From HR to EX: Transforming Workplace Culture
Show notes
In this episode of the Leaders in Talent podcast, host Adriaan Kolff interviews Samantha Gadd, founder and CEO of Excellent and Humankind, about the significance of employee experience (EX) and how it intersects with organizational culture and strategy. Samantha shares her journey from HR consulting to leading the field of EX design, emphasizing the importance of understanding employees deeply to create better workplaces. She introduces the PREP model, which focuses on Purpose, Relationship, Enabling, and Performance experiences as key areas of EX.
Samantha also discusses the EX manifesto, co-written with industry leaders, that advocates for putting employees at the center as a strategy for organizational success. The episode provides actionable insights for leaders and HR professionals on how to enhance employee experience by listening to and co-designing with their employees.
Timecodes
00:00 Introduction to Employee Experience
00:39 Guest Introduction: Samantha Gadd
01:59 The Importance of Employee Experience
02:47 Samantha’s Journey and Humankind
06:02 Building Excellent and the EX Manifesto
07:49 The PREP Model for Employee Experience
11:16 Measuring and Improving Employee Experience
14:43 The Future of Employee Experience
19:04 The EX Manifesto Project
22:15 Challenges and Opportunities in EX
26:43 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Connect with Samantha Gadd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samanthagadd/
Connect with Adriaan Kolff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaankolff/
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Transcription
[00:00:39] Adriaan: All right, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another episode of the Leaders in Talent podcast. Today, my guest is Samantha Gadd. A very, very warm welcome. Samantha is the founder and CEO of Excellent and the founder and director of Humankind, where Excellent helps organizations around the world develop employee experience design capabilities through learning, certification, and community.
[00:01:07] Adriaan: Prior to Excellent, for over a decade, Samantha has been leading the way in employee experience thinking through growing the leading HR and executive business in New Zealand called Humankind. In 2022, Samantha led a group of 34 contributors to write an employee experience manifesto for the world, defining employee experience, the value of exploring employee experience, and the principles of employee experience design. This manifesto has been co-signed by hundreds of leaders in over 30 countries.
[00:01:43] Adriaan: And if I’m not mistaken, Samantha, you’re also planning to write a book around this topic, right? So there’s a lot to talk about. You live in New Zealand, but currently you are in New York, right?
[00:01:57] Samantha: That’s right. And thank you for having me on this podcast, Adriaan. I’m really excited.
[00:01:59] Adriaan: I want to dive right into the employee experience. Tell me, why should we care?
[00:02:07] Samantha: The reality is, for organizations and leaders today, that expectations of employees have changed significantly. I don’t think there’s any leader that would disagree with that. And when we think about employee experience, we’re really thinking about putting employees at the center.
[00:02:20] Samantha: That is about deeply understanding who employees are, what they care about, and taking a design-led approach to our HR and organization design. The reason we have to do that is because if we don’t understand who our employees are and what they care about, we have no idea how to prioritize our investment resources into building better workplaces to ultimately attract and retain the talent that we need to deliver on our organizational strategies.
[00:02:46] Samantha: So it’s critical.
[00:02:47] Adriaan: Tell me a little bit more about your journey as the founder of Humankind, and where you are now, and why you got so passionate about this particular topic and started a new company actually in this realm.
[00:02:58] Samantha: I’ve been in people and culture, HR, employee experience, whatever you want to call it, for my entire career.
[00:03:03] Samantha: About 16 years ago, I left my last permanent job and went out on my own and did fractional Chief People Officer, fractional HR consulting. When I was doing that, there was so much demand for that type of work that it ultimately led me to starting Humankind, which is a consultancy that does just that—managed services for growth companies, fractional CPO work. About three years into starting that company, it was actually like starting a steam train. There was no standing in front of the growth. There was clearly a need for growth companies that couldn’t afford to hire or didn’t need to hire a full-time permanent person but needed that support.
[00:03:39] Samantha: About three years into starting that company, I really was starting to feel a little bit disillusioned with HR and about the impact that we can make with the current ways of working in HR. Around that same time, I listened to a podcast where Mark Levy, who was the very first global head of employee experience at Airbnb, talked about how Airbnb thought about HR and the fact that they didn’t actually want an HR team.
[00:04:01] Samantha: They wanted an employee experience team. What that meant was really breaking down the silos between many parts of the organization, including real estate and catering and digital, and all those other parts that really impact the employee experience, so that they thought about employees as users. I just loved it.
