This episode features an interview with Rachel Happe, Founder and Digital Workplace, Organization, and Community Strategist at Engaged Organizations. She started Engaged Organizations to focus on helping organizations adapt to new technologies and accelerate knowledge supply chains while improving trust, transparency, and agility. She is a sought after speaker and expert on the impact of technology on engagement, relationships, and culture and has keynoted at several digital workplace conferences. In this episode, Shawn and Rachel discuss treating employees as assets rather than machines, rewarding human contributions, and valuing emotional and social aspects in the workplace.
This episode features an interview with Rachel Happe, Founder and Digital Workplace, Organization, and Community Strategist at Engaged Organizations. She started Engaged Organizations to focus on helping organizations adapt to new technologies and accelerate knowledge supply chains while improving trust, transparency, and agility. She is a sought after speaker and expert on the impact of technology on engagement, relationships, and culture and has keynoted at several digital workplace conferences.
In this episode, Shawn and Rachel discuss treating employees as assets rather than machines, rewarding human contributions, and valuing emotional and social aspects in the workplace.
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“We still have this mechanistic system and the human system, and we're still treating humans like machines. I wrote a post a while back, because I was getting really annoyed reading about how AI could help employees. It was all like, ‘It can do these 10 tasks for you.’ And I'm like, ‘If that's all we are, we should go home.’ It's the mindset of what we think employees or people's value is. The example I use in presentations is diamonds. Why are diamonds valuable? They're rocks. De Beers made them mean something. You know who can't make something mean something to somebody else? AI. The value of people is activating other people. And value is meaning.” – Rachel Happe
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:20): Getting to know Rachel
*(10:27): Rachel’s career background
*(15:42): Employees are not machines
*(21:50): How to calculate the value of community
*(32:21): The role of AI in community
*(42:39): The current and future state of valuing humans
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Links:
Connect with Rachel on LinkedIn
Learn more about Engaged Organizations
Read Ed Zitron’s They’re Looting The Internet
Connect with Shawn on LinkedIn
Shawn Pfunder: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Cohesion Podcast. Today, I'm joined by Rachel Happe, fFunder of Engaged Organizations. She's a strategist who works at the intersection of technology, governance, leadership, communications. She's also a sought after speaker, was named a 2023 Top 50 Remote Work Advocate by Mobius Software.
Shawn Pfunder: Rachel, welcome to the show.
Rachel Happe: Thank you, Shawn. It's great to be here.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh boy, I'm excited. We've been able to chat a little bit before, before we got going and I know that we've got lots to talk about, but before we get too far, I have some, you know, I hesitate to call these rapid fire or even super personal questions.
Shawn Pfunder: I'm sure that we'll get some more personal and personality as we go through, but I've got five of them for you. Okay. First one being, what's an insult that you've received that you're proud of?
Rachel Happe: The one that sticks in my head, it's probably not the one I should be most proud of, but it describes me pretty effectively.
Rachel Happe: When I was in my twenties, I worked in a management consulting firm and we had just finished this big senior staff meeting and we were having lunch in the cafeteria at our client and one of the directors turns to me and he's like, You're like a truck driver in a skirt.
Rachel Happe: And it was absolutely the funniest thing. And I think it describes me because I am pretty good at using plain language to describe complex ideas and I get passionate. So some of the time, and I grew up in Boston, so. I can let loose a little bit on the language, which is what triggered the comment at the time.
Rachel Happe: I'm usually pretty well behaved. My husband was very impressed that when my daughter was little, I managed for like five years not to really swear much in front of her. That's, time has now passed, but. Um, I'm not sure I'm proud of it, but it was very descriptive in hindsight.
Shawn Pfunder: What are the top five most open apps on your phone?
Rachel Happe: So I have a family, so messaging, the carpool text chat is very active. Not surprisingly, I was thinking about this and I was like, Twitter used to be because I was a big Twitter user. One of the reasons I really liked Twitter was because I never stop thinking, like I'm always chewing on something. And not everybody wants to hear it.
Rachel Happe: They're in the middle of their own thing. And so, Twitter really allowed me to just let loose. And the environment was such that you could completely ignore me. Like, It was up to you whether you wanted that firehose or not. I haven't really found an alternative. I'm on threads a lot, but it's not like, it's a little
Rachel Happe: mixing worlds.
Rachel Happe: LinkedIn is not that. Instagram is a big one for me. I use it a little differently than most people. I have a private account. I use it sort of as a diary because I'm very busy. So I don't get to like write or jot down things. I use it for mindfulness so I can go back and be like, my life's pretty awesome.
