Quiet Quitting: Another Gift Brought to You by Corporate America

Introduction:

This week, in light of reports that half of the U.S. workforce has “quietly quit” their jobs, Shawn Busse, Paul Downs, and William Vanderbloemen talk about the latest rage: Is quiet quitting something new? Is it just a media creation? Have Shawn, Paul, and William experienced it in their businesses? And who’s to blame? Plus, the three owners explain how they hire for engagement and how they’ve changed their hiring processes in response to the pandemic and the labor shortage. For example, Paul explains why, in this brave new world, he continues to flip conventional wisdom on its head: Instead of hiring slow and firing fast, he’s been hiring fast and firing slow. And he says it’s working.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Shawn Busse is CEO of Kinesis.

Paul Downs is CEO of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers.

William Vanderbloemen is CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word Productions.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Shawn, Paul, and William. It’s great to have you here. I want to start today with a topic that it seems just won’t go away. It kind of started with The Great Resignation, which turned into the labor shortage, which has now morphed into what’s becoming known as “quiet quitting.” As you probably know, it’s not really about quitting. It’s about employees who say they’re not engaged with work, and they’re now doing the bare minimum to try to skate by, hence the term quiet quitting.

The Wall Street Journal just ran a story quoting a Gallup survey that found that fully half of the workforce has quietly quit by their own testimony. And only a third of the people in the survey said they are actually engaged at work. Is this real? Is it overblown? Is it just in corporate settings, and not so much in our world? Any thoughts from any of you?

Paul Downs:
Just because people are talking about something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s real. Things that make a good headline get a lot of play.

Loren Feldman:
Always picking on the media.

Paul Downs:
I would be curious to know more about the size of the survey, who they surveyed, how many people they reached out to who didn’t answer, which is a form of quiet quitting itself, I guess.

Loren Feldman:
Well, it was Gallup, so I believe it was a scientific survey. But I take your point, that doesn’t mean—

Paul Downs:
Half the U.S. workforce is not paying any attention when they work? That seems unlikely.

Loren Feldman:
Here’s the tricky thing with this: The definition is really important. Quiet quitting can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not paying attention. It means you’re doing the bare minimum. You’re not going above and beyond.

William Vanderbloemen:
Loren, I wonder if this is a change at all. I remember when the internet was first a thing, and you’re surfing the web, and there was Microsoft Windows—I forget what the extension was, but you could move your cursor up and to the right and a fake spreadsheet would show up. And an extension was called “Hide, my boss is coming.” That’s ancient history, but I just wonder.

It feels like, at least with our clients, the pandemic and all the ripples that are still happening from it, just sort of revealed realities and accelerated realities that were already present. When we wrote Culture Wins, four years ago now, all the research we showed said: Somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of Americans hate their job—not just are showing up or sort of like it, but hate your job. And if that’s the case, and if you go through two years of “Let’s work from home,” and, “I can be in shorts,” the accountability factors down even farther. I wonder if that just reveals a dynamic that was already there.

Paul Downs:
I think it’s going to be heavily influenced by the configuration of work, too. I don’t observe any quiet quitting happening in my operation, because we’re all here. We can see each other work. We can see the work being done. It’s a manufacturing environment. It would be very, very difficult for someone to quietly quit.

Loren Feldman:
Paul, doesn’t that depend on the definition of quietly quitting? I mean, is it not possible that you’ve had employees who just didn’t go the extra mile, who did the bare minimum? That could happen in a factory setting. Have you observed that?

Paul Downs:
That could happen in a factory setting. We’re not really a factory. We’re a workshop, and I think that it’s a different kind of environment. Yeah, if it was just an assembly line with people lined up and stamping the thing out—like I Love Lucy, that kind of assembly line—I think people can easily do the bare minimum, because there’s not much to be gained by doing any more than that. But in any kind of environment where a team is working together, physically together, and it’s not a toxic environment, and there’s work to be done, and you can see it being done, I think it’s just much harder to get away with any kind of change in the work output, or the other team members would notice.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, you’re working remotely, your entire staff is, and you also have a line of sight into a lot of other businesses. What are your thoughts about it? Is it real? Is it overblown? What do you think?