[00:04:19] Samantha: It really was a very big turning point in my career. At that point, I really reshaped our consultancy to be focused on employee experience. To do that, we needed to figure out what is employee experience? How is it different from HR? And what are the new ways of working we need to both understand what EX is and ultimately design better employee experiences?
[00:04:40] Samantha: So we embarked on building a bunch of methodologies, defining employee experience, and building a framework for us and organizations to look at their organization and figure out what was most important to people, and then ultimately integrated design thinking with our ways of working. This is really interesting because HR is one of the last fields to have taken a design-led approach. When we did that, it totally transformed my career, for a start. Being a leader and knowing that you don’t actually have to know the answers because the answers sit within the population you serve, aka employees, was so empowering for me, and it felt so right that by about 2020, we were thinking about how to have more impact at Humankind.
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[00:05:58] Samantha: Building a consultancy and growing it is a difficult business model to scale, frankly, and to have the impact that you want. So, at that point, we were like, why don’t we actually start teaching other practitioners in the HR space how to take a design-led approach? I created an online program called Employee Experience Design School, put a couple of things on LinkedIn about it, and then started getting inquiries from Costa Rica, and Germany, and the US. I was like, what is going on here? Looked up and out of New Zealand and realized that there was actually nowhere in the world that HR professionals could learn how to take a design-led approach. So at that point, I decided there was so much opportunity globally for teaching employee experience design, that I took EX Design School out of Humankind and created Excellent, a new home for this online education.
[00:06:39] Samantha: At that point, we also raised some venture capital to really start scaling out Excellent into the world. It was really at that stage when we decided to build a global company that took us into the EX Manifesto project, which I think we’ll talk about soon. But, it’s been really exciting to work with people in all parts of the world.
[00:06:59] Samantha: We’ve got people learning employee experience design in different parts of Europe. We’ve got someone in Oman learning employee experience design—really, in every part of the world, where everyone’s understanding that human-centered organizations or design-led practices are really the only way that we can solve for the really challenging problems that organizations have today. So that was my journey into EX and into creating Humankind and Excellent.
[00:07:25] Adriaan: And you’re still running Humankind, but your day-to-day focus is on Excellent, or how do you juggle those two?
[00:07:31] Samantha: I’m exceptionally lucky. I have a really strong leadership team at Humankind. Actually, I replaced myself by putting a CEO in Humankind about three years ago. So I’ve actually been almost out of Humankind entirely other than being a director and focusing on Excellent over the last couple of years.
[00:07:48] Adriaan: Let’s make that a little bit more concrete. It sounds very logical, and it sounds incredible, but how should companies think about employee experience?
[00:07:57] Samantha: The challenge with it is that it’s everything, which is not useful because we don’t really know where to start. How we define employee experience is the combined thoughts, feelings, and interactions that we have at work, which is such a broad definition.
[00:08:11] Samantha: When we work with organizations, we help them to look at employee experience through four lenses. We look at four types of experiences, and this brings it to becoming a little bit more real and concrete. The model that we use is called PREP. So we look at purpose experiences, relationship experiences, enabling experiences, and performance experiences.
[00:08:32] Samantha: If you look at either an organization, a division, a team, or even an individual and find out, is that person, that team, or organization, connected to purpose? Do people really understand how their role impacts the bigger picture of what the organization is set up to achieve? We know employees come to work wanting purpose; they want to know who they’re making a difference for and how. So purpose experience is key.
[00:08:50] Samantha: Then, relationship experience is about employees having connections, both personal and professional, in the workplace. It’s the relationships they have with their peers and their team, between their team and other teams, and it’s also the relationships they observe. We know that people join an organization and leave a leader often, so relationships with their leaders are really key. Looking for where there’s opportunities to improve and strengthen relationships in the organization is a key part of employee experience.
[00:09:24] Samantha: The third bucket is those enabling experiences, and this is really people coming to work to do their job. I know, having spent my entire career in HR, that we spend a lot of time thinking about the core moments that matter. How does it feel to be recruited, to be onboarded, to have a performance conversation, to be exited eventually?
[00:09:43] Samantha: Those kinds of key moments are what HR professionals often spend a lot of their time designing, but from back-of-the-envelope calculations, employees only spend about 5% of their time in a moment that matters. The other 95% of their time, they just come to work to do their job. So enabling experiences is really about what are the tools, the software, the processes, the enablement that people have on a daily basis to do their job with ease, and how can we set up people to be really enabled in their work day-to-day? That’s a big eye-opener for HR folks because this is where we really need to partner with other parts of the organization, like the digital team, to make sure that people have great ways of working. They have a good workplace experience if the physical workspace is important, those sorts of things.