Rachel Happe: You know, but it's, I take pictures of like little moments in my day. That bring me joy.
Shawn Pfunder: Do you still write descriptions if it's just for you or you just take the picture?
Rachel Happe: Yeah, but I don't cultivate, I'm not looking for. Likes or follows or whatever.
Rachel Happe: That's, I'm not a public persona in that way on Instagram.
Rachel Happe: One thing that I've picked up recently and it's interesting. It's this game called Dots. It's a challenge logic game and I sort of did it because I had maxed out on media and I was like, I need to find something to keep me busy that is not. And what was interesting, what's been interesting about that, is it just keeps going on and on and on, different challenges.
Rachel Happe: It's like different puzzles. And I found out, like, It really reinforced for me that I am motivated by challenge. Like that is my thing. Like I don't need praise, but like, I like a hard problem for better or for worse. Yeah. And then Pinterest is the last one. 'cause I'm kind of a voracious learner. Like I learned to, I self-taught myself to watercolor during the pandemic or bake or garden or like all of those.
Rachel Happe: I do a lot of like my own Reno and things like that. So. I use Pinterest to just collect ideas.
Shawn Pfunder: Pinterest is awesome. I was on Pinterest for so much for a period of time, and now it's like looking at tattoo designs or it's something, I don't know, more artistic, but I love that you use it like that. Well, you, in, in your career, you, you listen, you analyze, you learn a lot about people and the way they interact with each other.
Shawn Pfunder: What's the most common myth about your field of expertise?
Rachel Happe: I think the most common myth has to do with the title of the book I'm writing, but it's that we are in control and that the corollary there is that if we are successful, we must be in control or right. Meaning we believe that there's some order to the universe.
Rachel Happe: That when we are deserving, we will do better.
Shawn Pfunder: Right.
Rachel Happe: And I was writing about this recently and popped into my head. My step grandmother was this old blue blooded New England lady. She was, went to college in the thirties. So she's older generation. And she used to sort of sardonically and sort of not say, you know, you shouldn't marry for money.
Rachel Happe: But marry where money is. So she's trying to recognize that you're not going to be able to control everything. But if you put yourself in the right environment, yeah, your chances are better. I see a lot of logical fallacies going on with people, which is they're like, I have money, I'm a CEO, I'm a whatever, I must be right.
Rachel Happe: And you're like, Maybe, maybe, maybe not.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, oh my gosh, I love your grandmother's analogy. I'll say that a lot when, like, you control people like you control the weather. With your grandma's analogy, it's like, well, I can move to Hawaii, at least. So I know what the weather's gonna be like.
Rachel Happe: You can't even completely control yourself.
Rachel Happe: Is the problem.
Shawn Pfunder: No. No, no.
Rachel Happe: So, you know, I think, I think that's a fallacy that we, it's not just people, but in our narratives.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: We ascribe a kind of responsibility or accountability in that way. And it's, it doesn't always, I have millions of people I could ask and hundreds of countries around the world that are not doing so well, whether they think that's true and they would say no.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Yeah. Well, if I start to believe my own stories that I tell myself we're in big trouble, we're in big trouble.
Rachel Happe: Yeah. It's just, all you have to do is know that. Like life is fragile and bring that to the table with you every time you think you are the one to know things.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Yeah. I'm successful. I must be smart.
Shawn Pfunder: What's the most impactful media you've read or watched or listened to this year?
Rachel Happe: So I have two and they're somewhat related and they're about the attention economy. And the first one, Ed Zitron wrote an article called They're Looting the Internet. Yeah. And it's about, it's funny. Cause at the beginning of the internet, I was like, it's gonna rub, like everybody was like super hyped about social media.
Rachel Happe: And I'm like, it's gonna revert, but it's the, the coda to some of what's going on right now. And then the other thing I've been reading at the same time, which is, I read interesting things at the same time, and the echoes are interesting, so I've been reading Jenny O'Dell's book, How to Do Nothing, and that's a more philosophical take on it, but both are quite interesting.
Shawn Pfunder: No, love it. I guess your career, I mentioned earlier, you're being an analyst, being an observer, being a listener, but tell us what got you into it. To where you are right now. So yeah, let's start beginning of time all the way to engage organizations.
Rachel Happe: Okay. I, the beginning of time, the most interesting things about that, and I will be brief, are both sets of grandparents, were family farmers in the Midwest, both parents were ministers, so I have Oh, wow.
