The TroopHR Podcast

Ep 16. Transforming Employee Experience through Product Management Principles: A Conversation with Jessica Zwann, COO at Talentful

August 11, 2024 • Season 1 • Episode 16

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In this episode of the TroopHR podcast, host Taylor Bradley engages with Jessica Zwann, a former CHRO and current COO, to delve into the dynamic world of HR leadership. Jessica narrates her unique career transition from journalism and law to HR and operations, highlighting essential skills for HR leaders aspiring to broader roles. She discusses the integration of HR initiatives with business objectives and the application of product management principles to HR, as detailed in her book "Built for People." 

Additionally, Jessica offers a sneak peek into her forthcoming book on finding purpose in work and introduces the idea of the "transformation economy." Throughout the conversation, Jessica imparts actionable advice for HR leaders to enhance their commercial acumen and grasp wider business operations. She presents a compelling case study on addressing HR challenges through product management methodologies, providing valuable insights for HR professionals aiming for C-suite positions and business leaders seeking to optimize people operations. This episode offers a novel perspective on crafting transformative employee experiences and achieving business success.

Mentioned in the Episode:
 
"Built for People: Transform Your Employee Experience Using Product Management Principles" by Jessica Zwann 

Upcoming book: "Was Sisyphus Smiling?" (working title) by Jessica Zwann

Credits:
TroopHR Founder: Tracy Avin 
Show Producer: Nicole Fealey 
Show Host: Taylor Bradley
Note: Transcripts generated by AI.


Ep 16 Jessica Zwann Draft

Jessica Zwann: [00:00:00] What we really desire as people is to be positively changed by the work that we're doing is to have our lives and ourselves as people improved through that.

Taylor Bradley: Welcome to the Truth HR podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Bradley. Today, we're joined by Jessica Zwan. A visionary COO and author of a groundbreaking book, Built for People, Jessica is revolutionizing the way we approach HR and employee experience by applying product management principles to HR. In her book, Jessica challenges business leaders to develop people centered ways of working, emphasizing evidence based decision making and a culture of continuous feedback and iteration.

Taylor Bradley: Jessica's diverse background as a mentor, blogger, cyclist, and legal enthusiast brings a fresh, multifaceted approach to her work. We [00:01:00] start the episode by exploring how her journey was influenced by degrees in journalism and law, and how this led to an exciting career in HR that eventually evolved into a COO role.

Jessica Zwann: My background's not in HR, so my, like, my professional background is, my studies weren't, so my first degree is in journalism and communication, my second degree is a law degree, so I was exposed to a lot of different parts of professional life through my studies. And then my first HR role was actually a rotation program at a company called BHP Billiton, it's a very large company.

Jessica Zwann: I was based in Australia. And in that role, I worked across a bunch of different places. I worked in accommodation, I worked in payroll, I worked in recruitment, I worked in industrial relations briefly. I'd seen a lot of different sides of HR. And I think that exposed me to the different functional expertise that can exist within the function and where it interacts, whether you're interacting with finance, whether you're interacting with legal, whether you're interacting with workforce planning.

Jessica Zwann: I also always really loved that kind of broad view of [00:02:00] things. So as I got more senior, I was more interested in taking ownership of more areas of business. And then the opportunity came up where the board and CEO suggested I take the COO role. And I was really excited about doing that. I had already been running the legal team for a little while at that point.

Jessica Zwann: I did that in my previous role and I've been COO now in two different businesses. 

Taylor Bradley: Now, I can see how the legal degree ties in, but what were some of the unique benefits that you learned in journalism school that you have still applied to your career today? 

Jessica Zwann: This is a good question. I was 17 when I picked my first degree.

Jessica Zwann: I got a lot out of the degree, I think, in terms of understanding kind of global communication backgrounds and understanding the importance of like data research and rigor. Really my first degree was just a good way of me understanding like how to be a responsible, diligent person who Did the things that she needed to do in order to progress.