Shawn Busse:
I think it’s two things. I think it’s an example of good branding. Somebody’s put a name to something that already existed. And it’s catchy, right? It’s kind of an alliteration, so it’s kind of capturing the headline. But I mean, I think to William’s point, we’ve studied levels of engagement long before the pandemic, and they were always pretty deplorable. You had something like, maybe a third of the workforce was actually, actively engaged, 20 percent or so was actively disengaged, and then the remaining in the middle were just sort of showing up. So I haven’t heard the “50-percent hate their job,” but that kind of lines up with what existed before the pandemic.

And then I think, as you showed in the Morning Report the other day, Loren, you had an all-time high level of engagement in the summer of 2020—which I thought was really interesting—and now we have an all-time low level of engagement. So what’s changed in that time is remote work. I think to Paul’s point, when people can see each other working and are accountable to each other, it’s really difficult to be that person who’s checked out. But when you’re not seeing each other… I mean, I’m just hearing anecdotal story after anecdotal story of people who get a new job. They get a laptop, they do the job, but aren’t really doing the job. I just think that that lack of accountability to one another through physical presence makes it easier for that to happen.

William Vanderbloemen:
I totally agree, Shawn. I would say about the all-time engagement of summer of 2020, I was engaged in work in summer 2020 because I wanted to go upstairs to the office in my house and get away from all the children that were downstairs for a while. [Laughter] Yeah, I’ll engage—engage in anything other than being trapped in here. Some of my friends in New York in a 900-square-foot apartment or whatever: “Yes, please, put me to work.”

But I think, Shawn, you really hit on something. The virtual piece sounds so good, but it just doesn’t work. I mean, people were made to be together. My wife and I were out at a Labor Day parade this week and just noticed how people loved being in a crowd and being with each other. We were not made to be alone. And when we’re left alone and we’re left unaccountable, I think you just see the worst of us come out.

We’ve had a significant number of clients who have discovered over the last two years that fairly large percentages of their workforce—like 15 to 25 percent—are working from home and have also taken other full-time remote employment and are working multiple full-time jobs from home at the bare minimum to just get more paycheck. And that sounds awful, but I’m afraid that’s kind of where I think, Shawn, you’ve hit on it. Accountability will lead to productivity.

Loren Feldman:
I overheard a conversation the other day between Millennials, and one of them was talking about his outrage with his employer. He works remotely. The employer has suffered a number of losses, employees who have left, and has asked this employee to do a little more work. The boss guessed it would be about an hour more a day. And this employee is outraged with his employer, because they didn’t offer any more pay to go with this extra work—although he acknowledged he’s not working anything close to 40 hours a week, because he’s working remotely, and he doesn’t think it’s gonna take him any extra time to do the additional work. It’s just the principle of the thing that has him outraged.

William Vanderbloemen:
Loren, not to dominate the mic, but even before the pandemic, we wrote this book. We were winning all these “best places to work things”: best office dog, best office space, most engaged, blah, blah, blah. So you know, we kept getting pestered to write a book, and I didn’t want to write a book about our story. We found that nearly every book on culture is about that company’s story.

So we said, “Well, let’s study 150 places that are winning similar awards, and see what’s in common.” And what we found is all of them have said—no matter how they’re approaching workplace culture—the ballgame for the next decade (this is before the pandemic) is engagement and retention. The people who win that, given the new generation that’s showing up to work, given the flightiness of people with work, given remote work, engagement and retention is the ballgame. And I think the pandemic has accentuated that.

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, and then you’ve got the other force at play, too, which is, the media gets the vast majority of its stories from corporate America. And corporate America, for especially the last 40 years, has been an increasingly transactional workplace. So the business wants to get a certain set of results, it’s driving its employees to get those results, using more and more kind of, I would say, inhumane processes. And so this, in some ways, is a little bit of a rebellion against that corporate mindset.

And then, the unfortunate part—I think this is the real tragedy for everybody listening to the show, who probably isn’t in corporate America—is that small businesses kind of get swept up in that. You get employees who’ve been pretty abused through corporate America for many years. If they come into a small business, they’ve got their guard up. They just expect that that workplace is going to be crappy like they’ve experienced before. I’ve really struggled, honestly. Even pre-pandemic, I really struggled to hire people who came out of the corporate space, because they’ve just had a different level of conditioning. And I think a lot of this is that rebellion against that treatment by corporate America.