Rachel Happe: No. Family history of going to work and coming home. Like there was no boundaries there. Like work and life were.
Shawn Pfunder: The same. All the same.
Rachel Happe: I mean there were some bad, like there were events that happened that you went and worked and versus whatever, but it, there wasn't a clean line. And that also meant I grew up in communities that were pretty high functioning 'cause everybody was doing the same thing.
Rachel Happe: They were. Like, blending what was going on. So that's the beginning of time piece. The career piece is much more opportunistic, and at the time, one hop to the next seemed kind of random. I was following what interested me, not planning a career per se, but I will say they all circle on the way people behave.
Rachel Happe: Power, control, ideas and innovation, meaning like that creativity piece, and design, like how can we design things. So that this will work for people, control, power, et cetera.
Shawn Pfunder: Your role as a digital workplace organization, community strategist, tell us more about what that means. And selfishly, I'm super interested in the community aspect of that.
Shawn Pfunder: If you can go into more detail about that.
Rachel Happe: Yeah, I mean, it's a little tough that I ended up here because I used to know a little about a lot of things, now I know a lot about a lot of things, and so I've been a product manager, I've worked in a lot, done a lot of L& D work, I've done a lot of leadership work, I've done a lot of analytical work, so I'm kind of a metrics specialist too, although that's not, like, what I lead with, because For me, metrics is a means to check something, not
Rachel Happe: the sole reason.
Rachel Happe: And I really understand. Human systems and power. Like I, I used to sit in my dad's deacons meetings when I was like six or seven. I have no idea what they were talking about. I don't think I cared. The social dynamics. I was fascinated by the like movement, like how people were like negotiating, getting what they wanted.
Rachel Happe: So that's always just fascinated me.
Shawn Pfunder: You could sense that when you were seven, when you're like in those meetings.
Rachel Happe: Yeah, that really is what fascinates me is just watching how people interact and be like, How do you think this is gonna end up? And I studied international relations in college, which was all about power, right?
Rachel Happe: It wasn't domestic politics. It was like, how do you negotiate that power? So that's really at the heart of it. And then. You talk about the digital workplace and people think it's constrained to the superficial. Again, we think we have control over this. If we just design a workflow, we're done.
Shawn Pfunder: Everything will be fine.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rachel Happe: It'll be fine. And I'm like, I don't think you understand how people work. It'll be fine if it aligns with all the power dynamics, but that will change as soon as you add a new person to the team or like, so, you know, it's not that static. And at the same time, we, we're spending less and less money training and giving managers Groups of people that they can actually really connect and build relationships with.
Rachel Happe: So all the managers who should be helping others navigate all of those dynamics don't have the time either because they don't have budget for reflection or discussion or patience or any of those things that people need. So it's a deceptively complex thing to do well. And most people who work in the space, especially like on the digital transformation side of things, they're like, well, if we just have the systems and design the right workflow and our job is done.
Rachel Happe: Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Reflection, discussion, and patience. That's so great. Like they don't have budget for reflection, discussion, and patience. In order to, yeah, that's fascinating. Cause when you talk about power and then you talk about that, those two things together, my mind immediately goes to the, I guess the question is power going to exist no matter what, does it depend on, I don't know, like, are we looking for noble leaders or is it, we're thinking about it the wrong way because power oftentimes pushes aside the patience to reflection and discussion.
Rachel Happe: So here's my. Take on the whole thing and it took a bizarrely long time to see this. And then once I saw it, I was like, of course, that's the problem in our organizations, we have mechanistic and financial systems and we have a human system, we manage it all like it's a mechanistic system. And so the reason everybody's frustrated at work is we're like, well, it's a supply chain.
Rachel Happe: It should be logical and linear, and we should be able to control it. And we should get like standardized parts. And I'm like, have you ever been able to predict Anything that anyone on your team is going to do, probably not, unless they're just beat down and they're like, I'm just doing my thing because, and that's not actually what you want, because that's a very disengaged person.
Rachel Happe: And one of the mistakes people make is they're quiet. Everything's great. When somebody is quiet to me, I'm like, something is not, like, something's going on. Like it makes me very nervous when people won't talk to me because I'm like there's something I don't it may not be me But there is something Causing them to not feel okay about saying whatever's on their mind.
Shawn Pfunder: Right, right, right. Cause they're not a cog, I guess. I mean, that's so cliche to say not a cog in a machine. I'm not just a machine. They're not just machines.