Jessica Zwann: I left school and. My, I was the first person in my family to go to university. So my [00:03:00] mom and dad both didn't go to university. I just had such little awareness for how the world works beyond school. That the things I really take out of my first degree most of all was like, really just a way for me to figure out like my place in the world and who I was and.

Jessica Zwann: What I was interested in and how to read and gather information. 

Taylor Bradley: I, I'm interested to hear your critique of my media training. Afterwards. Of course, 

Jessica Zwann: just ask, not a professional here, not me. No way. I area, I'm still not very strong and I, I, I constantly feel like I need to reread my comms. I'm very procedural, very lawyery.

Jessica Zwann: Still though I will be very like loving in the truth in how I explain things and very like. Procedural in how one decision leads to another decision. And I actually think it's not a particularly inspiring communication style. So this is actually feedback I do already have. My first degree didn't set me up for success there.

Taylor Bradley: Hey, you may not view it as inspirational, but it is effective, right? And that's an important part of communications. [00:04:00] Now transitioned into this COO role, we've had a couple of COOs on the program so far. And one thing that I like asking is what is your definition of a COO through the lens of what you've been doing?

Jessica Zwann: Yes. This is a question that I think a lot of COOs spend, I'm in this group called the Operators Guild, which I really love as a group of finance and ops professionals. And it's so interesting how a lot of people have a very similar title, but we do extremely different things. The way I've developed it for myself now is your COR should be.

Jessica Zwann: Almost symbiotic, very yin and yang with your CEO. So if your CEO is really amazing at externals, at inspiring messages, at sales, then your COO should be a little bit more back office y, a little bit more process orientated, maybe a little bit more procedural in terms of like finance, whatever areas you're looking after.

Jessica Zwann: And if you have a really engaged HR focused CEO, then maybe you need to be a bit more on the finance side, right? [00:05:00] Needs to be this kind of balance. Because ultimately. The job of a COO, in my opinion, if you're a COO, very rarely are you the person in the spotlight getting the praise, the accolades for what's happened or what's been achieved.

Jessica Zwann: Your job is there to make sure other people get effectively, can effectively reach what they're trying to reach or the goals they're trying to reach. And very often that just requires you really clearly articulating what the gaps are in the rest of the EMT and then being there to support that success.

Jessica Zwann: So if that is the kind of thing that motivates you, you like seeing other people succeed and you like being a kind of a yin to a yang of someone else's strengths, then I think you probably would be quite good at being a COO. There's one final definition, which is it's on F things basically. And I don't want to swear on the podcast, but I think it's like your job very often is Oh, this thing is broken.

Jessica Zwann: Okay. Someone needs to come in and just be able to like, make it unbroken. That's very often the kind of work that I will do. So it could be a whole function is broken or a specific part of a reporting. Or an [00:06:00] implementation, but very often that's where Ops is being brought in. It's to clean up something or to recreate something or redevelop something so that it works again.

Taylor Bradley: And you're breaking new ground on the podcast on how we censor things in the future, which I love. This is great. We're learning as we go along this journey together. Now, this is the third time I've spoken to a COO on the podcast. Three completely different answers. So you hit the nail on the head when it comes to the diversity of the role, is there any advice that you would give to CHROs now that have only been CHROs of what CHROs Types of traits or things should they learn about in the business to maybe prepare themselves for that transition if they're exploring it.

Jessica Zwann: Yeah. So there are three things, and I do talk about this a lot when I do speaking engagements or workshops. I have this one whole workshop that's just dedicated to this actually. And the three things [00:07:00] that I mostly talk about are the ones that are seen as the glass ceiling of HR leaders, right? So. The first one is that HR leaders are particularly commercial.

Jessica Zwann: They don't really understand the kind of commercials reports of the business. The second one is that you don't understand the business and how the business works. So you don't understand like why customer support does X or how engineering deploys. And the final one is that HR leaders don't have manageable or measurable impact.