Paul Downs:
Well, when you read about—I think there was a series of stories in The Times a couple of weeks ago about the monitoring software that some corporations deploy—I mean, if you treat your people like garbage, they’re not going to be feeling loyal. This whole trend of monitoring everybody’s every second, I think, is really a huge mistake by whoever does it. It would be interesting to sit in on a conversation where someone persuades a boss that this is a good idea, when anybody with an ounce of human experience knows that it is not the way to get the most out of people.

Loren Feldman:
I think we all agree with you on that, Paul, but you do understand where this comes from. People are trying to figure out how to manage remote workers.

Shawn Busse:
I don’t know. I don’t know.

Paul Downs:
I don’t know about that. I think they’re just trying to squeeze every penny they can out of their people, and they don’t treat them like human beings.

Loren Feldman:
I agree. But don’t you think there’s a legitimate concern? If you’re managing people who are working from home, you don’t really know what they’re doing.

Shawn Busse:
I don’t think that’s… Maybe you call that management, but really what it is, is non-leadership, right?

Loren Feldman:
Well, what’s the right way to address it, Shawn? If you’re not sure what your remote employees are doing, what should you do?

Shawn Busse:
You’ve got to engage them. You’ve got to treat them like humans. You’ve got to actually—I mean, this is the problem: Much of the system is antithetical to a positive way of leading. I don’t know what the answer is in corporate America. That’s why I don’t want to work there or work with it.

Paul Downs:
I would think that part of managing any workforce is you’ve got to tell them what the goal is. And then you’ve got to give them some flexibility to accomplish it. And the description of these software packages where they’re measuring things like keystrokes, and if you stop typing, you get a downgrade. Well, wait a minute. That’s not how I work.

I mean, I had an analogous experience a couple of years ago when my auto insurance company offered me, “Hey, we’ll put this thing in your car, monitor how you drive, and you’ll save money.” And it turned out that the device could not distinguish between jamming on your brakes and approaching a stop sign on a steep hill where you weren’t even touching the brake and the car just stopped. And so it was constantly going off in all kinds of situations that did not correspond to bad driving. And I was like, “Fuck this thing. Turn it back in. I’m an excellent driver. I don’t have accidents. I don’t get tickets.” But it was dinging me all the time, because whoever had written the initial algorithm had decided that things that were easy to measure were the actual measurement of output. And that’s just not the way human beings work.

So we have certain team members who work part-time from home and part-time in the office. And I don’t go out of my way to figure out what they’re doing at home. It’s just, “Did you get the work done?” That’s it. I don’t care how you do it—as long as you’re not pissing off your teammates, and the work is of acceptable quality, then do it however you want.

Loren Feldman:
Well, that gets to the quiet quitting question a little bit. If you think you’ve assigned them work that you think should take 20 hours, but they get it done in much less than that, do you care?

Paul Downs:
No. God bless them. And that’s how I work, honestly. I’m a burst worker. I sit around and stare at nothing for hours and hours and hours, and then I get a lot done in 10 minutes. And that’s worked for me so far. That’s how I’ve always worked. I call it “burst working.” That’s mental work. Physical work, I can just plow through it and work all day. But working in front of a computer screen, I spend a lot of time doing nothing, just waiting for a burst of energy, and then I get a lot done. And you can look at whatever I’ve accomplished in 40 years and make your decision about whether I was productive or not, but it works for me. So I would not try to force my employees to conform to some theory about what work looks like. Let’s see what they do.

Loren Feldman:
William, do you have anybody working remotely?

William Vanderbloemen:
Yes, we do. Well, I say remotely—our consultants, our client-facing people, are on the road most of the week. So I guess you could call that remote work. They were doing that long before the pandemic. I mean, traveling salesmen, do you call them remote? I don’t know. When you say “remote work,” do you mean, do I have people who are not based in Houston and never come to Houston and never come into this office? We have a couple.

