Dr. Jessica Kriegel talks with Jolen Anderson, BetterUp’s Chief People & Community Officer, to delve into her inspiring journey from law school to leading people-centric HR strategies at various large organizations. Jolen shares her evolving purpose, the significance of trust and respect in leadership, and the crucial role of mental health in the workplace. Tune in to discover how Jolen navigates complex organizational dynamics, fosters inclusive cultures, and envisions the future of work in a rapidly changing world.
- What Is Your Why:
Jolen Anderson discusses how her purpose has evolved over the years, focusing on making an impact in her community, family, and friends. - Career Journey and Transitions:
From law school to becoming a CHRO, Jolen reflects on her career transitions, driven by a desire to solve complex problems and make workplaces better. - Trust and Respect in Leadership:
The importance of starting relationships with trust, over-communicating, and treating people with respect and dignity. - Navigating Organizational Dynamics:
Insights into managing people-related problems, the significance of employment law, and the journey from antitrust litigation to HR leadership. - Creating a Positive Work Culture:
Practical strategies for fostering a great workplace, including open communication, psychological safety, and the role of coaching in employee development. - Mental Health and Workplace Dynamics:
Addressing mental health challenges, building psychological safety, and the importance of personalized support for employees. - Challenges and Insights as a CHRO:
The unique challenges faced by CHROs, the loneliness of the role, and the importance of courageous leadership. - Future of Work and AI:
The evolving nature of work, the impact of AI on leadership skills, and the importance of human connection in a technology-driven world. - Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:
Addressing the current landscape of DEI, managing challenges, and the importance of systemic interventions for building inclusive organizations.
Jolen Anderson:
CHRO at BetterUp, known for her impactful HR leadership across various large organizations. Jolen’s journey from law school to HR leadership highlights her commitment to solving complex problems and fostering inclusive cultures. She is passionate about democratizing coaching and leveraging technology for personalized employee support.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jolenanderson
Website: betterup.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/betterup/
Jessica Kriegel:
Website: https://www.jessicakriegel.com/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicakriegel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jess_kriegel/
Culture Partners:
Website: https://culturepartners.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/culturepartners/
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: One of the thought leadership powerhouses, as you probably know, is BetterUp. BetterUp is innovating in this field, democratizing coaching to drive personal and professional growth at scale. In today’s rapidly changing work landscape, these insights that they provide are more valuable than ever. And today’s guest is BetterUp’s Chief People and Community Officer, Jolen Anderson. She has had a remarkable career starting in law and becoming one of the leading figures in the HR space, a decision that her parents are a bit perplexed about, which we dug into in our conversation. Her insights today on the intersection of people, technology, and organizational culture, I think are some valuable takeaways for our listeners. I hope that you enjoy. Jolen, thank you so much for joining us. I cannot wait to hear what is your why?
Jolen Anderson: It’s a really good question, and I have to say I was a little bit stumped when I thought about the fact that you were going to ask that. I noticed in all of your podcasts that that’s a question that you start with, and there’s probably complexity in it, but it always comes down back to this, which is to whom much is given, much is expected. My family was a family of immigrants. My parents both worked really hard. They got educations later in their lives. I had the choice between becoming a doctor and a lawyer, and law school felt like the better option. Although ultimately I found my way to doing people-based work because I feel like talent is a driver and a lever to help organizations thrive, but also make an impact in people’s lives. So I’ve continuously chased the idea of how can I make an impact? How can I help solve complex problems? How can I make environments and places better than where I found it? And how can I continuously learn and grow and evolve? And so those are the things that have often helped drive various decisions, particularly as I’ve had different chapters in my career and I’ve had the benefit of doing lots of different things, but there’s always those consistent themes across the work that I’ve been able to do.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I’m interested in those chapters because I was perplexed that you went from law school to Chief People Officer at various huge organizations. Tell us about that. Was it just because you went to law school for your parents and then you really followed your heart once you got into your career? How did you make that?
Jolen Anderson: Maybe ultimately you look back and you’re like, where did I end up? I studied political science and social policy in school. I thought I was going to be a big policy advocate, go work for the government, and got kind of jaded by living in DC my first year in law school. So ended up transferring back to Northwestern and had lots of opportunities to do different things. But you kind of get pushed into this big firm life and the idea of making six figures at an early stage in my career and having big loans, I was like, okay, sign me up for that. And then all of a sudden I was an antitrust litigator and doing business litigation and working with big clients on these really complex lawsuits. And although I enjoyed the complexity of it, and I’m super grateful for law school really giving me that foundation of how to unpack problems and how to solve issues and how to kind of think, I really kind of applied that school across that learning across different chapters of my career.
So I went from antitrust litigation to going in-house at a company that I was working as part of their defense to becoming more of a generalist. So I did sponsorship, law, technology, licensing agreements. I did a little bit of everything, but I found my heart and joy in employment law for a couple of reasons. One, it was people-related problems, and that always felt more realistic than two companies fighting on paper. Two, frankly, it was kind of juicy figuring out what was going on at an organization and what reorgs might be coming up or what investigations needed to be done. It felt like I was in my favorite reality TV of corporate days of our lives. So I enjoyed that corporate days of our lives. I really enjoyed it. You steal that. Yeah. And then it was just impact because again, you saw how the work that you did really started to exist and change how an organization functioned and ran.