Jessica Zwann: So they aren't able to demonstrate the value that they're adding. Those are three things that I think are really important for COO roles, and just generally actually for C suite, even if you're a head of HR, VP HR out there. And these will be things that you may see as criticisms coming towards you or just generally towards HR people, right?

Jessica Zwann: So the first one is commerciality, and I think a really important thing there is, You do just have to eventually let go of what I call the Gut Principle. So there's this idea of the PETA Principle, which is that people get promoted to their highest point of incompetence. Now, I don't love the idea of the PETA Principle, but it is an [00:08:00] interesting thought experiment.

Jessica Zwann: And the PETA Principle basically says, so yes, you get promoted to your highest point of incompetence, and then at that point, you are now unable to get promoted any further, because you're not achieving your goal for overachieving, right? So my version of this in HR that I think is relevant and perhaps a little more kind to people is this idea of the gut principle, which is you get promoted or you succeed or you get viewed as being commercial up until the highest point that your gut is able to make good decisions.

Jessica Zwann: And then you have an obligation to become more data orientated, to become more commercial, to understand better, like how the business is working from a commercial perspective. So if you're a HR leader listening to this out there, and I say, what's your company's EBIT or what's your burn rate or what's your head count OPEX ratio, and you don't know the answers to those questions, then I would say you are probably one of the people that are at risk of getting to this point where if you don't try to make an effort to learn more about the commercials of the business.

Jessica Zwann: Then you may see yourself reaching this [00:09:00] glass ceiling, right? Cause you're not being brought into the conversations because a lot of the conversations that happen at highest level are going to be pretty much exclusively around the P and L in some way, shape or form, right? Big bets we want to make in the future or things that are happening right now, which may impact it.

Jessica Zwann: So that's commercials. The second one is really understanding the business, how the business works. I think. One of the things that held HR leaders back from this or has developed this, I think it's a, it's a presumption. It's a stereotype that a lot of business leaders have about HR leaders is actually how we have structured our teams.

Jessica Zwann: So by adopting the Ulrich model, which I am a huge fan of, very kind of siloed centers of excellence, people running very particular specialisms. What ends up happening is you get fed piecemeal information about what's going on in the functions. You learn a little bit about what's happening in business partnering team, which may be focused on employee relation.

Jessica Zwann: You learn a little bit from Mattel and Acquisition. You might learn a little bit from Cole and Ben, but you don't have this really nice, like through [00:10:00] line of what's actually happening across the whole team. So you could either challenge that by building a really high quality people partnering team that is in a lot of those conversations from the start of acquisition to the end.

Jessica Zwann: Or adopting more of a squad model, which I obviously am advocating for. That's part of my whole approach, but there's many ways to solve that problem. And the final thing is very product orientated, which is thinking in terms of outputs. So I think a lot of HR leaders reach this glass ceiling when they've been producing work that's been focused around.

Jessica Zwann: This quarter, we're going to launch a benefits platform and they've never said why. They've never said, and this is the metric we're trying to impact. This is the outcome we're trying to achieve. And this is business standard and every other function. If the sales team said, we want to spend, send 500 emails, someone would say, why?

Jessica Zwann: What do you want your pass through rate to be? Like how much revenue do you want to close? You're trying to close a particular account. But in people operations, we can say things like we want to send a survey and no one has really asked us or pushed us to say, and what is the outcome of that going to be?

Jessica Zwann: And I think. Once you start thinking in outcomes, try to [00:11:00] align them back to both a commercial need and a real business through line. All of a sudden your knowledge about how the business runs becomes a lot more sophisticated and you've already challenged those pre supposing ideas that exist in the business and it becomes a lot more natural that you should be a part of those more senior conversations and more operational conversations.

Taylor Bradley: And that alone is a masterclass in not becoming a COO, but also a CHRO that's really in tune to the business. So some great takeaways there, it reminded me of something that I used to do when I managed a talent acquisition team was, I encouraged all of my recruiters, they should be attending their client groups, all hands, they should get to know their managers, they should understand how the product work because success is Is it just time to fill?