Rachel Happe: When you flip it though and come from that workflow perspective and that logical, I'm just going to design this workflow.
Shawn Pfunder: Right.
Rachel Happe: And then you're like, well, if people aren't cogs, How do you think that's going to happen?
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, yeah.
Rachel Happe: You just decided how 500 people are going to do their jobs.
Shawn Pfunder: Right.
Rachel Happe: And you're going to tell them how to do their jobs.
Shawn Pfunder: That's where we see the lip service. Well, executives Seem to get it. And there's lots of literature around this. There's lots of talk around this. And a lot of the professional development or the manager training is about people, people, people, you're our most important aspect.
Shawn Pfunder: We want you to feel engaged. And there's lots of evidence that highly engaged employees just perform, but they make more money for a company. So they know all of this and yet you'd run into this. Here's your workflow. Do what I tell you to do. And even those moments of, it's almost like, uh, like when some CEOs or execs, when they regress.
Shawn Pfunder: Or when they're under stress, they regress and they regress to this like, do what I tell you to do no matter what, which is like the opposite of what they want in the end. You write about toxicity in the workplace. Is that where this basically lies or there's this plus other things that create this toxicity?
Rachel Happe: So what I think is going on, I've often said that like denial is our national pastime in America. Yeah. Right? Like, we like to say a lot of things, but what we
Rachel Happe: do is not actually any of those. In the workplace, you get an added reinforcement for denial, which is this. People are not on the balance sheet as assets, only liabilities.
Rachel Happe: So if you think about the implications of that, the more skill I have, the faster I do something, the bigger the liability I am, the more likely I am to get laid off. Because at the end of the day, Executives are managing the organization, senior executives are managing the organizations by their spreadsheets.
Rachel Happe: If on the other hand, knowledge and trust to social skills was quantified as an asset of your organization. employees, we would have to rationalize who has skill and who doesn't.
Shawn Pfunder: Right.
Rachel Happe: But because we don't do that, it's easy to ignore, right? And it's not that people's intent is to screw employees, but it's ephemeral when I have very specific numbers in front of me.
Rachel Happe: And because I don't have specific numbers in front of me, for example, if people were assets on the balance sheet, HR would not be a cost center.
Shawn Pfunder: That's true.
Rachel Happe: Right. And so then I could invest to improve people's skill and it wouldn't be increasing risk to the organization. And so that is the biggest nut of the problem.
Rachel Happe: And if you really want to blow your mind. And there's a book by Caitlin Rosenthal called Accounting for Slavery. Well, people used to be on the asset side of the balance sheet when we owned them. And then we didn't own them anymore. And we just wiped that out and forgot about it.
Shawn Pfunder: That is super complex.
Shawn Pfunder: You know, before you said that last little bit about the book, really, all I wanted to know is How do we fix this? And now that you've said that about the book, my brain, you're right.
Rachel Happe: That's how we fix it. Ultimately, that is how we fix it. And actually, it's funny because for years I've been like mulling on like, And actually a lot of the work I was doing in community was calculating the value of community.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. How are you going to calculate that? I mean, within an organization. Yeah.
Rachel Happe: I have an ROI model for that, but I got back to the bigger organizational balance sheet issues. One morning I was doing something and I was like, why do I keep beating my head against a brick wall? Like everybody's like, what are you talking about?
Rachel Happe: Like, that's impossible. That's not like, I've had this conversation. With accounting experts. And they're like, it's too complicated. And I'm like, yeah, but we amortize software. What the heck is that? Like, of course you have to make assumptions, right? Like it's not ever going to be claimed because whatever.
Rachel Happe: And I was like, why do I keep doing it? And I was like, and the O was I interned back when I was in college for a family friend who was a healthcare economist who changed the way Medicare and Medicaid reimbursed for healthcare procedures. Before that, there had been no rationalization to how doctors got reimbursed.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, interesting.
Rachel Happe: It was just whatever the market would bear.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, whatever the market would bear.
Rachel Happe: Right? So, and because it's an unknowable, how do you judge the quality, like if you're a random patient, like
Shawn Pfunder: Like guessing, like maybe I'll get reimbursed, maybe I have no idea!
Rachel Happe: Right? So, I was just helping process, but he was doing a big benchmarking study, collecting all of this data.
Rachel Happe: And I went back and I looked at it and he had included in there, emotional stress, time for reflection. Right. And I had that in the back of my mind. And of course I went and had lunch with him to pick his brain. He's in his nineties now, he's very old, but he's a brilliant guy. And then I did a little more digging and somebody at a bank in Florida, Finland, I believe Scandia bank had done a calculation and included it into their spreadsheets.