And so any good lawyer, I made it my business to understand the business of HR and really became a student of it. And I found my advice at some point switching from here’s what I would do from a legal perspective to, well, here’s strategically the questions I could be asking, and what about this? And I’ve been reading some articles and then ultimately had my chance to move into HR when I became a Chief Diversity Officer and the legal team and function has its own challenges from a DEI perspective. So I was able to bring some of that learning and expertise into become a Chief Diversity Officer. And from there, I kind of did my tour across HR disciplines. So I was an HRBP, I did employment relations, I did talent work, I did org design things, and ultimately I think had the chance and the aspiration to take everything I learned to really go then impact at the full C-suite level before becoming a CHRO.
And then did that for a few years. So I went from Visa, which I would call more of a FinTech to Bank of New York, which is a 240-year-old organization, 50,000 employees. I led the HR team. I also did social impact work and ESG work as well before about my next chapter, which is now moving to a 10-year-old high growth startup in which the entire team, the entire company is smaller than the HR team that I had at BNY, but I’m loving the work that I do. So I’ve had these chapters, like I said, of financial institutions, fintechs, a lawyer, large-scale organizations, to now being in a high growth startup. But each of it, again, that theme of impact, purpose, opportunity, all of that really, you can kind of see the through line.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I can see why given your why and your background, this opportunity would be of interest because of not just the team that you’re leading, but the impact that the company is making. I remember hearing about this company many years ago for the very first time I was doing research on love in the workplace, started to see that term love show up at work more often. And I was intrigued and I’m in divinity school, and so I was trying to see where is humanness and a soul and love in the place that we spend all of our time every day. And so I started interviewing CHROs, asking them, do you talk about love at work? Is that touchy? Do you have initiatives around that? What impact does it have on your work? And someone said, well, you know what? The way that we show our employees love is with the work we do with BetterUp. Have you heard of them? And I hadn’t at the time, so I just became obsessed with the organization and the thought leadership that you guys all put out. And I totally get it because you’re in an interesting role as the CHRO at a company like BetterUp because your role is bigger than leading the HR team. Can you talk about what the other half of your life probably looks like with the external-facing element of it and the impact, the purpose of the organization?
Jolen Anderson: Yeah, no, it’s a really good question and thank you for understanding the choice. I will have to go back to my parents who were still perplexed, still perplexed that I’m no longer a lawyer, that this makes perfect sense. And if you could almost find my path to this, if you look across my career, so one of the things that always really drove me crazy as a CHRO was this problem and the challenge of scale. The truth is HR teams and design functions just aren’t designed to touch every leader, every manager, every individual who needs support in an organization. And as much as we try, we call it self-service, we call it, we call it giving you the power of data in your hands. We call it ask hr, we call it lots of different things, but we’re not in it with managers every day. And it used to always challenge me, and I know organizations in all HR teams and functions of just like, how do we really touch the people who are truly driving the employee experience?
And I remember 10 years ago encountering BetterUp and this idea, I think the first thing that was appealing to me was the idea of democratizing coaching and as a CHRO who would sometimes negotiate with executives and they would get to the very end and they would say, Hey, by the way, I have a coach and that’s part of the deal. I need my coach to be part of the work I do because they’re incredibly impactful. And again, it drove me crazy that not every employee would have access to that type of impact, that type of intervention. And so BetterUp thinking about bringing that to bear was incredibly powerful for me. So that’s how I got on board as a customer and then as an advisor with the company many, many years ago and have followed their journey, seen how they’ve scaled, geeked out on the research, to your point, seeing the partnerships that they’ve developed with different organizations.
And honestly, there was this sort of connection between the challenge that I always had every day of how do you drive impact and interventions at scale? How do you really truly do work that’s changing people at the most fundamental level and helping them with tools beyond what they can even imagine? And then how do you really build community and connection among CHROs? Because the truth is the job having sat in it and you talk to them, so it can be very lonely. You are holding a lot of different tensions within an organization and there isn’t always an outlet or a place or experiences internally that helps you just shape where to put all of that energy. And so the CHRO community is incredibly important and powerful and needed because we’re all trying to tackle issues that really no organization can solve by itself. So BetterUp coming here has really given me the chance to not only think internally about how do we create a great employee experience, how do we continue to invest in our product in a way that solves some of that impact at scale challenge that even I had as a practitioner, but then also how do I give back to fortify that CHRO community?
BetterUp has incredible relationships, lots of access and information that we just really want to enable individuals and companies to just do their best work. So I get to sit across all of those spheres and it’s incredibly interesting, a lot of fun, and I’m really enjoying it.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So can we double down on this conversation about how lonely it is for CHROs? Because I think that is of particular interest for a lot of the listeners. I was a CHRO for a startup organization for many years, and it was the hardest job I ever had because of the loneliness. They talk about loneliness, it’s lonely at the top, it’s lonelier right below the top for the CHRO because the CEO either is bought in or not. And if they’re bought in, actually it’s a great job. If they’re not, it is the hardest thing on the planet because you are like the toxic handler for the entire organization. So what is it like for you at BetterUp in your experience?
Jolen Anderson: Yeah. Well, BetterUp is incredible because I think the company is surrounded by individuals who sort of sit in this space. So because the CHRO and other c-suite individuals are our customer, it’s really nice I think to be surrounded by that community. Internally, I talk to our sales leads or I talk to our product leads or others within the team, and they all sort of have that talent lens and understanding. So it feels like a collective community where we’re trying to tackle it together. That being said, to your point in any role that I’ve had as a head of HR, you’re just holding a lot of tensions. You’re navigating a number of things. First of all, one of the things I was probably most surprised by once I moved to a chief talent officer role in a large organization was how everything hits your desk, every employee matter, every illness that someone may be experiencing.