Long before the pandemic, I was trying to figure out—we had a really talented guy in Sacramento who wanted to work for us. It’s nowhere near us. His kids lived on the same street as him. All his grandkids live there. There’s no way he’s gonna move to see us, right? So I sought out some counsel from a Bain consultant who I have leaned into for a long time— happens to be my sister-in-law—and she said, at the time, “My advice to clients”—and I think this is pretty uniform—“is you should leave room in your workforce for about 10 percent of your people to be remote, if they’re that good. But most people need accountability.”

Now, this guy in Sacramento is awesome. I think his travel budget was lower than anybody from Houston. I think he might have FedExed himself somewhere one time instead of flying, but he was amazing. He had an uncanny discipline to get up, go down to his office at eight in the morning, close the door, not get distracted by kids, and come out when he was done being productive, whether that’s through bursts or long chunks.

And that’s a long-winded answer, Loren, to your question, but yeah, we’ve always left room for what I consider to be the exception to the rule—and that is the exceedingly disciplined person. But you know, my wife said to me the other day, “You know, it’s so funny, William. Everybody talks about remote work, and you get so much more done. Why then are gym memberships back up? Why are people not just working out at home? We bought all the gym equipment. Why do we still go to groups to get stuff done?” It’s a great question.

Loren Feldman:
I will note, there are businesses that are very happy with this brave new world. I mean, Karen Clark Cole, actually, is an owner who speaks very highly of the way things are working. They have kind of a hybrid situation. Correct me if I’m wrong, summing up here, it sounds like none of you are terribly concerned about this.

Shawn Busse:
Oh, I’m really concerned about it. I mean, I think that the problem is that these things, when they enter the zeitgeist, and they flow from corporate America into small business, it just creates headaches for us. I mean, that’s really what it boils down to. And I think that the issue isn’t the long-time employee who you’ve built trust with in person. I think it’s new hires who have never been into an office, have never built a connection.

And it’s not to say that they can’t work out. I mean, we have some folks that we hired right before and in the pandemic who are working out great. But I’ve definitely seen this phenomenon, and it tends to be with folks who’ve been hired remotely. And again, I’ve got clients that do that almost entirely remote thing or quasi-remote, but for us, at least, I just don’t think it’s a positive—the remote piece.

Paul Downs:
So I’m not worried about it, because we can’t do our work remotely. And to the extent that corporate America is rejecting perfectly good human beings for insane reasons, those are the people who I can hire. To the extent that corporate America destroys itself and starts to fail, then that would affect my sales, I guess, somehow. But in the short-term, being able to hire people and being able to offer them an environment that is human-friendly, to me, it’s just an advantage. I’m able to hire out of other companies and get the best people.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, when I asked that question, I was thinking that I was asking: Are any of you concerned about quiet quitting—the issue of employees being engaged or not? And I think you may have answered the question, “Are any of you concerned about the issues related to remote workers?” Obviously, there’s an overlap there. Are you concerned about whether these young employees in general are engaged?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I just think that if you look through history, almost all of the great things that get created get created in groups. They get created in collaboration. Even when you have, quote-unquote, genius artists, most often, if you look at their experience, they’ve got a studio with assistants, or they go to a salon and meet up with other artists. And so I think that this idea of collaboration and coming together is being undervalued to some degree. And then I’m seeing career counselors, people who are supposedly advisors for people’s career development, give advice to young employees to say, essentially, “Don’t go the extra mile. Do exactly what the framework of the job calls for, because that’s what you’re being paid to do. Don’t do any extra.” And I’m like, “Man, I don’t know…” Maybe I’m old school. I’m old fashioned. But I just think that if you’re giving young people that advice, it’s really awful.

Loren Feldman:
That’s in all of the stories about quiet quitting. I mean, that’s the nub of the issue, I think.

Paul Downs:
Well, let’s flip it on the other side, though. How often does a big company go the extra mile for an individual employee? So I think that if you’re in a situation where there’s some reasonable expectation of reciprocity from the company, that that’s terrible advice. If you’re in a situation where the company is a cold-hearted robot of pain that just delivers a paycheck, work, and nothing much else, then I don’t think that’s inappropriate. But the market mechanism will shake that out over some period of time. Those companies that treat their workers poorly will get poorly performing workers, and others will go to other places. So yeah, I mean, is it good career advice? Probably not. But is it appropriate advice for some situations? I would say it probably is.