Rachel Happe: So it is possible, but it's a systemic problem, right? Like one company can't, they can do it internally, but it won't matter externally for a public company until the financial world metrics change. So our standards change, but that's the heart of it. That's how you fix everything. There are some other things you can do.
Rachel Happe: At other levels to improve things.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, you've got the, you've got the ROI, you've been able to see this stuff, there's ways to measure it. I guess, I'm wondering, in your experience, you've worked with a lot of executives, you've worked with a lot of companies, and being able to present this stuff, for people that are listening that are within this world, they're with NHR, they're leaders, or they're executives.
Shawn Pfunder: How do you approach somebody that when they are under stress, they regress to this, like people are liabilities like immediately type of thing. Cause you're right. I understand that has to be more systemic, but how do we start to do that at the like company by company level, at least just try to make that change.
Rachel Happe: That's why I was studying online communities because I wanted to understand what was success, what was the impact of the success and really like, What I was after were two things, a financial ROI model.
Shawn Pfunder: Right.
Rachel Happe: And I wanted, this is not quite the right, it's how I thought about it, but it's not the right term, but I wanted to know the half life of like, when do communities get to financial zero and how can you project their financial growth, their growth in general, but.
Rachel Happe: The financial growth of them.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: And once I had done that at the community round table, I stayed for another couple of years, but I'm like, I did what I came to do here. Now I want to go like, do the next thing. But what I will say is in communities, It's all about engagement, right? That's how people think about success.
Rachel Happe: Are people engaged? Every organization is a community as well. It's a community of employees. It's an ecosystem of communities, right? It's not just one, but nested communities. It's a network. There used to be this idea that you were inactive, you were active, or you were proactively engaged.
Shawn Pfunder: Right, right.
Shawn Pfunder: Right.
Rachel Happe: And what I started doing is breaking that down. So like some of the research I now have like an engagement framework because
Rachel Happe: I'm like, all engagement is not the same and it doesn't have the same value. Certainly inactive has no, like no value. Active and just absorbing does have value. People are learning, but it's not contributing new knowledge.
Rachel Happe: And so I tried to parse that out. And then I was looking, because we were studying communities that were. Being used for a lot of different business objectives.
Rachel Happe: I was looking for a generalized ROI model rather than a very specific for customer support or internal knowledge management or like whatever it was.
Rachel Happe: And so I was like, okay, so the fractal, the pattern that's true of every community. Is it thrives off of people getting answers. So it's a question and a answer. And so I started collecting data on the value of the answers. The average value of an answer in different kinds of communities and the volume of questions and answers, right?
Rachel Happe: And so the thing that most executives don't understand about communities, even online communities, is you have this workflow. If you diagram it out, it has, you know, 20 big questions between the beginning and the end.
Shawn Pfunder: Yep.
Rachel Happe: If you go online and ask those questions, you can improve the cycle time of that workflow, but it's somewhat marginal, meaning executives know how hard it is to change people's behaviors or like whatever.
Rachel Happe: And so they're like, eh. Does this really matter? But what they're not seeing is with online communities, once you have the answer captured, if it's seen by 10 more people that didn't even have to ask the question, it's 10 times the value, right? And so I call that the network value of an answer, right? You had the initial value and then you had the observable value.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: And so I was looking at this and saying, you know, the, the value of an answer is how it's realized in a workflow. How much time can you save? By having the right answer.
Shawn Pfunder: That's right.
Rachel Happe: Or a better answer.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: And then I had a very smart client who had a new community, Heather Ausmus, and she had been there for a year.
Rachel Happe: And so some communities never get off the ground. Like they're always just communications channels, but because she knew what she was doing, that was not the case with this one. And we did a project where. We projected out three curves of how that community was going to grow based on the year of growth she had.
Rachel Happe: So we did aggressive, we did conservative, and we did, like, projected.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah.
Rachel Happe: She calculated actual to projected for two more years. At the end of that time, it was bang on the middle curve.
Shawn Pfunder: Huh. When you mentioned, this is mind blowing to me, that the definition of community, that you brought a very simple one of the people go there to ask questions and they get their questions answered.
Shawn Pfunder: And I'm even thinking about that outside of work. Like I'm thinking like, oh yeah, I'm part of a trail running community. But yeah, that's what we do. We call it, hey, where am I going to go this week? Can somebody recommend better shoes for me? Right. And there's that back and forth. And that more questions doesn't mean That it's working better necessarily because the answers are already there.