And this might be more profound because I was a CHRO during covid, but nonetheless, it was like everything that a person is navigating in their lives, it hits your desk. So I would know about child suicides. I would know about cancer diagnosis. I would know about job layoffs coming off, coming up in the middle of knowing that someone just had a baby. I would know about all of the organizational dynamics. And because of the position of confidence and trust, you’re just holding that tension. There’s not anybody you can always talk to because you’re holding the information and trying the best way to navigate it internally. I also think to your point, you’re that confident of the CO, you’re trying to be that confident of the executive team, and sometimes you got to hold various confidences. So again, sort of navigating that, how do I prioritize the organizational agenda, the leadership agenda, the individual agenda, the macro environment happening with protest and DEI crisis and war-torn countries and trying to get employees out of conflict areas. It’s just all converging and you can’t always talk to everyone internally about all the things. So that makes the job challenging. And it could also make it pretty lonely because there’s no outlet always for the experiences that you might be facing. And I know this is no surprise for you, you did the job,
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: But it’s also the most interesting part of work I’ve ever had when I have to grapple with the ethics of putting the organization first or the people in the organization first.
I mean, there are a lot of times where I chose people over organization, and if I had had a wonderful CEO that I was working for, that probably would’ve been supported, but I didn’t. So it was seen as betrayal and I had to sit with the kind of spiritual tension of my role in this capitalist system assigned a particular place with a particular paycheck and certain responsibilities. And also seeing a person in front of me and saying, you know what? This is bigger than that. And then the tension that I created for myself in making those decisions. That happens almost every day for people in your roles, as you said, the tensions, the things that hit your desk. And I don’t think people get that. I think that they think that CHROs are policy people who are there to say no to everything everyone wants.
Jolen Anderson: Right? Sometimes you are, you’re the office of no, sometimes too.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Sometimes you are. But I honestly think, and these are the types of things that we talk about in CHRO forums and community, and when you get into it with some of the practitioners who’ve had those tough jobs and those tough moments, everybody has a story where you really are calling that moment of courage. And in fact, we recently had our BetterUp annual conference and the theme was courageous leadership because navigating the tensions that we just described and doing that analysis in your head that you just described really takes that courageous leadership. It really takes a deep understanding of self and sort of your boundaries and your ethics and what can be right. And I think your point around being commercial is also a good one because I think sometimes people mistake the idea that you’re trying to prioritize wellness and lives and healthy organizations with an idea that you aren’t commercial, that you can’t run a company.
And I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with all the data and the research and the thought that you can have both, that you can be commercial, that you can run a business, but you can be human. And in fact, more and more, that deeply human skill that we all inherently have and need to cultivate is going to be even more important in a sort of AI-driven technology world because it’s the thing that’s going to differentiate us. It’s the thing that’s going to allow your organization to attract, develop, retain the best talent is that deeply human understanding of we’re a group of people trying to drive a company forward. It’s the only way the work gets done. And at the end of the day, those needs have to take first priority, and that is commercial. And so to your point, some leaders get it, some don’t, but you still have to call on that moment of courage as a CHRO and be the one to say the thing that no one always wants to say.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: And what is interesting too is that in order for you to make the impact that you’re making in the world, you have to stay in business and you have to be profitable. And so you have to hit those numbers in order to live the purpose that the organization exists for. Exactly. Exactly. They’re not at odds. It can feel that way sometimes because of bad stories, because you hear these nightmare stories and you think this is a broken system. And so it cannot work for everyone, right?
Jolen Anderson: A hundred percent. And again, that’s the value and the purpose that we’re playing out at BetterUp because we attract people who are incredibly, we’re a mission-based organization. We’re trying to democratize coaching, we’re trying, we call ourselves a human transformation company, which is really trying to, at this individual level, change mindset and enable people to thrive at work. And that is incredibly rewarding, incredibly purpose-driven, but we’re running a business. We have investors, we have employee payroll that has to be met and run. We have clients who are expecting us to deliver our best every day. And we often talk about living that value, driving our organization forward from a purpose perspective doesn’t happen if we’re not commercially minded client oriented thinking about how do we put the company first? But it doesn’t mean you can’t be kind and that always can underline, I think, and underpin any interaction. You can be kind even when you’re making a tough decision.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: This is where I start to get into the juiciness of this topic.
Jolen Anderson: Because C, for days of our lives, here we go. My favorite,
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I’m so stealing that. So culture partners, we do culture consulting. And our tagline that is an unofficial tagline is we operationalize not just memorialize culture because a lot of people, they do culture work. It’s like we’ll go to take the leadership team to a retreat in Napa. You get a facilitator to do some mission vision values, exercise for two days. You have some boondoggle, and then you go home and you send a town hall recording out that’s like, here’s our new mission statement. Here’s an email follow up, check it out on the internet, the end. And that doesn’t move the needle. So so much of what organizations do to move the needle on culture and on driving results and on human potential and driving transformation, it’s done under the lens of we’re all the same and people are this way. And so what we need is, for example, more feedback.