Taylor Bradley: It's making sure that you're hiring people that lead to an enduring company. And you need to be able to talk about to these candidates, what [00:12:00] they're gonna do, what teams they're gonna be working with, what impact they're gonna make on the top line. That is a way that you can dive deeper. Highly encourage everyone to embrace it.

Taylor Bradley: And I really enjoyed your reframing of the peer principle. Which, I agree with you, it's not necessarily a nice way To talk about hitting a particular ceiling or a limit, but, your way is fantastic. Now, speaking of getting in tune with the business, you have a great book out, Built for People, Transform Your Employee Experience Using Product Management Principle.

Taylor Bradley: Let's first start with those that may not be familiar with product management principles or product development. Can you give us a quick primer and then we'll go into some of the topics around the book itself. 

Jessica Zwann: Yeah, absolutely. So the book comes from the idea that every company is building three products.

Jessica Zwann: Now, The first question is, do you really know what a product is? So I [00:13:00] think the kind of easy way to describe this is people, I think it's one of those things you presume you have a definition and then you think about it. And you're like, actually, what is that? So the way I just define this is something that is through some kind of process of creation, um, that serves a use, right?

Jessica Zwann: And technically that's the definition of a good product, but we're out here making good products, we're out here making bad products, right? Your business is building three products. The first one it's building is your consumer facing product. And everyone should know this, about 80 percent of your business has spent their entire life focusing on it.

Jessica Zwann: It is razors, if you're Harry's razors, laptops, if you're Apple, it's whatever you are selling out to your consumers. The second product you're building is a fiscal product. So generally your EMT or your CEO leadership team would be very aligned with this. This is the product that you are selling into investors or shareholders or private equity, or even yourselves, if you're bootstrapped, right?

Jessica Zwann: There is a fiscal instrument here that you are building, the possible action of your company. And then the third product you're building is your employee experience product, and that is in my analogy, a subscription product. It's a product that everyone in [00:14:00] your company buys into month on month until they hand their resignation in, and it is the exchange of their services for your money.

Jessica Zwann: So technically you are buying them, but what they are also buying into is an experience, right? And there's this huge marketplace of experiences out there in the market. I think we've moved beyond. The world in which a job is just a job and everyone could put their hat and their ring to anything as long as they're getting a paycheck and now this idea of this kind of transformational employee market exists where people really want to spend their hours somewhere that they believe they're going to get additional benefit out of.

Jessica Zwann: With that mindset in place, all of those products are very symbiotic. They're very important to each other. If you have a failing consumer products, you're going to struggle to get high quality investment, which means you're probably not going to be able to make the hires you'd like to make or deliver the experience you'd like to deliver.

Jessica Zwann: But inversely If you are developing a wonderful product, your customers are loving it. Your metrics are looking great. You're probably going to get a really high quality investment, probably a great valuation, which means that you're really able to invest back into your employee [00:15:00] experience. Make sure you have very aligned people.

Jessica Zwann: And then in turn, obviously you're going to see hopefully a better quality keyword product being built. So the idea is that rather than you being the CHRO VP people, the head of a service function that is there to support a business doing a thing, What you're actually, they're doing is building one of the most important product the company is building that are all symbiotic to each other.

Jessica Zwann: And all of them have a relationship to your P& L, your strategy, the way that you're planning on building your business. And all of them require great deals of investment, right? Like headcounters. Probably 60 percent of your P& L as it currently stands, the biggest investment, no doubt companies making, and all of them require really high quality risks and outputs that need to be measured and effectively maintained.

Jessica Zwann: The idea is that every time you're building someone, something within your employee experience, you should be approaching it like your product development team. And that means having a very clear hypothesis of what you're trying to change, having an output to try and assess whether or not you're actually making that progress appropriately.