Shawn Pfunder: And that's where you're getting the big result from it. This makes so much sense, but your ROI cannot just be lots of people are asking questions. It has to be lots of people are getting answers.
Rachel Happe: So here's the thing. The questions are the most important part, but if answers aren't coming, people will leave.
Shawn Pfunder: They're gone. Yeah.
Rachel Happe: Right. So you don't, you can assume that if people are getting answers,
Shawn Pfunder: Then it's just an echo.
Rachel Happe: And it's not even all the verbalized questions, right? Like I think of growing up in a church. You didn't have an articulated question, like, what is the meaning of life? Like, you didn't walk into church.
Shawn Pfunder: Like, you knew, don't ask that question.
Rachel Happe: So there's a lot going on in communities that isn't just the question and the answer.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: But that's really the consistent thing across communities.
Shawn Pfunder: So you'd say, communities then, I think about it almost like it's like we're organizing, it's like the proletariat uprising, like the community then impacts or affects.
Shawn Pfunder: The leadership in an organization to, so that it's not, Hey, I'm just a, like, I'm actually an asset or we're actually assets instead of.
Rachel Happe: Well, so like what it does now, it's totally like for executives today, you could change none of the governance and you'll get so much more value out of an online community.
Rachel Happe: And it can do so much more because it's not throttled by all the controls, right? You've connected across groups and now you're not, you don't have like a hundred employees across the globe solving the same problem again and again and again, right? Like, so that you don't even need to solve the big problems to get value out of it.
Shawn Pfunder: This naturally leads. For me, and I wish it didn't because I'm kind of tired of talking about it because it's either freaks me out or I think it's overhyped, but it leads to AI and especially in the case of a, in the case of community, is it helpful in the case of community? Is it risky in the case of community?
Shawn Pfunder: And what are those two things? And well, and in the case of an executive going, Hey, do I need you?
Rachel Happe: Do you know why it's not risky to humans?
Shawn Pfunder: Why?
Rachel Happe: Because we're still, we still have this mechanistic system and the human system, and we're still treating humans like machines, right? So, I wrote a post a while back, because I was getting really annoyed reading AI, about how AI could help employees, and it was all like, it can do these 10 tasks for you.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: And I'm like, If that's all we are, like, we should go home. Like, let AI work with AI and they can keep doing tasks and it'll be fabulous, whatever.
Rachel Happe: I'll take a nap. It's the mindset of what we think employees, or people, Value is right again, back to the slave plantation, which is how our organizations are structured and how our mindsets are structured.
Rachel Happe: But the example I use in presentations is diamonds. I'm like, why are diamonds valuable? They're rocks. I have a zillion of them.
Shawn Pfunder: They're rocks.
Rachel Happe: Why are these rocks really valuable? De Beers, De Beers. Made them mean something. You know, who can't make something mean something to somebody else? AI.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: So the value of people is activating other people and value is meaning, right? Value is not that I have a thousand diamonds. If I have no market for a thousand diamonds, It doesn't mean anything.
Rachel Happe: I don't got nothing. Right, and so Because we manage our organizations like mechanistic systems, again, back to, we must be wildly successful.
Rachel Happe: We have all of this stuff. I'm like, did anybody read it? Do they care? Right. Did they do anything? And so like, I go back to it. I was doing some advisory work at one of the biggest consumer package goods companies in the world. Early when I was at the CR and I was sitting there and I was working with some IT people and my client was like, yeah, we went and we did this audit of our, all our intranet pages.
Rachel Happe: And there were like a whole bunch that hadn't been looked at in months, maybe years. And so we deleted 60,000 pages.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: No one noticed.
Shawn Pfunder: No.
Rachel Happe: And so like you swing back to the individual employee perspective of that, who's not drowning in content?
Shawn Pfunder: That's true.
Rachel Happe: Right. One of the things I do with my clients, literally I draft and edit and shape what they're sending out.
Rachel Happe: Because Everybody like we're so obsessed with productive meetings and like having the perfect message and like that we just create volume. I do it. I like it's a human, human nature.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Happe: But I'm like, No one's reading that. Like, we're drowning in information and channels. Like, if you can't answer one little thing quickly for them and emotionally, then it doesn't matter.
Rachel Happe: Nobody's looking at that stuff, even if it's brilliant.