If everyone gave more feedback, it’d be great. What they’re not taking into account is mental health challenges and what that even means. Most people have no idea. They don’t know that addiction is a mental health issue. They don’t know that anxiety affects a third of the workforce on any given day. And that sometimes you might give me feedback as my manager from a loving place with great intentions, and the feedback is maybe you should move that over to the left. And what I hear is what’s wrong with you? How my mother talked to me or whatever. And I’m hearing it totally different than it’s being spoken. And then the manager is like, this person is totally unprofessional because what they’ve just had is a triggering event that has them react in an emotional way. And they didn’t know that they were even being triggered. And the manager certainly doesn’t know that. And they’re like, I just told them to move it to the left. This person is not a good fit. Culturally,
Jolen Anderson: There are
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Thousands of examples like that. And in any given day, and we’re just beginning to talk about it, just beginning to talk about perhaps maybe there’s this mental health issue that we should talk about. So I’m curious what your perspective is on mental health at work, the boundaries of appropriate conversations and inappropriate conversations and how you’re dealing with it at BetterUp.
Jolen Anderson: Yes, really good question. And anything else? I would say those moments that play out every day have to be considered long-term investments so that they aren’t necessarily that one-off transaction. So your ability to navigate that exact scenario is paid by depositing weeks and months of relationship capital, psychological safety building to enable you to navigate that moment appropriately. And the issue is, to your point, people are moving incredibly fast. They don’t always make those deposits in the relationship bank or that psychological safety building. They don’t have the tools or capabilities themselves to even know what that looks like. And organizations aren’t necessarily creating the infrastructure and the space to enable that skill building and holding individuals accountable for how they’re leading and functioning within those teams. And all of that then leads to that crisis in that moment when, as you said, you just had this interaction and two people had a completely different experience because in a world where you had leaders who were self-actualized and healthy themselves, who could recognize their own triggers and have spent that time among a mastery trying to understand how to engage and be empathetic and read signals and value that within teams and have good EQ, they would’ve spent the time for that.
They would’ve spent that time relationship building with their employee. They would’ve had an environment again where people felt psychologically safe to say, Hey, I know you gave me feedback, but let me explain how I heard that, what the receipt was in my experience of receiving that. And the manager would say, oh, wow, that’s not what I intended. But instead, everybody walks away and just again holds it and then it builds and it’s all unhealthy and then you’re up at night spinning and just all the things that cycle when you don’t have those interactions in the right way. So how I think about navigate, manage addressing those issues at work is exactly the way in which I sort of described. It’s like what is your organization doing to create the space, the capability, building the accountability around how you lead and manage your teams? How are you supporting people with what they need in their lives to be self-actualized and aware and mature and have high EQ and all the things so they can be prepared for those moments? And then how are you reinforcing it within your culture? And that’s one of the things that is fantastic about BetterUp is because we are individualized, we are with that manager, we are sort of trying to address that issue of scale so that you can have healthier relationships and conversations. But this is all I recognize ideal and nowhere and lots of organizations are on the journey and we haven’t solved it completely yet, but I do think it’s possible.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Is there also something that we run into, which is when something isn’t handled super well or there’s some relationship dynamic or a little nugget of toxicity that pieces head out of, then there’s extra eyes on you because it’s like, wait a minute, we’re BetterUp, we be better than this. I mean, it almost feels like it gets highlighted or amplified because we work in a world that’s obsessed with this human dynamic and culture. And so when culture isn’t ideal, then it feels like, Ooh, it hurts more. I don’t know. Do you have that?
Jolen Anderson: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. But I would say that any organization, sometimes your own experience of your product or how you’re showing up in the world, I guess my point is it doesn’t mean we don’t have our own problems and issues, right? Because it’s just often lawyers aren’t always the best lawyers. HR is the worst job on the HR team, this is HR. For HR, it’s the hardest thing to do because you’re talking to the talent experts and trying to take your own medicine. And just in the same way BetterUp, as much as we are super, I mean we do things that are incredible, things I’ve never done in my career, having been at really mature financial services organization, the opportunity to stop and think about our readings and our connections and the conversations we’ve had, I’m learning a whole new language of just how we have conversations at BetterUp.
And so there’s lots of infrastructure and support I think to enable us to achieve that best world-class environment. But any other organization, we have our challenges, we have our journey, we have our investments, but thankfully I think we have our own product that really provides a bit of a roadmap for how we can resolve some of the issues that we’re facing internally in the same way that clients do. So I’m really proud of the language and the structure that the company has embedded to enable us to have some of these dialogues. And we do have a very high bar to be reflective of the clients in which we serve. One of the things I’m excited to join the organization to do and reflect, we talk about that, that we have to really reflect and model what it looks like for our clients, but we also on our own organizational journey like anybody else, and trying to continue to enable employees to really create that world-class environment.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So I believe that culture is an internal manifestation of brand, and brand is just an external manifestation, a culture. The two are inexorably linked in a way that I don’t think we knew very clearly before. And you’re seeing a lot more C-M-O-C-H-R-O roles, people that are managing both brand and people at the same organization because they see those things as intertwined. And I’ve also followed your brand evolution and it’s different now. I mean, it is leaning into human transformation and the AI messaging and that’s not what it was a few years ago. So can you tell us about that brand evolution as it connects or doesn’t to the culture evolution?