Jessica Zwann: Being able [00:16:00] to measure that thing in more iterative sprints rather than just big chunks. Looking at user research to really understand whether you're actually building a product that solves the problem for your users. And I think once you start doing that as a mindset, as a philosophy, a lot of those things we spoke about before about what you need to be a great COO or CHRO, you will find that they actually start kind of start ticking themselves off a little bit.

Jessica Zwann: You have to be able to understand the business and the commercials and output in order to build products. Otherwise, what are you really doing? It's just guesswork, right? 

Taylor Bradley: The items that you'd mention that really suck out to me. So first to reiterate some of your points You need to go in with a hypothesis of what you're trying to achieve.

Taylor Bradley: Now, for those that are not deep in data analytics, which this is 101 level stuff to begin with, you don't come up with a hypothesis after you've done something and then try to match your data into what you've achieved. 

Jessica Zwann: Yeah. It needs 

Taylor Bradley: to start at the [00:17:00] beginning. The second point that you mentioned, Yes, it could be revenue, but it could be something else.

Taylor Bradley: You need to say what you're trying to change, and all too often. In particular, I think this is an easy thing to pick on, is HR runs a survey, there's no hypothesis going into it, there's nothing to necessarily measure coming out of it, and you end up with a big process that took time away from the business, and probably subtracted value.

Taylor Bradley: That's something that we really need to embrace what you're saying is what are you trying to change? Articulate that an hypothesis and then test it with what you're trying to work on. The final piece, your headcount is often your largest investment. I love that word in particular that you use versus cost center because there should be an investment mindset and you should be getting a return on that investment.

Taylor Bradley: That can be [00:18:00] measured in a variety of ways and being in tune to the financials of the business will certainly help you as a leader. Now that you've gone through this process, product management principles, can you give us a specific use case that either you have seen or someone that's read your book has shared with you that they've tried?

Jessica Zwann: Yeah, I can give you a really nice couple of examples that I talk about a bit. So one of them is. The idea of the Holiday Knot, which is something that happened back when I was working at WebEye. And the Holiday Knot is the way that I describe it, but basically what it is, a lot of scaling businesses start bumping into this situation where they're starting to get a little more formalized and now resource planning becomes very important.

Jessica Zwann: And your team is maybe not so diligent around like booking time off and people are booking things at the same time. It means that you're difficult, finding things difficult to resource. And whereby this was very like, this was a chronic problem, right? And this problem was seen because we had a lot of team members that were focused in one particular [00:19:00] geographic area in Scandinavia.

Jessica Zwann: And in Scandinavia, it's very common to take the whole of one specific month of the year off. Now there's a couple of. Hypotheses we had around this problem. One of them was a long term solve, which is we need to make sure that we're resourcing more globally in order to dampen this resource drain. And then the other thing we went into it was we think that people aren't appropriately booking ahead of time, not because they don't have the visibility of when they're going to take leave, but actually people are just booking at last minute because it's so standardized, particularly in this one particular region that they are just doing it because they thought that would be fine and they can just do it like a week before.

Jessica Zwann: And there's a few other things that team had our policies on. They went away, they did some user research, they spoke to a lot of people. They went, looked for people that had booked holiday, like very short turnaround, looked for people, managers that had multiple of their team away in one week and really stuff it.

Jessica Zwann: We had basically a whole month of one year where people almost were completely off, right? The whole company almost ground to a standstill. So this was a pretty chronic problem for us. And what [00:20:00] the team came away with was, yes, of course, hiring more geographically dispersed would be a very good long term help for us.

Jessica Zwann: So there's like long term projects. To extend our time zone coverage by a certain amount of hours. But in the short term, we had to address some of the kind of chronic pain point that the product we built. The first one was we were using this HR system that people just didn't really remember and to log in to a separate tab on your Chrome, people never really used it, so they forgot what it was called.

Jessica Zwann: They would Slack someone and say, Hey, do you know the URL for that HR system I need to use? And then their manager would be like, what do you need? Oh, I want to book holiday. Oh, don't worry about it. Just put it in your calendar. It was just, everything became naturally off base. So we needed something that worked with their workflow.

