340. Meta's management u-turn, trolling A.I and The Great Compliance. PLUS! Does purpose make us work harder? With Bill Yost

13:28Bill Yost:Well, I was going to say that if you've got to butcher the older adage, if you've got an LLM, everything looks like an agent. is this that where like the tech companies, because they're on the cutting edge and they understand what agents can do, they're the first ones to go, oh, we don't need people. We can just replace them with agents.

13:47Al:I mean, possibly. I think there is, of course, an underlying incentive to reduce costs by moving towards agentic stuff vis-a-vis, I don't need a human. I need an agent. That said, I think the reality of what this costs is setting in. I see this across industry, talking to a lot of my peers at other tech companies. We're definitely in the, hey, let's take a hard look at how much money we're spending on tokens era of things right now. About a year ago, it was spend as much money as possible. It doesn't matter. Figure out what this technology can do for us and make us more productive. and there are of course lanes in which it has made us more productive it's not all of the lanes and it's not all of the things and in some instances it's actually way more expensive to do some of these tasks with an llm than it is to just go do it as a human and so these tokens are not getting cheaper over time i mean maybe they're getting cheaper over time i'm not totally sure as they build more data centers and use more water and stuff but there's still a cost over time that is becoming larger and larger on the balance sheet.

14:55Al:And this is something that I think they're going to start looking at heavily in that equation of, well, do we need an agent or a person? It's going to be, well, that agent might actually be more expensive than the person when it's all said and done if we look at what they actually need to do.

15:10Bill Yost:Lee, thoughts?

15:12Leanne:I remember when last summer, we were on, as in summer 25, you and I were on a podcast called The Nerd Journey.

15:20Bill Yost:Oh, yes.

15:21Leanne:and they were asking us about AI and manager layoffs and what we thought and we said exactly the same that it's going to swing back because it just has to the the thing that frustrates me is it's a like you were saying but it's a really easy thing to cut because it's an expensive item on on the balance sheet in terms of salary isn't it having a manager add on to that that managers are completely overstacked in terms of what they have to do as an individual and then manage people on top of that there's not enough time carved out into the majority of middle managers roles to actually manage people effectively and then you add on and the majority of managers aren't trained then it's almost impossible for them to have a really great impact on performance and productivity without having either great mentors around them or just time in the role to kind of learn on your feet so we kind of set them up to fail so when you're looking at an organization that's got an expensive person on salary they're not performing particularly well and the team is all burning out it's easy to blame the manager but removing a bad manager isn't isn't the same as like having no manager do you know what I mean like it's not it's baby with the bath water type thing so I think my frustration is in terms of of meta fine we're we're now acknowledging that we do need management roles within the team alongside AI and individual contributors.

16:46Leanne:But are you going to train them? And are you going to train them properly in the human skills that are going to be needed even more now that they're also managing with AI, things like critical thinking, things like empathy, things like human judgment? If they'd announced that alongside this, I would be applauding Mark Zuckerberg. And overall, I think he's a bit of a twat, but I would be applauding him. So it's kind I'm like, yeah, we all saw it coming. And do you know what? It'll all happen again. Because they probably weren't training them. It'll probably all go horrible again. And so the circle of life continues until the robots take over.

17:19Leanne:Okay, yes.

17:19Bill Yost:Well said, Leanne. Well said. It's like if we flip back 26 years, when you had a company and you put.com on the end of your name, you suddenly were worth 100 times more. Now, then like five years ago, it was like powered by AI and now you're worth 100 times more. And now it's almost like all our managers are AI. It's like these are just fads. They go back. the inflatable slides of the office, they're going to go. Anyway, Bill, that was a very odd link into your article. Bill, what have you seen this week?

17:49Al:So I want to give you both a choice here because I got a sad one and I got a funny one. Or we can do both really, really quickly.

17:56Leanne:I mean, I'd always pick funny, but equally, if sad is, you know, an important message to the world, then.

18:03Bill Yost:Yeah, I mean, I can try and find some sad music to put on the back of this if you want.

18:07Al:All right, let's do this sad one real quick, and then we'll spend a little bit more time on the funny one because I have thoughts on both of them. Love it. So oftentimes, I'll make the cheeky observation at work, capitalism comes for us all. When cost cutting starts to happen or when there's layoffs or just like bad news in the job marketplace or whatever, kind of just, you know, this is capitalism rolling along. And there are certain employee perceptions that I think are very important to follow as we kind of measure where the public consensus is on these different topics, particularly these kind of like rough edge, how should we operate in a business context?