Jolen Anderson: Yeah, really good question. I think again, BetterUp started with a relatively simple yet complex question, which is how do we democratize coaching? Our co-founders had this vision and understood the impact of simple things like mentorship and then how that could really unlock individuals. So then it became, well, how do we apply technology and scale and make this a way where everyone can have access to this fantastic thing that really does help people change and be better? And that was the beginning of our journey. But as we started to think about all the ways and all the touch points within an organization to allow that vision to come true, I think what we really have continued to evolve towards is an enterprise SaaS platform that has many different products that help that transformation journey. So whether or not it’s BetterUp Care that is in the space of mental health and wellbeing and really helping ensuring that employees can be connected to the right tools and solutions that address those needs to our individualized coaching product that gives that one-on-one instant access and relationship that helps employees work on their goals and individuals because we do have a direct to consumer model as well.
And then layering on to your point, the technology advancements that we’ve seen over time to really even help that manifest even more at scale. So how do we leverage artificial intelligence? How do we leverage the data interventions that come with being aligned to HCM products like Workday? How do we take all the organizational data and inputs so that we’re deploying the right solutions in the right moment? So to see it go from we’re a coaching platform, one-on-one relationships to an enterprise SaaS product that’s deploying various interventions at various moments in an employee lifecycle has been incredible. And I’ve remained impressed at how research is at the center of what we do, how technology is at the center of what we do and how meeting client needs and individual impact is at the center of what we do. And so the company has remained kind of true to that value even as we have built infrastructure and evolved our platform to better enable us to service our clients and their needs.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I love this story so much. So tell us about diversity, equity, and inclusion. I mean, we need to talk about it because has, here’s the question I want to ask that I probably shouldn’t ask is how do you manage your rage?
Jolen Anderson: That’s how you plot and you plan. That’s what you do, you plot.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, plotting is actually true. That is how I help manage my rage. So tell us about this travesty we’ve seen over the last couple years of this disinterest and actually demonization of diversity, equity, inclusion. That phrase in and of itself has just become simplified to basically be affirmative action in everyone’s minds. And now we’ve lost the script, we’ve totally lost the script and it feels like we’re going 20 years backwards. What is BetterUp doing about it? How is it internally at BetterUp? How are you seeing this within your community of clients? I mean, how do you contain your rage is my question ultimately?
Jolen Anderson: Well, I mean, listen, first things first. We start with our relationships and our platform and being a voice of reason and calm and resourcing to teams in this moment. And at least for now, as you’ve probably heard from individuals, as we connect with our clients and certainly internally within our own work, it may be rebranded, we may be calling it something different. We may be not necessarily releasing the press release around certain opportunities, but as we understand it, most of our clients are continuing the work that they’ve always been doing because to your point, they see the connection to if we want to attract development and retain the best talent, if we want to have an organization where people feel psychologically safe, if we want to be able to navigate all the difference in the world that’s going to exist as we continue to see demographic shift occur, then we have to have competency and resourcing and a plan around this.
So again, they may be calling it something different, but I think most people are continuing the work and the mission in the space, and that has certainly helped provide some reassurance and being able to say that to our clients and teams like, listen, we’re talking to many different Fortune 500 companies. We have relationships with everyone from Google to Hilton to Chevron. We have relationships across a variety of businesses and they’re still doing the work. I think that helps. The second thing I think we’re trying to give people resourcing and assistance around is, okay, then how can you be prepared? What is the playbook? How should you be perhaps pivoting the work that you’re doing or how you’re describing it to meet where we are in this moment and being able to provide that resourcing and tools I think is important. And then the third thing that we’re doing is just continuing to enable employees to be great no matter who you are, no matter what you’re doing, how do we give you the resources through our platform, through our relationship with our coaches, through our data and our assessments to help you do fantastic work and continue to help your organization thrive?
And we’re just going to stay on that mission and be kind of ubiquitous about it, be like, this is what we’re focused on. We’re trying to help employees thrive and be great. We’re focused on the data and the results that show how the tool works and that these interventions are powerful and we’re going to continue to deploy them in the ways that we can. So that’s what we’re doing as a company. If you ask me personally what I feel in this moment still tee, I think this is going to be an interesting challenging time. The topic of civility at work, as you probably know, is top of mind for everyone. We know we’re going into an election cycle where this is going to get even more pronounced. And I think CHROs and leaders are buckling down to prepare. And I think the best thing that they can do to prepare almost goes back to the topic that we were talking about previously, which is enabling managers to be human, to support their teams, to be able to navigate these conversations, to hold these tensions, to know when they need to escalate, to shut down things when they need to be shut down, but also create spaces where people can understand one another, and that’s competency and skill building.
And so that’s the best thing think any organization can do to just be prepared for this cycle. And I optimistically hope that it is a cycle.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: So in research that we did at the beginning of this year, we reach out to the American workforce and asked them various questions, and one of the questions was, what’s the best thing about your workplace culture and what’s the worst thing about your workplace culture? And for the first time in the history of this research that we’ve been doing for years, one of the top three best things about culture was DEI. And one of the top worst things about culture was woke ideology. So you’re seeing this political polarization happening internally that people leaning in to diversity, equity, and inclusion are also getting a lot of pushback from employees saying that woke ideology stuff is the worst thing about working here. And I think that’s because this election cycle has become so noisy and it’s permeating the workplace now. And it used to be don’t talk about mental health, don’t talk about politics, don’t talk about any of those religion at work. And now people are talking about all those things at work and it’s messy.