William Vanderbloemen:
I would echo a whole lot of what’s been said. And I will be completely stealing Shawn’s insight that the great works in history were done in groups. But I think, Loren, am I concerned about quiet quitting? I’m concerned about engagement. And that’s separate and apart from the pandemic. We’ve got just a ton of research and data that shows engagement will be the competitive advantage for companies going forward who can hang on to their people a little longer and have them engaged a little higher. It will keep them from having to hire companies like mine to find new talent. So I’m very concerned about that.

Am I concerned about the current state of quiet quitting? I think there are gonna be some short-term impacts, but I think it will right itself, as long as we remain a capitalist society. Frankly, this is gonna sound like a curmudgeon, but we’ve had, in the last two years, a pretty big bulk of that time where people just haven’t had to go to work. And I’m one of them. We’ve gotten a whole lot of help from our government to get through a really tough time.

But I think a shadow side consequence of all that is: If I don’t run for a year, I can’t run like I used to a year ago. And it’s gonna take a while for people to start to learn to get back to a work ethic. And employers, sooner or later, will quit just saying, “I’ll let you work wherever you want. I’ll let you do whatever you want. Just get the bare minimum done.” I think that capitalism will right itself with enough time. We’re coming out of maybe a once-ever situation. And I think it’s too early to make long-term predictions about quiet quitting, based on where we are.

Paul Downs:
I’m very curious, William, about whether you think that the trend in churches or other values-driven institutions in any way mirrors this broader trend that’s just happening in capitalist corporations? Because theoretically, there’s a whole different set of motivations at play.

William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, I think you’re right. And our clients, whether it’s a school, or a nonprofit, or a church, or a values-based business, they do have the edge of, “You’re here for a cause, not just a paycheck.” Now, having said that, that’s the most trendy thing to do in every company right now. United Airlines: “Good leads the way.” It’s just every company you can imagine is saying, “Well, we’re values-based,” and trying to lead with something more than just time, money, and transactions. But in general, I’d say we have a slight advantage, but human nature is human nature.

Paul Downs:
So you’re saying that there’s like a little war going on inside every worker about whether to actually do the job or not?

William Vanderbloemen:
I mean, let’s go back to Animal House where John Belushi has got an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. I think there’s a war going on inside all of us about whether to get up and do work or lay around and do nothing.

Paul Downs:
Yeah, but the discussion the angel and the devil were having, if you recall, was on a very different context.

William Vanderbloemen:
Yes, it was a different context. I just think the last two years have given us a unique opportunity to be a little lethargic about what was normal. We’ve all gotten out of the rut that we were in for however long before the pandemic. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a bad thing. But it’s gonna take a while to redevelop some muscles that have atrophied.

Loren Feldman:
Let’s take a quick break to hear from our sponsor.

[Message from our sponsor, Work Better Now]

And we’re back. William, I’m curious, what have you learned about hiring for engagement?

William Vanderbloemen:
Well, I think what I’m learning about hiring for engagement starts with the employer. Why would I want to come work here? Tell me the job. And the employers that have a very clear handle on their purpose—why they’re doing what they’re doing—and their culture—how we’re going to behave, why we’re doing what we’re trying to get done—have a distinct advantage over those who are just kind of clueless.

Engagement has also changed to include geography, to some extent. We’ve got a fabulous client in New York City that has a much, much more difficult—he called me yesterday and said, “We used you for our head person, four years ago, and it was amazing. Now we’ve got a number two position. We really thought we could get it done on our own, but we’re realizing it’s harder to recruit to the city than it was four years ago.” Yeah, so I think geography is something that employers can’t entirely control, but it is a factor that comes into play. So those are two things right off the top of my head.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, have you thought about what it takes to hire for engagement?