Jessica Zwann: The second thing is that we recognize that the majority of the times that people weren't booking anything was in January and February. People just got off Christmas, the brand new year. And everyone is wondering, no one's thinking about summer holidays, right? Everyone's just trying to get back into the year.

Jessica Zwann: So if we could do some positive nudging to remind people to book holiday around that [00:21:00] time, then that would likely nudge the behavior in the appropriate way. And then the third thing we did was I'm a massive fan of incentives rather than discouraging in HR. So I really don't like the idea of writing a policy that just says you have to book holiday three months in advance.

Jessica Zwann: I'm a much bigger fan of saying, let's try and encourage people to do that. But the last thing that we did was we said for this year, we're going to offer everyone that books holiday six months in advance. A one night accommodation on bookme. com so you can have an extra night on your holiday. Right? And it was worth it for 250 for each head was massively worth it to have that visibility so that we could have appropriate resource plan.

Jessica Zwann: And what we saw is that year, basically with the combination of three things, one, a way you could book HR direct and book time off directly in Slack, so people could just forward slash holiday and type in the holiday, went to book, and it got done straight through Slack, their usual interface. The second thing was in January, doing a bit of a push, just a couple of comms.

Jessica Zwann: Hi, like now's a great time. Holidays are really cheap. If you book ahead of time, we'll give you this additional benefit [00:22:00] and really encouraging people rather than just waiting people or punishing people. What we found was actually the problem was very quickly solved and we still obviously had the backup of being able to hire more broadly, but the team went about that user research program, identifying the hypotheses of what the challenges were, what the output metric to measure that would be.

Jessica Zwann: So 50 percent of a holiday booked in January. Less than 20 percent of people have a holiday the same day as someone else, yada, yada. And then they built the program of work they wanted to update, and they measured the effectiveness at the end of the quarter. 

Taylor Bradley: And pulling back on your journalism degree, uh, what you're saying reminded me of a quote by George Bernard Shaw, the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Taylor Bradley: That is an issue that runs into HR professionals all the time. And when you were saying folks weren't remembering what your HRS system is called, naturally, my instinct was someone's going to tell [00:23:00] you, we sent out an email, we told people that this thing existed or that they should do this. And one quote that I always use is we can't blame the audience for the movie that we created, not resonating with.

Taylor Bradley: We need to understand what the audience wants and how to communicate and connect with them. And that's something that you mentioned that really stuck out. Is you just ask, you ask people, Why aren't you doing this? Versus, taking a more punitive approach, which, reminds me of HR of old, but using the product principles that you did your user research, you identify where the blocks of the bottlenecks were, and then essentially introduced early bird pricing to the program by offering them this booking.

Taylor Bradley: com thing. And I would encourage all of our listeners, have the courage to 1. Get Jessica's book and learn these different types of principles. But 2. [00:24:00] Try these things. Try these unique things. 250 a head may seem expensive, but if it mitigates your company grinding to a halt one month a year, seems like it's worth it.

Taylor Bradley: Now, as we come in for a landing here, I'll change into a topic that is on top of everybody's mind and that's Greek mythology. So I want to talk about Sisyphus, which is a segue into a new book. That you are writing now, I don't know what's top secret and what's not. So I'll turn it over to you. Let's talk about Sisyphus.

Taylor Bradley: Let's talk about what you're working on here for the future. 

Jessica Zwann: Yeah. So I'm working on a new book at the moment. It's it's similar topic, but slightly different. This is one of the first times I've publicly talked about it. Essentially. I have been thinking a lot about the first book, right? We just talked a lot about their concept and the ideas.

Jessica Zwann: It's very. It's a very employer facing book. It's very company facing book, right? Like how to build a product, really compelling. And I've been [00:25:00] thinking a lot more about the kind of product that you're building. So the idea of the experiential economy is that the further away from a commodity you move, the higher value and more margins you can charge on a product, arguably the kind of higher value it is to the customer.