[00:10:25] Samantha: And the last bucket is performance experiences. So how do we get people role clarity? People need to know what they need to achieve. It’s remuneration and reward, it’s career pathways, it’s all of the things that people come to work for because they want to see where their career could go with this organization.
[00:10:45] Samantha: So if organizations are just starting, it’s really about thinking about that PREP model and trying to understand. Why do people join our organization? Is it because of purpose? Is it about the people? Is it about relationships? Is it about the enablement, like a really awesome work environment? Or is it about performance and growth?
[00:11:01] Samantha: And then, why do people stay? When you know your core employee value proposition drivers—those attraction drivers and those retention drivers—organizations know where they can double down and really focus their investment and resources. It’s a really powerful framework and really brings EX to life.
[00:11:16] Adriaan: How do you measure PREP?
[00:11:17] Samantha: That’s a great question. The first way to understand what’s important is really about doing that qualitative employee research. This is a real challenge for us, professionals in this space, because the tools that we have currently don’t really help us to understand those questions. Like why do people join? Why do people stay? What’s getting in their way? What do they love? Most of the engagement tools are actually asking very company-centric questions about what employees think about the company, not about the actual employees. So what we recommend is really having one-to-one conversations with employees to figure out the answers to those things, and by setting yourself a benchmark by understanding where people are at today, and then measuring progress.
[00:11:57] Samantha: By essentially involving employees in the co-design of employee experience, I like to talk about how we close the gap between the promise and the reality. And I know you’ll be really obsessed about this too because when we bring new people into our organization—or in fact, everyone that’s in our organizations—they’ll come into it every day with a promise in their minds.
[00:12:17] Samantha: That’s the EVP. It’s like, what is this organization going to give me in return for my efforts? The day-to-day reality is the employee experience. And our job as leaders is to close the gap between the promise and the reality. There are only two ways to do that. One is to ensure that your EVP and your promise actually match the reality. It’s not too ambitious, it’s not too aspirational. It’s actually talking about the current state. The other way to do it is to co-design experiences with employees to make sure that you close that gap and people aren’t disillusioned by, I thought I was going to get this, but actually, I get that.
[00:12:50] Samantha: That’s our job every day, to close that gap between promise and reality so we’re not breaking promises to employees.
[00:12:55] Adriaan: Let’s say this is the first time I’m speaking about employee experience and PREP, right? What advice would you give me as a founder of a fast-growing RPO company if I want to do something with this?
[00:13:07] Samantha: Honestly, the simplest thing you can do is talk to your employees. Ask them those four simple questions: Why did you join? Why do you stay? What do you love? And what’s getting in your way? If you ask those four questions, you’re gonna get a gold mine of nuggets where you can really figure out where the opportunities are for you to improve the employee experience.
[00:13:27] Samantha: It’s just a really simple, great place to start. You can do that with a team, even just with one individual. If you ask them those questions, you’ll get some insights, or you can do it as a team. In a big organization, you don’t have to talk to everyone. Obviously, that’s not scalable, but even if you talk to a dozen people and you’ve got 500 or 1,000 employees, you’re going to get so many nuggets as long as that dozen people are representative of the people that you’re serving. You’ve got to get some really good insights there. That’s a great place to start.
[00:13:52] Adriaan: And is your preferred way to do this through one-on-one conversations versus sending out a survey?
[00:13:59] Samantha: The thing is, a survey alone is never enough, particularly with the current surveys that exist in the market. They are generally like art-scale questions about the company. If you want to do a survey and use qualitative research—like more qual questions where you’re asking for free-form answers—you’re going to get better data. But I would say from experience that people, including myself, are very lazy about filling in surveys. So when people survey me, they’re not going to find out a lot. If they have a conversation with me, they’re going to find out a ton. It’s the same with EX research. So I would say if you’re in a talent team, split up the job by saying we’re going to talk to three or four people each across the organization. Ask those four questions, have conversations, and take the transcripts or the insights from those and really develop a strategy from there.
[00:14:43] Adriaan: Why do you think that employee experience is going to be the new UX/UI for the talent industry?