Shawn Busse:
Oh, I mean, it’s what we specialize in. This is the work we do for our clients. Pre-pandemic, we were running around, workshop after workshop after workshop, talking about engagement, how to create a culture of engagement, how to hire for engagement. You know, our philosophy is that it all starts with your purpose, your mission, your values, what you stand for, and that you need to essentially apply the tools of marketing to HR, so that your job descriptions really speak clearly and accurately to the type of culture you’re creating, and what type of person will succeed in that culture. And if you then craft your interview process to look for those values and traits, you have a much greater chance of getting a culture where everybody’s rowing in the same direction.

I mean, I really credit that work we’ve done with us having almost no turnover in this supposed Great Resignation. And then the last piece, I think, to get a culture of engagement: if you can align the customers with the values of the organization, then you’re not having friction between what is internal and what is external. And that’s, I think, the hardest part in that journey, because I know some businesses where they have this wonderful internal culture, but then the clients that they serve maybe are really difficult, and that friction can be hard on employees. So you get it top to bottom.

William Vanderbloemen:
Great, Shawn. One other thought, Loren, that comes to mind. I think you can interview for engagement. I think you can watch for engagement in the interview process. In the sales cycle in our company, the way we’re treated by a potential client is a pretty good indicator of what it’s going to be like to work for that client. So the flip side of that is, if you’re interviewing people, and you want to interview for engagement, ask questions that give homework. Test to see how much they looked into you before.

We hired an intern yesterday, and I didn’t have anything to do with the hiring, but she walked in, I got introduced, and she said, “Oh, I’ve watched all the YouTube videos you guys have put out, and it’s amazing.” I’m like, “Well, that’s a big statement.” She said, “No, I’ve watched all of them.” Like, okay, well, either that’s weird, or it’s engaged. But we’re gonna go with it. Can you look through the lens as you’re interviewing and saying, “Is this person in the interview engaged in a way that I’d want them engaged?”

Shawn Busse:
That’s a great tip, William. I mean, I really love people who write a great cover letter. I know cover letters, there’s some contention over their value, but I love them, especially for our work. I’ve had employees who’ve read our book before they do the interview, unsolicited. And those employees are with us today, and they’re great. Protracting the hiring process to see if somebody’s really in it to win it is really valuable.

Loren Feldman:
Have any of you made significant changes to your hiring process, based on the turmoil we’ve all been through the last couple of years?

Paul Downs:
I’ve said it before on the program, but my basic hiring theory right now is: Try to not draw out the process. If we get someone in for an interview, and they look positive, we make an offer right there. Because I think that you can interview for engagement. You can hope people will do homework and all that. But my feeling is that we’re still looking for good workers, and that if you play too coy, if there are too many games, they just go somewhere else. And I would rather hire someone and get rid of them at my leisure than not have the chance to evaluate them at some length. And I think it’s fair to them to pay them while you do that, as opposed to, “Hope they’re not going to do it.”

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, I agree with that.

Paul Downs:
So is that a change in my procedure? Yeah, I used to interview a bunch of people and think about it, and then choose the one I liked the best. And now as soon as I see someone who’s adequate or sort of checks the boxes, I hire that person right there and don’t worry about the rest of the interviews. Because otherwise, you really drastically cut down the number of people who are willing to take a job, at least in my world. And that’s manufacturing. It’s a blue collar workforce.

In my hiring process, I go to a great deal of effort to explain to people why the company is different and better than wherever they’ve been before. And everybody smiles while they’re hearing that, but I wonder whether a pretty large percentage of them just don’t believe it until they’ve actually worked here for a while. And that’s another reason why I try to lock them up. If I want them at all, I’m gonna try to get them hired first, and then spend some time to figure out whether they’re any good or not.

Loren Feldman:
The cliche is, “Hire slow and fire fast.” You’ve kind of flipped that on its head.

Paul Downs:
I do go the other direction. I’ll fire relatively fast, if they’re not working out. In fact, I just fired someone this morning who we hired in February. And he was okay for a while, and then he just started to not show up, and had a million excuses, and blah, blah, blah. And he hasn’t actually been at work since August 22nd.