Jessica Zwann: You start with something like a coffee bean, right? You got a coffee bean from Kenya or Rwanda or Colombia. And yes, there might be some differences between that coffee bean as a commodity, but really the price of them is not going to vary wildly, right? A kilo of coffee beans is like 5 or whatever it is.

Jessica Zwann: Great. Then you package that coffee bean up and you send it somewhere. It comes, it arrives in Brooklyn. There's some cool guy with lots of tattoos who like roasts the coffee bean, he grinds the coffee bean, he puts it in a cool package and you go buy it from your local cafe. What started as a 5 a kilo coffee bean is now 40 a kilo.

Jessica Zwann: The next thing that happens is it starts becoming part of the service of coffee. So someone starts taking it, they turn it into a cup of coffee. You walk past your local Starbucks and you just pick up a coffee, take away, don't even go in and you walk down the road. Then all of a [00:26:00] sudden your coffee is worth more money, right?

Jessica Zwann: The per kilo is increased, but also the value is increased. You're no longer having to grind, roast your own coffee or make your own coffee and make it for yourself and put it in a cup or wash it up. It all happened for you. And then you transform into what is called the experiential economy, which is the idea that you arrive at your favorite cafe, they're playing awesome music, it's really cool, everyone around you is great, you're the barista, you have a great time, you've got free Wi Fi, you can work for a couple of hours, and you leave there really feeling like you've had an experience, right?

Jessica Zwann: You're there because you enjoy the presence of being there. And there are lots of things that are part of this experiential economy, and that again is like taking you further away from a commodity and further into a higher, um, level of the economy. for listening. The final stage is this idea of the transformation economy, which is the idea that you go to an experience, not because you want to have the experience, because you yourself want to be changed as a person through the experience.

Jessica Zwann: So some companies that you may know of that do a really good job of kind of selling into the transformation economy in places like [00:27:00] gyms, like Equinox, if you're familiar with it, really sells massively into the transformation economy. A lot of these float bars and health centers and things that exist now are really also part of this transformational economy.

Jessica Zwann: But so can things like art, or going to a theater production, right? You're going to experience it, but also they're really selling you on the idea of you're leaving a different person than you became. Now, my argument is that, you know, The kind of ideal world, employment is part of the transformation economy, right?

Jessica Zwann: There is definitely a kind of service economy piece where it is, we, I give you service, you give me money, we exchange, exchange, and that's it. It's like a, an hourly rate role where you don't feel changed as a person. And there is definitely an experiential world, right? We really lived in that maybe in 2016 when we were all doing beer pong and.

Jessica Zwann: Table, the snack walls and all that beanbag kind of stuff at work. But my argument now is I think actually we're in this new type of work where what we really desire as people is to be positively changed by the work [00:28:00] that we're doing is to have our lives and ourselves as people improved through that.

Jessica Zwann: So if we then say, okay, that makes sense. I'm bought in. I like the idea of a transformational work experience. Then there has to be something there on the connection with purpose. Like, why are you trying to change? What does it mean to you as an individual? And my new book is about that concept. So the transformation economy of work, and can you have a sense of purpose at work?

Jessica Zwann: If you are a finance manager at a cloud IT and I'm interviewing a lot of People that have had really interesting career journeys, a couple of key profiles that people are pulling into to try and get an understanding of what are the common themes of having a deep sense of purpose and connection at work and how can you as a business leader, as a manager, recreate that in your own transformational experience you're building.

Taylor Bradley: Incredible prep for the book. I'm looking forward to it. I want to tie it back though, cause some folks aren't going to be familiar with the kingdom of [00:29:00] Athura. How does Sisyphus fit into this? Will you get us a quick primer? 

Jessica Zwann: Yes, of course. So the kind of current working title and these things always change.

Jessica Zwann: We'll see what happens, but it is, it's called, Was Sisyphus Smiling? And it's about this idea of. Sisyphus was cursed with pushing a boulder up a hill every single day. And when you'd get to the top of the hill, the next day it would start at the bottom again and you had to do the exact same thing every single day.