Jolen Anderson: It’s messy and they’re going to. And so you have to prepare people to have the conversation. And my whole thing as a former Chief Diversity Officer and even as a CHO, because I still thought my job, by the way, was leading DEI, because I think in order to have truly inclusive organizations, it starts with embedding them in talent solutions. I like to talk about institutional inclusion because systemic issues require systemic interventions. And so if you really want to build an inclusive organization, you have to get deep into the infrastructure of how talent systems are designed, how benefits are covered, how policies are written. It’s not just the training, it’s really embedded in the solution of how an organization operates, and that’s how you drive systemic inclusion. But it also starts with this mutual language. To your point, people can’t even talk because they don’t know what they’re talking about.
These terms are so misused and undefined. I think it’s striking that your research shows that woke ideology and DEI are disconnected, then I think they’re probably talking about the same thing and they just don’t know it’s been weaponized. So you have to start with defining what is diversity, what is inclusion? What do these things mean? What is race? You have to define the terms so people can have actual conversations and then equip leaders to navigate these spaces with their teams. And that’s the work that I think companies and functions can do to just prepare for the moment and they have to do as well because as you know, people trust their organizations like the Edman Trust index shows that they trust workplaces more than governments, more than religious institutions.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: They do.
Jolen Anderson: So then you have an obligation, I think, in that space as a corporate citizen to enable individuals to have some of these tough conversations.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I had this crisis of conscience after lifelong atheist. I had a spiritual experience at one point, and then I realized, well, if God is either everything or nothing and now I believe in God, then God is everything and I have to revisit every decision I’ve ever made in my life and everything that I do about my world. And a part of me was wondering if I could continue to work in corporate America because of the way that it can be exploitative when the wrong people are in control. And I was like, maybe I’m supposed to just give it all up and go be a social worker for foster kids. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. But it doesn’t feel like thought leadership and research on workplace culture is moving the needle on giving back to whom much is given, much is required, or whatever you said in the beginning about your why. I felt that same thing. And ultimately what I decided is if I can do good from within, I have the ear of people in incredible amounts of power and influence. And if I can move the needle a little bit for those people, I have actually done good. And so I’ve stayed in this world. I feel like that’s what you’re doing.
Jolen Anderson: Yeah, I think we all, many people who have had that crisis of conscience and said, what can I do? And I often to your point say, you got to stay in the game because every inch on the play yard matters. And so having been at organizations and changed paternity leave policies and raise the minimum wage and broaden benefits like BetterUp and even internally at BetterUp, thinking about how we double down on our employee experience, how we recommit to our product because we know it works. And so how do we really recommit to it as employees? How do we continue to learn from all of the scientists that we have access to and create this fantastic experience so that we can go out in the world and scale and enable our impact? I think it all matters, and I always encourage people and I’m like, it sounds so cheesy. It really does. So to the point I hope, I think people mistake this optimism and this idealism with she’s not a commercial person. It’s like, no, no, no, it’s both. I like my paycheck. Let’s be clear.
I got three kids. I got a mouse. It’s both. So we can be commercial, we can help organizations be genius, brilliant. We don’t have to give it all up, but we can also do a small thing every day that’s going to make an impact and move the yard. And if we all do it collectively, this is a foundation of any, I think a lot of belief systems of if we all become instruments and tools of good, then the collective impact that we can have together is huge. So I’m glad you’re here. Somebody is listening right now and we’re grateful that you stayed in the game and they took away something from an episode or even this conversation that they’re going to take back into the workplace and change somebody’s lives. And that certainly motivates me every day.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, it popped for me, when we talk about culture is ultimately all about the employee experience and every experience we have leads to certain belief systems. You mentioned belief systems and whether there’s value in what we’re doing, whether we’re important, whether our colleagues are in it with us or not. And those beliefs drive our actions at work every day, which ultimately get results. And that’s how culture ties to results is if you want to get results, you got to get the right actions, which don’t come from micromanaging actions. It comes from the beliefs that people hold. And you can nurture the right beliefs with experiences. And when we do this work, we talk about some of the most powerful experiences are just stories, the stories that people hear, right about if I join a new job and on day one we’re going to have a leadership meeting and someone says, oh, don’t ask any questions, the CEO hates it. When you ask questions, that’s an experience that leads to a belief that leads to an action that gets a result. And so there was a moment when I realized that I’m a storyteller and I’m creating experiences for people who listen that hopefully will lead to a new belief. And in my view, the belief that I want people to tear down is this illusion that we are in a world that has to choose between people and profit.
Jolen Anderson: Yes.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: That is a false dichotomy. And we can operate in a world that people and profit are symbiotic and the relationship nurtures itself and it’s more than just having better pet bereavement policies at work.
Jolen Anderson: Yes.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: That’s part of it. That’s an example of it. That’s part of it, yes. And it’s not to do with kombucha and ping pong tables. It has to do with actually caring about the person that I’m interacting with, even though I met them through a professional relationship.
Jolen Anderson: A hundred, a hundred percent. Again, one of the things that we talk a lot about artificial intelligence and AI, what’s it going to displace in the future? And I believe and BetterUp believes, and we’ve researched that shows that the manager skills of the future, what’s required right now is more deeply human engagements. It’s kind of counterintuitive, is that we need to be more connected, more aware, more checking in with one another and the winner. Those are the organizations that are going to win not only because they have those connections with teams, but because it’s almost priming when you have people who feel that connected, who feel part of something bigger themselves, who have mattering, who have purpose, who have safety, they can contribute more, which will enable your organization to go faster, which will take down some of the blockades and the fear that requires people to information hoard and not want to change and be resistance.