And I was on vacation for much of that, came back, talked to my shop manager, like, “Hey, where is this guy?” “Oh, he hasn’t been here for a while. He’s got this, that, the other thing.” I was like, “I think this guy is actually a dope addict. Let’s just get rid of him.” It was just like endless bullshit from him, and at the end of the day, not showing up and working. And we’ve extended every hand we can to him, but I’m done. So he got fired this morning. Although, I will say that we didn’t—here I am saying “firing”—what we did was we said, “You need to show up today or you’ve quit.” Because I don’t particularly want to pay unemployment to him forever. And he communicated, but did not show up. So as far as I’m concerned, that’s a quit.

Loren Feldman:
Are any of you asking different questions than you used to in job interviews?

William Vanderbloemen:
I’m being more blunt about, when we say, “You have to be at the office,” you have to be at the office. I would say that, up until the last year, I’ve been the biggest proponent of long hellos and short goodbyes, which is the nice way of saying, “Hire slowly and fire quickly.” But the dynamic is the same. I think Paul’s onto a little… I am a little bit more in his corner than I was. I’ve never seen the candidate pool or candidate market be as fickle as it is now. People will change their mind very, very quickly and turn on a dime. So if you have a great person, you need to act with all deliberate haste. But questions that are different? “How’s remote work? What’s your expectation? What does engagement look like?” Questions that get at some of the new dynamics in the last two years.

Paul Downs:
We haven’t changed anything much, other than the speed of a decision. And I hired four people this year, and three of them have been great. And the weakest candidate was the one we hired who just left us. And so I would say that a 75-percent success rate is not bad for any hiring.

Loren Feldman:
Shawn, do you have any new favorite questions?

Shawn Busse:
Well, I guess I’ll add on to that. We did change our hiring process a bit. And I kind of lament those changes, and we’re going to not do that anymore.

Loren Feldman:
How so?

Shawn Busse:
Well, one of the things that we did in our hiring process previously was a sample project. So we would ask the candidate—and we’d pay them for it—we’d ask him to do a presentation on a kind of strategic problem. And man, that was such a good filter to see how they thought and also how they presented. And we cut that out, and we have not seen good results from the folks who we cut that out for. So I think that the changes we made—there were a lot of changes we made—and I’m just totally regretting a lot of them. Also, my getting out of the hiring process, I don’t think that was very good. I think owners have some sort of a sixth sense about this stuff that it’s hard for teams to develop. I’m not quite sure how to get around that. It’s a tricky one.

What questions I’m asking these days, I think that I want to rethink some of the questions that I asked before the pandemic, especially questions around teamwork and demonstrating how they value teams. We have an employee right now who is on maternity leave. She’s a wonderful, wonderful employee, hired her right at the beginning of the pandemic. And she had worked a remote job for… I don’t know, like eight years before coming to work at Kinesis.

And what I appreciate about her is she understood the pros and cons of remote work. She signed up because she didn’t want another remote job, and then the pandemic hit. She actually knew how to offset some of the downsides of remote work, so she would create one-on-one conversations with folks. She would go out for long walks with people. And so she really understands the value of a team and how to create teamwork. And I think I need to craft more questions around that idea of how people celebrate being in teams, because we just are a team-centric organization. And I think that the pandemic tends to foster folks who want to work by themselves. And that’s not the kind of culture I want to create.

Loren Feldman:
William, correct me if I get this wrong, but I recall, maybe a year ago, you told us that you had had to let some people go when the pandemic first hit, and churches shut down. And that when the world opened up again, and you started hiring people, you put a greater emphasis on diversity. And you were successful in hiring a much more diverse group of people, but you found that there was a downside to that, which is: They didn’t know each other, and they weren’t working in the same place, and it was hard to get them into a cohesive team. So first of all, have I got that right? And second, have you been able to address that and kind of solve that issue?

William Vanderbloemen:
I think you’re mostly right. I wouldn’t call it a downside, as much as an unforeseen challenge or opportunity. Anytime you’re grafting someone new into the workforce, it takes work. As Shawn has noted, and I would agree, unless you’re a totally virtual company, and always have been, I found that onboarding virtually is an entirely different proposition and takes more work than onboarding in person. And a lot of the people we hired during the shutdown, and during the remote work time, have never met each other. And it didn’t dawn on me that if you haven’t met each other, that’s a challenge. And I didn’t see that coming, so that took more work.