Jessica Zwann: You had to repeat the same task over and over. And, There is a philosopher who wrote a piece that basically said is the way to be happy to imagine that Sisyphus was smiling, that every single day he woke up glad to be pushing the boulder up the hill, there was some sense of purpose or accomplishment in that, and I was inspired by that idea, basically, as I've been doing my research for the book.

Taylor Bradley: Yes, and a concept that I could imagine many in HR can resonate with, pushing that boulder up the hill, and then start afresh each day. I'm definitely looking forward to the book. Are we, [00:30:00] do we have a timeframe of when this is going to hit our shelves? 

Jessica Zwann: Yeah, I think it will hit your shelves sometime in the next, probably next year.

Jessica Zwann: It's a long process. I really want to take my time with this one. I felt like the last one, I was just so outcome oriented. I just wanted the book that now I'm like, maybe I should enjoy the process of writing a book. Not that I didn't enjoy it before, but I want to enjoy it. 

Taylor Bradley: In the many authors that I've spoken to, they do find the process very cathartic.

Taylor Bradley: And I think it's something that it seems to be an enjoyable one. Perhaps I'll go down that route one day. But in fairness to you, the approach you took sounds very product development to me, right? Outcome oriented, quick sprints, those kinds of things. So maybe you were just emulating the moment or book.

Jessica Zwann: Yeah, that's a good point. Maybe I need to like really get method actor y. And how'd I do? The first one was very, I had a Trello board. I had every week I'd write 1500 words, a task list. I was ticking it off. This one, [00:31:00] I feel like I'm. Organized, but I've let that go a little bit. Maybe that's part of the method after, like to figure out how exactly to make that all work.

Taylor Bradley: I will end with two quick questions for you. So one, what is one bit of career advice you'd like to share with our listeners? 

Jessica Zwann: Yeah, I give so many different versions of this question. I think where I'm at the moment is inspired by the new book is look for your joy in the work you do. A lot of the themes of the interviews I've been doing with people, actually, one of the big joys that people find is being deeply connected to people that are helping, right?

Jessica Zwann: So having a sense of community at work or having a connection to your customers, if that's possible. And I think putting the product manager hat on again. If you are in a HR role, I almost can't overstate how valuable it is to really be conducting like in person user research, getting to know your team and finding the joy by being solving their problems for them and not just administrating [00:32:00] policy or creating projects because you're being asked to.

Jessica Zwann: Yeah. I really think try and find your joy. What is the thing that gives you purpose? And then look for ways to really make that into your day to day. 

Taylor Bradley: Excellent advice, and the final question, how can people get a hold of you and get a copy of Built for People? 

Jessica Zwann: Built for People you can buy anywhere books are sold.

Jessica Zwann: Amazon, of course, you can buy directly from the publisher, Kroger and Page. I think Bronze and Noble, Target, all those places will have it. The second question is how to get in touch with me. Good question. You can always Get in touch with me on LinkedIn. I will add a caveat, which I used to never add, which is my LinkedIn lately has been such a black hole.

Jessica Zwann: I'm so bad at getting back to people. I do try very hard to respond to everyone, but it will be, it might be a while at the moment. Summer in New York. I'm trying to spend my evenings out in Tompkins Fair Park, eating ice cream with my friends, not at home responding to LinkedIn, but absolutely reach out to me there.

Jessica Zwann: Reach out to me on Twitter. I'm at Jessica May Hayes.[00:33:00] 

Taylor Bradley: We will put the links in the descriptions for everything that Jessica just mentioned. Jessica, what an amazing episode. Thank you for being on the podcast. 

Jessica Zwann: Thank you so much for being so organized and so great. 

Taylor Bradley: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Troop HR podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to subscribe and leave a 5 star rating.

Taylor Bradley: If you would like to learn more about our community, please visit troophr. com. In the meantime, keep living the dream.