It affects the resilience. All the things that we see that come from those toxic moments can be overcome with just helping people be people so simple but stunning and shocking at the same time. And then you take a step back to your point and you’re just like, well, then what’s so hard? What’s so hard? Why aren’t organizations do it? I don’t know. I’m interested in your response. I always say scale, really. I’m just like, well, it’s hard because we’re human and we’re imperfect and things show up. But it’s also hard because of scale and how do you do that for 50,000 people becomes the question and the challenge.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s hard because our animal instincts kick into gear and we see the paperwork. The paperwork says, I’ve got to hit this much revenue by this quarter or else I might look bad. And so I’m going to do whatever I can claw, scratch, steal, beg, borrow to get to that number because I don’t want to lose my sense of safety regarding financial security. And sometimes we do what’s urgent at the cost of what is important. And it does require a counterintuitive reorganization of your brain that says, this isn’t going to pay off this quarter, but it’s going to pay off in three quarters. And that’s important. But the reality is we are people that unless you are owning the company, you don’t necessarily see yourself attached to the future of the organization. And so we are all animals and we are in survival mode. And so the system could be improved. I haven’t figured out what the new capitalism looks like, but the system does work against us in that way.
Jolen Anderson: Yeah, I agree with that. So then to your point, if you need a resetting, then you need hard stops. You need interventions to people stop in the moment and be like, okay, wait, wait, wait. Let me reorient myself to a long-term view to a collective community to where this needs to be thinking about short versus long-term. And certainly I think coaching helps with that. No surprise. Totally no surprise that I would say that. But then organization structures, knowing that how do you hardcode those nudges, which is where culture and rituals and all those things then come to bear to have people kind of reset themselves when that animal instinct kind of takes over
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: And the outside eyeballs looking at you and asking you the question, right? Because what great coaches do, they’re not like, Hey, you’re a little bit off right now. They say, and how effective do you think that was? Right? Or some question that makes you give, it’s like my therapist is constantly asking me questions that I understand the answer as she’s asking it because the question in and of itself is the answer.
Jolen Anderson: Right? Exactly. We could
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: All use more of those.
Jolen Anderson: Anybody else? I’ve totally had those moments and either mental health journeys or with therapy or with my own coaching journey where the minute the person asks you the question, you’re just like, oh, that seems so nice, right? I should try it that way.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: I mean, I remember. I also love the why of the company. The democratization of coaching is that is equity, FYI. That is what equity is. And what I love about that is I remember being, I worked at Oracle for 10 years and I was largely focused in the enterprise SaaS HCM space, and I remember how we used to pick who would get coaches and who didn’t. First we’d do a nine-box grid and we’d identify who top talent was, who has the most potential, and who is driving the best performance according to leadership. And then we would pick some of those people that deserved coaches, and then they would have to apply filling out these forms, and then we would spend tens of thousands of dollars on these three people or whomever it was and no one else got, I just remember thinking is the ROI here? I mean, because also your top talent are your highest at risk of being poached, so you’re going to invest all this money in just these three people. And then if one of them left, you just lost tens of thousands of dollars, it didn’t make sense to me then it doesn’t make sense to me now. And what you’re creating is equity in that insane process.
Jolen Anderson: Exactly. Exactly. I love it. It’s the thing we know it works. The things that we’re talking about, being able to navigate that gray, navigate that tension, that kind of adaptive capacity building research shows that the coaching is the only thing that really helps with that mindset shift and change and holding it to a group of individuals. Look at the tortured process you just described, the nine-box journey. That’s the type of thing in HR. Everybody’s rolling in their graves right now. They’re just like, oh my God. First I got to do a talent exercise and then I got to pick the people and then I got to go to the manager and then they have to sign up and then I got to check it. And by the way, we’re going to pay the people who do this thing like a hundred thousand dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, and without data, without science, without a system, a product that allows people to make it easy and accessible, to your point, instantly, I remember hearing about the company meeting our co-founders and I was like, oh my God, I get it.
And now to see that process now say, okay, we know that sometimes today some people want to talk to a coach and they want to have a real live human conversations, but sometimes they just want to practice. Sometimes they actually want a judgment-free zone. So could we enable our system based on the thousands of data points and research that we have and every conversation that we know what it looks like to model these great moments? Can you practice? Can you talk to kind of an AI, our version of a coaching Alexa and just be like, Hey, I’m going into a tough feedback conversation. Can you help me practice? And so when you bring those technology solutions to it, it makes it even more accessible and scalable, and that’s where the company is going. And I’m super excited about it because having sat in the seat, I’m just imagine a world where 50,000 employees can have access to this type of tool, and what impact would that have?
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Can I ask you one more question? I feel like I’m supposed to be wrapping it up, but I have one more question I just want to ask. So I’m doing research on mental health at work right now, and I’ve been talking to leaders in this field, Scott Doman, the chief HR officer of Calm and Jerry Hawthorne, chief HR Officer of Aflac, and asking them about not only what their organizations are doing to move the needle for their clients, but also what they’re doing internally. And they both identify, they have so many options available internally to their employees. One of the challenges, the number one challenge actually is adoption because of awareness that employees are inundated with all this information. They don’t even know what’s available to them. And so they’re not adopting because either they don’t know or they do know, but they don’t know where to go, or they do know where to go, but they don’t have the time to prioritize it or they don’t see it as an important enough. Is that a challenge for your clients, the awareness of what becomes available to them and then the adoption of it? And how do you overcome that?