Shawn Pfunder: I think we also get all caught up into that. We're creating content. It makes me feel like I'm earning my paycheck, whether or not the content's going to do anything or not. And so, because if you went to that group of people before you sort of sunsetted all of that content and said, Hey, is this okay to get rid of, there would have been an uprising.
Shawn Pfunder: No, don't get rid of that. No, don't get rid of that.
Rachel Happe: So I have an example of. Of that, I did an internal community strategy for Steelcase, the office furniture company. And they had the opportunity to do an analytics project with one of the local universities. And they looked at successful and unsuccessful projects.
Rachel Happe: And what they found is on the successful ones, They started off with a lot of questions, and it, the questions really phased out very quickly towards the end. The unsuccessful projects, the ones with a bias towards action, we gotta get something done, had very few questions at the beginning, and those questions escalated quite dramatically by the end of the project, right?
Rachel Happe: And it's because when you're more junior, don't have as much confidence in your expertise. You want to demonstrate that you're earning your keep. So you need to show, show that you're doing your job.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: If that problem's already been solved. And you don't solve it well, you're just creating more work. We do that again, and again, and again, and again, and again in organizations.
Rachel Happe: Because that is what's rewarded. That is, like, output. Because we think humans are mechanisms of production, not meaning.
Shawn Pfunder: That's like a, you're like digging holes. Like you said, like, it's just, it's not getting us the results that we want. Like somebody digs a hole in my backyard and then I say, oh, I want to be busy.
Shawn Pfunder: They filled in the hole. And then I go out there and I dig the hole. And maybe I dig it as well as they did. Maybe I don't, but it's just another hole. I dig that again and again. That reminds me of, I don't know why it's, I think it's Ghostbusters at a certain point before they get any ghosts. And there's the receptionist, he's like, do something, William, we're paying for this.
Shawn Pfunder: She's just sitting there doing her nails or whatever, but there's, yeah, nothing to do. You've made me really think about this on an individual level, like understand, I don't want to be too frou frou or light about this, but really understanding your worth. As a human being, as a human contributing to a company, not as a, I really know how to check my email, contributing to a company.
Rachel Happe: And also you don't control your email. It doesn't align with your priorities. I can guarantee you.
Rachel Happe: So there's a great quote that I, ever since I've heard it, I think about a lot. Which is, it's from Annie Dillard and it's how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.
Shawn Pfunder: We are going to be great friends now that you quoted Annie Dillard. That is amazing.
Rachel Happe: I love Annie Dillard. I just reread her Eclipse essay.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh my gosh, you're great. That's wonderful.
Rachel Happe: Yeah. Anyways, so like, I'm going to circle back to the executive. Executives are in denial and what they're doing is managing by spreadsheets. And again, not their fault. They're in the system too. Like they're in a structure that incentivizes this. They are so used to socializing the costs and consolidating the gains that they tell people, Oh, just return to the office.
Rachel Happe: Not understanding that like I did a back of the napkin, stupid calculation. It costs like 25 percent of somebody's compensation to get to the office every day.
Shawn Pfunder: I know.
Rachel Happe: Think through that, right? Like, or they'll be like, I want to, I want you to be back in the office because we need to build relationships.
Rachel Happe: Well, who gets stuck doing all the crap work of building relationships? Usually the women, usually the black women, right? Like the, whoever's lowest on the power totem pole, right? Gets stuck with all of that stuff. Well, if you value it, Invest in it, pay somebody to do that, and then it doesn't matter if you're in the office or online, you have a community manager, you have, like, whatever you want to call it, like, social guru, I don't know, but, like, make that somebody's job if it matters.
Rachel Happe: Don't ask, and I hate in the IT space, we're like, Oh, get some super fans to like do adoption. And I'm like, that's their discretionary time.
Shawn Pfunder: It is.
Rachel Happe: If it's worth it, pay them. I had a client actually once who paid rising experts in the organization to be community managers for communities of practice, and it was on their professional development, and they got hourly billing.
Rachel Happe: Dispensation for that on a weekly basis. That is how you do it.
Shawn Pfunder: I'm in this trap. I don't know if you end up in the same one. And I've kind of mentioned this before where I feel like I've got to be doing something. I've got to be doing something. I've got to be doing something. Instead of the actual human connections.
Shawn Pfunder: And it's funny that you bring up sort of Lois on the totem pole ends up being the people who understand that the best and like the CEOs know they understand that the best. And that is probably one of the most valuable things Within the organization, you're right. I mean, pay them so that we can be successful in this.
Shawn Pfunder: Like it's so, so, so important.