If you intentionally hire for diversity—which I am a champion of—you just need to perceive that no matter what the diversity is—it could be age diversity, could be geographic diversity, racial, ethnic—you’re now bringing people together who have different points of reference, whether that’s, “We put sugar in our tea in the South and we don’t in the North,” or different movies or different cultural backgrounds.

When you hire people who are alike, they can speak shorthand very quickly, because they’ve had very similar circumstances. I don’t think that means you hire people who are alike, and not do diversity. I just think it means you need to perceive the challenge that when you bring different people together, you’d better have a common cause for why you’re doing your work. And you’re also going to have to do some legwork to make sure that people who haven’t met and are coming from very different backgrounds have ways of relating and learning from and with each other.

Loren Feldman:
Have you gotten to that point, do you think?

William Vanderbloemen:
We’ve had some hits and some misses, man. I mean, some good, some bad. I’m learning as I go. I’ve told you before, Loren, I just have a religion degree and a philosophy minor. So I’m making this up as I go.

Loren Feldman:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Laughter] You have told me that before. And I still don’t believe it. We only have a few minutes left. I’m just tempted to ask each of you, basically, how’s business? Can each of you give me a quick snapshot? Maybe Shawn, you first?

Shawn Busse:
Yeah, it was really good at the beginning of the year, I’d say January through maybe March. A lot of interest, a lot of activity, and then it just kind of fell off a cliff. It’s hard to say why and how that relates to our regional issues. Oregon has been very, sort of hyper—without passing any judgment—really focused on the pandemic. And so new news of, “Hey, this variant is spreading fast, etc., etc.,” it really impacts business activity.

And then in the summer, which is always a slow time, I think everybody was trying to make up for lost time. So everybody was on vacation and just checked out, just kind of mentally checked out of their business. So it kind of remains to be seen. Historically, the fall is a good activity time period for us. I’m hoping that people are interested in getting back to work. But kind of the overarching, “Oh, it’s a recession, and then there’s war, and we might have a nuclear reactor get blown up, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Just kind of that constant drumbeat of negativity, I think, has an impact on small business owners. That’s our audience. That’s our customer. All that to say, kind of meh, right now, and I’m working hard to change that, but it’s tough.

Loren Feldman:
Paul, how about you?

Paul Downs:
We’re doing fine. We’re up about 15 percent on sales last year and on track for our best year ever. Given my product and how, in general, I would say a reflection of business confidence, or at least purchasing confidence, that there would be good signs ahead, that the recession is not as real as many would like to think. Because nobody ever needs to buy what I sell. They only do it if they feel like it, and they feel like they’ve got resources in their pocket to do it. And so I would say, all indications are that it’s going to be a strong year for us, and I haven’t seen any slowing down in any way since the beginning of the year.

Loren Feldman:
That’s nice to hear. William?

William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah, well, our business is lumpy. It comes in clumps, so I’m always hesitant to give a year-end prediction. But I did just finish looking through the two-thirds of the year that we just closed. Our marketing funnel started out giving me a little concern that we weren’t going to make the numbers we’d hoped. We projected just 5 percent growth this year. It’s so unusual in our sector, because we’re coming out of this time where the bulk of our clients are churches and schools, and a lot of them had to shut down, and then when they opened up, everything’s different. And so when will things normalize, whatever that means?

So we said, “Okay, 5 percent.” We’re 3 percent ahead of plan, so we’re 7 percent ahead of growth this year, and that could go sideways any minute. Usually, if we get through the summer strong, then that’s a really good sign. And we had some concern early in the year, but right now, things look good. I don’t know. What we do is pretty new to the sector that we serve. So I don’t know that we’ve been around long enough to be able to say, “The way our business is going is a predictor of whether there’s a recession or whether people are nervous,” because people are still figuring out that we’re here. Does that make sense?

Loren Feldman:
It does. All right, well, I sometimes let these conversations run more than the hour that we’ve assigned, but I’ve decided that it’s time to kind of pull back a little bit and just do the minimum of what I need to do to get this podcast episode out. So I think we’ll stop there. My thanks to Shawn Busse, Paul Downs, and William Vanderbloemen—and to our sponsor, Work Better Now. We’ll see you next week.