Jolen Anderson: Really, really good question. And I think in partnership with a lot of our clients, we actually see pretty high adoption rates because of the ease of the tool. Because it is that almost consumer-grade experience where it’s showing up in your phone and you’re getting a reminder and you’re getting a message. And we see people really, when we’ve launched programs of the client the other day, they just launched the pilot and they had a 95% pickup rate within the first three days, and they’re two weeks in. And most of the team has had a one-on-one coaching session. So I think when
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: People’s, that’s insane results.
Jolen Anderson: I think when people feel like it’s personalized, it’s individual, this is for me, it’s easy, it’s accessible, and it kind of helped me. I think people participate more and it also means that you need that kind of programmatic overlay of letting people know that it’s available to them. But in our experience, the uptake has been fantastic because of those things. It’s a great experience. It feels personal. It helped me, and it also feels connected to me personally because we have people. It’s not like we’re saying, oh, you can only be coached on your performance goals, although that’s the option if someone wants to come in, but we can talk about your sleep, we can talk about nutrition, we can talk about what’s going on with a child that might be experiencing some issue. It’s your life and back. One of the reasons why we do that, we’re so set on that with clients is because all of that shows up at work, it all matters. So if you’re not helping a person navigate whatever might be top of mind in the moment, then you’re not really getting the best value out of the engagement. And I think that’s why people engage. So to your point, I know employees get inundated. There’s kind of the benefit soup of offerings available, and I think when you clear the noise and really focus on products and solutions that work, then people zoom in and they engage.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: And it seems like you’re also thinking about the employee experience beyond just the experiences we create for one another, which we’ve been talking about, but it’s also the user experience of the app makes a difference. So yeah, it is really all about experiences at the end of the day, all
Jolen Anderson: About experiences at the end of the day and connection and being human.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Beautiful. So my last question, what is one thing that you don’t get asked very often in these types of interviews that you wish more people would ask you?
Jolen Anderson: So I knew you were going to ask that.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Do your research, huh?
Jolen Anderson: Well, it’s a good question. I love it. It’s a good question and I am not sure I have a good answer for you. And here’s why. Because I am having the conversations. I’m having these conversations every day. I’m like connecting with CHROs. I’m with our clients, I’m with our research teams, we’re experimenting with our products. I’m having these conversations every day. So maybe instead of what question I’m being asked, I guess I would say who I’d rather who ask me these questions, having these conversations with talent teams, but I wish more CEOs were asking me these questions. So that’s my answer.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: That’s an interesting one.
Jolen Anderson: Not the what? It’s the who.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: Yeah. And why aren’t they, you think?
Jolen Anderson: I think they’re human too. That’s such a great answer. I think they’re human too. And I think, like you said, they’re looking at that number and that job talk about a difficult job. They probably would say, how come anybody, no one’s asking me about this job? That’s a lonely job too. You having sat alongside many CEOs, it is a tough job. Now, I am not getting on violin. A lot of them are, well-paid, so trust me. But it doesn’t make it easy. And they’re navigating a ton. So I think they’re human too. I think they’re looking at that number just like anybody else. But I think they equally have to stop and say like, okay, what am I doing? How do I get that intervention that I’m talking about with my teams and have had the same realization and connection to people who are talking about some of the things that would help. So I think there are more CEOs that are answering asking the question than they would’ve been 10 years ago. But certainly I wish every CEO was asking this question.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: It’s so funny because for people like you and me who totally get it and have done the research or seen the research around the connection between these type of people-oriented interventions and the ROI to an organization for it, it’s so obvious. It’s almost like, wait, are we really still asking the question? Will it drive results? Does culture drive results? Who actually wonders about that? But I mean, most people do. I mean, most people do. And I sometimes get so lost in my own mental models that I forget that you have to explain it because why? Because bad culture also gets results. You can have a toxic culture and be very profitable. And so it feels like, well, then there’s your answer. I don’t really need to invest in it. It’s like, well, might be possible if you didn’t have all of that stuckness.
Jolen Anderson: I agree. And I do think a reckoning is, I don’t think, perhaps I’m optimistic, but I don’t think those systems survive. They’re not sustainable.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: The anti-work movement is growing. Increased unionization, the multi-directional nature of information sharing on social media is exposing bad behavior more than ever before. It’s just a matter of time. I’m here for it. Let the revolution commence. I’m into it.
Jolen Anderson: I love it.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel: This has been so lovely. Thank you so much for agreeing to come and chat with me. I’ve been fangirling you from afar and now I actually got to have a chat with you and it was just so lovely. I learned a lot. Where can people go if they want to learn more about you or BetterUp?
Jolen Anderson: Oh, really good question. LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the calling card. So I’m pretty active in the space as is BetterUp. And you can take a look at our website. We make it very accessible. There’s tons of research and solutions that we’re talking about. We’re not trying to hide this, people. We really want to help arm communities with this information. So on our website, on LinkedIn, it’s the best place to figure out what we’re doing and learn some information and access some of the things I’ve been talking about with studies and that sort of, and I equally appreciate the opportunity. The work that you’re doing is incredible. These conversations are super enriching. It’s unique and it’s been my pleasure and honor to participate with you, so thank you.