[00:14:50] Samantha: I think if you look at trends, CX, UX, those are massive growth spaces for organizations because if we want to deliver products to our customers that are really fit for our customers that they love, it’s all about designing with customers. This is exactly the same for employees and for organizations. Going back to the original point of expectations of employees significantly shifting, the only way that we’re going to be able to attract and retain enough talent to be able to deliver our organizational strategies is to deeply understand these people, deeply understand our future employee base, our current employee base, who they are, what they care about, and ultimately co-design solutions with them that are fit for purpose.
[00:15:31] Samantha: We’ve passed the time—and I know HR as a field has been quite obsessed with best practices—but there’s no more looking over the fence, using best practices, using what I’ve done in a previous organization to solve today’s problems because today’s problems are brand new.
[00:15:46] Samantha: There’s only one way to do it, and that is to really co-design with your people. So it’s, to me, it’s a no-brainer that EX will be as big as, if not bigger than CX as a field of capability eventually.
[00:16:00] Adriaan: Do you have an example of a company or companies that are really leading the field in employee experience? And next to like the company keels, why pick out these particular examples?
[00:16:15] Samantha: Going back to my original story about how I got into EX, I think Airbnb is a great example of an organization that really delivers an ethical employee experience. The reason being is that they’re deeply curious about their people. They think about the experience of their people like they do the experience of their hosts or their customers.
[00:16:35] Samantha: So they’re always asking, they’re always digging for data. They’ve got heaps of data about what their employees care about and how they feel. Ultimately, they are designing an employee experience that retains those epic people in the organization. They have understood that you can’t deliver host or, ultimately, customer experience at Airbnb without your people having as good as, if not better, experiences themselves.
[00:17:01] Samantha: It’s really interesting, actually, because when we think about, especially those enabling experiences, if you think back to the last bad customer experience you had—no matter what it is, it might’ve been like calling your telco or calling an airline or something—I can almost guarantee you if it was a bad customer experience, it was driven by a bad employee experience. That employee didn’t have access. They didn’t have access to the right data, the right systems, they were under-resourced, whatever it was. That employee was having a bad time, so you’re then having a bad time as a customer. They are absolutely linked. So organizations that get that to improve your customer experience must improve your employee experience first. They’re going to be the ones that ultimately have the better employee experience because they invest in it.
[00:17:45] Adriaan: So true. Next to Airbnb, is there anything in particular where you feel like, hey, this is something that they’ve really nailed in that PREP model, or that’s a good example?
[00:17:56] Samantha: Not even just using Airbnb as an example, because in my consultancy in New Zealand, we work with mostly small organizations over there.
[00:18:04] Samantha: If you think about the relationship experiences piece, that’s really critical. Employees are coming to work now looking for far more than a job. They’re looking for community because we don’t have community in any other area of our lives right now. We’ve seen that since COVID—that kind of connection and belonging piece.
[00:18:21] Samantha: Also, organizations having a perspective on different issues that are going on in the world—that’s what they expect from community. So I think the key thing to do is to really double down on those relationship experiences and make sure people feel really connected to each other, to their colleagues, and they understand who people are.
[00:18:37] Samantha: If you think about your organization like a community, I think that’s a powerful way to go about it. Often that stuff doesn’t cost any money. It just takes a deliberate focus. Actually, some of the best books that I’ve read on employee experience are actually community-building books because they’re very linked. If you’re thinking about building a community, all of the tools or all of the ways of working that you would use to build a community are very relevant in employee experience because we’re building community at work.
[00:19:04] Adriaan: Let’s talk a little bit more about the manifesto that you wrote with, if I understood correctly, Mark Levy from Airbnb and Dean Carter from Patagonia, right?
[00:19:12] Adriaan: You’re smiling, so it says it all. Yeah, tell us a little bit more.
[00:19:19] Samantha: It was such an exciting project, and both Mark and Dean are now very good friends of mine. Basically, when I started Excellent, I was like, we need to put a flag in the sand about what employee experience is because unfortunately, like many things, that term has become quite overused and almost bastardized in many situations, where people are just slapping “employee experience” on what is actually a company-centric or HR process, team, or tool, whatever it is. So we were like, let’s define employee experience for the world. We really took inspiration from the Agile manifesto, which was written 20 years ago by 17 dudes who just decided that project management within IT wasn’t working anymore. So they wrote this Agile manifesto, and now 20 years later, Agile is an enormous industry.
[00:20:04] Samantha: So we really unpacked the system of how that Agile manifesto was written and why it’s been so successful. We collaborated with some of the best, including people like Dean and Mark, and we had leaders from many organizations, including Disney and IBM and all these really incredible brands.