Rachel Happe: Yeah, it's, it is fascinating to me. It's like essential workers during the pandemic. I'm like, if they're essential, why don't they have health care?
Shawn Pfunder: That is so, so hard and complicated, especially right now. Do you get frustrated about this a lot? The drum that you're beating and what you're, the change that you're trying to affect, or are you really optimistic about the future?
Shawn Pfunder: with where we're headed on, on, I guess, valuing humans. I don't want to sound horrible about saying, but just valuing people as people.
Rachel Happe: I go back and forth. There are organizations I work with who are the acknowledged experts in their fields. They're the ones people look up to. They tend to operate Truly around the humans.
Rachel Happe: They are very coherent. Their values show up in the daily interactions, right? Like you can draw a straight line between those two things. They are amazing and very few and far between. What's true of humans is over governing them is not the right answer, right? Like my book is called control is for amateurs for a reason, right?
Rachel Happe: Control is for like systems. That you don't want a plane falling out of the air. That's really good. I like control in that domain, but for people, it just shuts them down. And so you get average out of people and people are amazed. Like they can, like, if you truly reward and enable somebody. They will do things you cannot predict, but
Rachel Happe: are absolutely amazing.
Rachel Happe: I am frustrated on the other hand that, you know, we, Jack Welsh seems to have won the, this is how we manage large organizations and they're just financial instruments. They're not product companies, but no, we're just like, whatever. And I'm working on this book in part because I'm like, I've learned a lot.
Rachel Happe: I've had some amazing clients. Only a handful of them are doing it at a level that matters significantly to the whole organization. People are frustrated because change initiatives. Just fail all the time, or they succeed for a while and then fail, and I'm like, it's cause you haven't changed the fundamental structure of your governance, like, and until you do, like, you're just wasting a lot of money.
Rachel Happe: You're like moving the chess pieces around, but you're not actually playing chess. You're like a two year old with chess pieces, right? Government is being a lot more innovative right now than the private sector.
Shawn Pfunder: Interesting.
Rachel Happe: I don't think they want to hear that.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: But it's true. Some of the global nonprofits are being really innovative, so I'm at the point where I'm like, I'm gonna write this book, and if I can connect with the people who really want this, then great.
Rachel Happe: And if not, I've done my life's work, I've published it, and somebody can find it in a decade or two, and, you know, I'll go off and bake cookies, or I don't know, do something else. I mean, uh, and it's not that I don't have some clients, but like, it's really hard to get up to a level where people have the influence.
Rachel Happe: And actually I've done a lot of work with large organizations in Europe because they value the influence. Humans, right? And so much more of my enterprise work has been for European companies than for American companies, American companies. I tend to go in at a lower level or I go in with it as a kind of a change management on the side, but it's not.
Rachel Happe: Very holistic. It's very like, use this tool.
Shawn Pfunder: This will fix everything. Yeah. Well, you're, you're tapped into what I think and believe. I mean, community just in general, and it gets overused and talked about, but I wish it would get talked about more and there were more details around it. Those are the things that help us live longer.
Shawn Pfunder: Those are the things that help us stay at a company longer. Those are help us to create, like, It's so fundamental to who we are.
Rachel Happe: Well, you know, the other thing, like these organizations that are excellent.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Rachel Happe: Communities determine the floor and the ceiling for your expectations of yourself. If you grow up in a community that's really disconnected, unhealthy, not there for you, you can't see, you can't even imagine what you could be.
Rachel Happe: If you're in a community of just. excellence and support, your vision for yourself, and expectations, then create your reality. Like, if you believe you can do something, you probably can.
Shawn Pfunder: Anything you put your mind to, right, McFly? That's awesome.
Rachel Happe: Well, it's not just that somebody has to validate you. Somebody has to encourage you.
Rachel Happe: You need that emotional piece that we ignore in organizations. And we don't value the emotional piece. And I'm like, it's all the emotional piece.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Well, how do we find you? How do our listeners find you?
Rachel Happe: I'm at EngagedOrgs.com is my business address. I'm Rachel at EngagedOrgs.com if you want to email me.
Rachel Happe: I'm on LinkedIn. I don't know. You know, if you're motivated enough and you know how to spell my last name, you can find me.
Shawn Pfunder: H A P P E. Happe. As in the good kind of beer.
Rachel Happe: Yeah. Yeah.
Shawn Pfunder: Awesome. All right. Well, thanks, Rachel.
Rachel Happe: Thank you so much, Shawn. It was great to chat.