this time laying off a huge number of highly talented employees. And we know there’s some great statistics from McKinsey and Company, that talk about the fact that employees are… when they are leaving, they’re often leaving the industry as well. So it’s not just that, you know, we’re in a consulting field, and we’re going to lay off a bunch of our consultants, and then we’ll just hire these consultants back on, or cherry pick from our competitors. Well no, people are actually, I believe the statistic is that only 21% of employees who left their jobs were actually returning to the same industry. So you’re causing massive, massive problems by treating your employees like a liability, rather than investing in them and treating them like an asset.

[COBY]: Yeah it’s kind of funny because I kind of see the, you know, ‘we’re tightening our belt, so we’re cutting off employees’, kind of like saying ‘we’re tightening our belts as a software company, so we’re going to stop paying our power bill’. Or ‘we’re tightening our belt as a transportation company, so we’re going to sell our trucks’, right? Like you know, what I mean it makes about as much sense as that. yes, because payroll is often, what 50% if not more of an organization’s kind of overall expense?

[JAMES]: Depending on their industry.

[COBY]: Yeah I mean, and some of them it’s a lot higher. So I get it, like you know, this is our biggest expense, so this is our easiest place to lay off from. But again, this kind of goes back to our conversations around the Fragile Grip Principle too, right? Around the idea of letting people go with the Weak Grip is just is how you are not taking care of that fragile relationship that you have with employees. And again, they’re going to remember. And like you say, they’re not going to be coming back. And it’s like, you know, you can burn bridges, how many bridges do you have to burn before no one can come to you? So yeah I think that’s another great example of an Antiquated Assumption, that people, employees are expenses and liabilities. Because again, that mentality is gonna… the ropes running out on that one. So it’s only going to work for so long. Okay, so I think that’s all have time to get through.

[JAMES]: I was hoping for four or five, but I think we’ve got a solid three.

[COBY]: Yeah, apparently we have to stop picking questions that trigger us on our soapboxes. But what’s kind of cool is, and this was totally unintentional, I think there’s a lot of overlap with a lot of the questions too, right? Like the first question, we talked about the ability, the need, to investigate the Policy, Practice, and Perception of our workplaces, of the culture, to kind of identify our pain points. But then, in the second question we talked about the professional development programs of the companies. Well again, if those companies have good professional development policy, but the practice and perception of those policies reinforces people Being Busy instead of Being Better, then that again creates a vulnerability that will that causes some of the major pain points that we’re seeing and again. Then it goes back to the mining and farming analogy, it’s because we don’t want to… if we don’t want to invest in people, because people are liabilities and expenses, rather than  something that we should be investing into, then that kind of Practice of of treating people like liabilities. You know, wanting to find people fully formed, so we don’t invest in them, and then we encourage them to become busy, all that kind of stuff all plays together. These are all actually, again this is totally coincidental, but there’s a lot of connections and overlap between these three questions. Because I really do think that again, a lot of it comes down to, when you have the culture that is not… that is missing pieces or has vulnerabilities, usually because of Policy Practice, and Perception, then it creates the pain points, like you know again, difficulty attracting talent, of low engagement, poor success with professional development, and then these are the things we focus on. When really these are the symptoms of culture problems that we should be addressing, kind of through again, an investigation of the 3 Accessibilities. Because that’s where we’re going to actually have the greatest success in addressing them.

[JAMES]: Yeah that is again, that is the best place to start. If you, whether you are doing internal ops, or you’re an external consultant trying to help clients identify these things, Policy, Practice, and Perception will give you some really rich data that will inform you about how the workplace culture is currently operating. Before we end, I just want to say that I’ve really enjoyed this format. I’m really hoping that you have as well. And let us know if you like this type of Q&A and please connect with us. Either send us, you can send us questions through LinkedIn, or you can send them to us by email info@roman3.ca. Let us know what you thought, and please keep sharing your questions. Because this has been fun.

[COBY]: all right, so that about does it for us. So for a full archive of our podcasts and access to the video version hosted on our YouTube channel visit our website at roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.

[ANNOUNCER]: For more information on topics like these don’t forget to visit us at roman3.ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share, employees breaking out in spontaneous dance, dry mouth, aversion to the sound of James’s voice, desire to find a better podcast…