[00:20:19] Samantha: We brought them together in the US for a workshop where we really unpacked what employee experience is, how do you measure it, what’s important. Then we took away the extremely challenging task of taking that workshop content and writing the manifesto. Ultimately, when we published the manifesto, we wanted to define how employee experience relates to culture, the core values of employee experience, and the core design principles. We needed it to be simple and something that any leader in any organization can pick up and run with. When we published it at exmanifesto.com, Bloomberg picked up the release of it. It was really interesting because one of the values, the pointiest value, is employee-first over customer-first, and that’s been the piece that’s been a real talking point for people around the manifesto. But it’s definitely opened a lot of opportunities for great conversations with leaders around the world, and that’s exactly what we wanted it to do. We hope that it stands the test of time and that people can pick up this resource and use it to spark conversations in their organizations with leaders.
[00:21:22] Adriaan: Why was it, in a way, a manifesto that people were signing and rallying behind? Was there something missing, or what was that drive or that push that you experienced?
[00:21:35] Samantha: The reason we wrote it as a manifesto—and the definition of a manifesto is that it needs to be bleeding-edge and provocative in many ways—is that we didn’t want everyone to read it and agree with every part of it. That’s not change-creating. We wanted to put it in a way that people could co-sign it and join the movement, essentially. That was really what they did with the Agile manifesto 20 years ago. That’s why we set it up as something that people could co-sign, people could get behind, people could use it, and ultimately develop capability and influence within their own organization around how to go about this in a different way.
[00:22:09] Samantha: It’s really like a new way of working for a new world of work.
[00:22:12] Adriaan: You published the manifesto, you said Bloomberg picked it up. What do you see now happening with this and now the employee experience field? What have you experienced in the last year or so after publishing this manifesto?
[00:22:26] Samantha: It’s really interesting because we’re in quite a challenging global economic climate. A lot of people are saying the pendulum has swung—it was very pro-employee, and now the pendulum has swung right back to the employer. The reality is, with pendulums, that they do swing back again.
[00:22:38] Samantha: There’s probably a little bit of, maybe we did go way too employee-centric, and we were just adding all these perks and benefits that weren’t really making a big difference for people. What’s happening now is that organizations are really focused on delivery.
[00:22:51] Samantha: Organizations probably aren’t investing enough in employee experience. I think it’s fascinating. I think organizations might think they’re going well because there aren’t many people leaving jobs, but that’s because there aren’t many jobs to go to. My fear in this current environment is that we’ve actually got a lot of retained churn that just hasn’t happened yet. The organizations that are still continuing to invest in employee experience and understand who their people are, what they care about, and co-design their organizations with their people are ultimately going to win.
[00:23:22] Samantha: I worry that there are a lot of organizations right now that aren’t doing that because they think that it’s not important enough to invest in. As soon as the climate starts to pick up and more jobs become available, they’re going to lose a lot of people. I believe that’s true across many different industries. I know there are leaders and HR practitioners really wanting new ways of working. They’re feeling like I did, which was that I want to make a difference.
[00:23:48] Samantha: But the ways that I’ve been taught and the ways that the organization expects me to operate as an HR practitioner simply aren’t working now. I need a new toolkit. And design-led HR or employee experience design is a hundred percent that. We have people saying, “Oh my God, I’ve done the EX Design School, and I’ve got a new lease on life in terms of my career. I’m feeling so excited about my career.
[00:24:08] Samantha: For the first time, I feel like I’ve got the tools I need to actually make a difference in my organization.” So being able to empower people with this new way of working, these tools, and mindsets is just so rewarding for me, and we’re hoping that the manifesto and our online community and education really help HR practitioners to do what they set out to do in their careers.
[00:24:29] Adriaan: So Airbnb was one of the first to really start with employee experience and talk about it. Actually, I think Mark’s job title was the head of employee experience, right?
[00:24:39] Samantha: He was, so he’s been gone from Airbnb for a while. He was the very first global head of EX at Airbnb. He’s now doing advising, but yes.
[00:24:45] Adriaan: So that was it. That was his title, right? Many organizations don’t have such a big people team. Do you feel that organizations should have a dedicated person on employee experience, or at what scale? How does this fit into the overall people function?
[00:25:02] Samantha: It’s a really good question. I think the reality is that employee experience can’t just be the responsibility of one person. Even if you’re an organization with one people person, that’s a great place to start. Have your people person learn design-led ways of working and take an approach to the organization just as the product team would.
[00:25:19] Samantha: Be really curious about the users, etc. Ultimately, though, employee experience is only successful if the executive team, the C-suite, the CEO really believe that employees are users and they’re just like customers. We need to be curious about them to design something that’s going to work for them and give employees the experience that they would give their customers.
[00:25:39] Samantha: Often it’s like one grade for the customers and another grade down here for employees. Ultimately, no matter what size organization we’re talking about, we need to have the executive team and leaders buy into employee experience as a key strategy, and we need to have people with the capability and tools to take a design-led approach, which is just a new way of thinking. There’s a lot of unlearning to do for people in the HR and talent space. There’s a lot of unlearning of old ways of working that we need to do before we can become design-led practitioners. Actually, that can be quite a hard process, and it does take time. So, investing in and taking the time to learn these new mindsets, try it out, fix a new muscle, build confidence to start with something scrappy versus the perfectionistic stuff that we’re all used to—be scrappy and iterate, iterate, iterate. All of those things take time to do, and it’s just investing in that new way of working that’s going to help organizations to ultimately thrive.
[00:26:43] Adriaan: So where does your company then come in? Do you come in as a consultancy, as an advisory? Tell me a little bit more on how you help companies that want to embark on this journey.
[00:26:53] Samantha: Excellent provides the tools, platform, and resources to become a certified employee experience designer. We have a 12-month certification program where people come and do a bunch of online learning. We give them the tools and confidence to put EX in action in their organization, ultimately write a case study, and then become a certified designer. So that’s a 12-month program that we run, and we’ve got people from all over the world doing that.
[00:27:17] Samantha: We also have a community where we run event programming. Every month, we have a couple of awesome speakers showcase what employee experience looks like, what are the different tools and mindsets that we need. So that’s what we do. It’s really an education piece. Humankind does consultancy, but that’s predominantly a New Zealand-based business.
[00:27:36] Adriaan: What about yourself? I know you’ve been an entrepreneur for quite some time, but what’s the best employee experience you’ve ever experienced yourself?
[00:27:44] Samantha: Oh my gosh, that’s such a good question. It’s been over 16 years since I was an employee. Feeling like I can really be myself, that I’m fully understood as a unique human, and also that I can play in my fast lane.
[00:27:59] Samantha: So understanding where I’m really good, where I feel in flow, and being able to surround myself with people who pick up things that aren’t in my fast lane. That’s my best employee experience. I think early on in my sort of founder journey, I thought I had to do everything, and I thought I had to be good at everything. I think you realize pretty quickly that you’re not. When you’re playing in lanes that aren’t your fast lane, it’s actually no fun.
[00:28:24] Samantha: You just feel like you’re not winning; things are going slow around you. It’s just having the confidence and being in the right environment that enables you to look at yourself and go, this is who I am, this is what I’m really good at, I’m going to play in that lane and surround myself with other people. To me, that’s a great employee experience. Also, being obsessed with purpose. I’m very purpose-driven. The reason I get out of bed every day is that I really believe that every leader in an organization should treat employees as key stakeholders. We need to understand that employees have really valuable input. We need to understand who they are and ask for that input to ultimately design the best organizations. I’ll be satisfied when every employee in the world has a voice in the decisions and the experiences that impact them. Ultimately, I want that. I want agency. That’s why I’m a founder, but I also want that agency for every other employee, no matter what job, organization, or industry they’re in.
[00:29:18] Adriaan: Amazing. Amazing. So if I want to start, I either go to you, or at least I have an interview with my employees asking, “Why did you join?”
[00:29:31] Samantha: Yep. Why did you join? Why do you stay? What do you love? And what’s getting in your way? If you ask those four questions, you’re going to unlock a bunch of stuff.
[00:29:40] Samantha: If you want to know more about how to take that next approach and take discovery into really defining the problem to solve and then ultimately into designing better solutions, yeah, come and check us out at excellent.io. We’d love to have a chat.
[00:29:58] Adriaan: So cool. So cool. What’s the best way for people to connect with you? Is it through LinkedIn?
[00:30:01] Samantha: Yes, please. Love LinkedIn.
[00:30:17] Adriaan: Amazing. Amazing. We’ll share your LinkedIn in the show notes. It was such a pleasure talking to you. I learned tons. This was very good, tangible advice, which is my favorite. Thanks for taking the time to speak to me.
[00:30:20] Samantha: Thanks so much for having me on the podcast, Adriaan, and I’m excited to collaborate in the future. Thank you.
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