18:56Al:Like RTL would be an example of this, right? And so this article that I have is called The Great Compliance, Workers Back Down as Employers Regain Power in 2026. It's from this website called My Perfect Resume. I did not vet the methodology here, but let's just take it at face value for purposes of the discussion. The key findings here say only 7 % of employees say they would quit outright over a mandatory RTO policy compared to 51 % who said the same thing in January 2025. huge right this is something that people are sitting on and they're like no i will you can't maybe go back to the office i'll move i'll shuffle 51 down to seven year over year i think there's a number of reasons why that might manifest tough job market might be one of them if i was going to paint with a broad brush but just this precipitous drop that i thought was fascinating 74 of workers predict that they will have the same or less bargaining power to demand flexibility in 2026 as they did in 2025.

19:52Again, kind of dire.

19:55Al:46 % expect companies to become stricter about requiring onsite attendance. So the one hallmark of the COVID era that you saw every company doing was this like remote first, everybody can work from home kind of approach. And we're seeing the big wind back of that. This is, again, a pendulum swing, right? This is the same thing as the managers, the kind of number of managers question is, you know, you can go all remote, you can go all in office. The answer is somewhere in between and companies are trying to find the one that skew more towards like, we want you to be as productive as possible. I don't think we're necessarily building for employee experience or engagement anymore.

20:33Al:We're building for productivity. And that's the key decision factor in these return to office policies, at least in my view. And then the last one, the one that makes me sad. 73 % expect employers to expand their use of surveillance tools to enforce accountability. Oh. Yes. As someone who values a lot of autonomy at work and has always been, you know, getting my work done for the decade plus that I've been in the workforce, I don't like the idea of someone just watching me to make sure I'm doing what I've been doing for years. And I think if you need to employ surveillance technology at work, that's an indictment of your hiring process.

21:09Al:Who are you hiring that you need to surveil? Are you really hiring the best people then? I think you just that if you if you are at that late stage, I think you need to back up and take a look. It's kind of the top of funnel here. So that's my sad one. What are you guys's thoughts?

21:23Leanne:That is sad, but so not surprising, which makes me even sadder. Yeah, I think you're right. I think a lot of it is this tough job market, isn't it? And this kind of swing back from from kind of that that near post covid time. what frustrates me as a psychologist is that a really great employee experience is correlated pretty strongly to things like engagement and performance so it's kind of like by not investing in that you're almost making it harder and then when it's harder to get that productivity and that engagement and that that excitement about the work you want to tighten control so then you bring people back in and you start surveilling them and do you know what weird and i'd be interested to there's any studies on this i'm thinking about you know way back to the hawthorne studies in like the 20s 1920s kids not this decade honestly um the 1920s and it basically found that that changing something in the work environment boosted productivity even if the change wasn't positive because our need for attention is so great that can it can result in a quick boost in productivity so my concern would be organizations implementing this surveillance we could hypothesize that there would be a little bump in productivity and performance but i don't see that being sustainable in any way because it comes down to fundamentally we want to be trusted we want to be valued we want autonomy we want flexibility so i think ultimately it'll it'll it'll always swing back again and when it does we thought the great resignation was bad it's gonna be a it's gonna be a carnage

22:57Bill Yost:i believe that what do you think al i mean you two are the experts in this um both got a decade plus experience in this uh whatever you say i totally agree with i just think um from from the slightly cheeky entrepreneurial point of view i'm like if i was if i was being surveilled surveyed

23:16Leanne:surveilled was that is that the right it isn't it should be am i conjugating the verb correctly

23:22Al:I believe it's surveilled, yes.

23:24Bill Yost:If I was being surveilled, then I'd be like, cool, challenge, right. Let's see if I can find a way to get around this. Like Mouse Jigglers. Well, I mean, Mouse Jigglers is like sort of like, this is like the Ford's first car. I'd be like, no, no, no. Let's see, let's see what we can do here. So I'd see that as a bit of a challenge. But then also at the same time, I've been fired more times than I've actually, yeah, I've been fired every time, I think. So I probably, kids, don't do what I did. Don't do what I did. No. So honestly, I've got nothing important or essential or anything to add to this.

23:55Bill Yost:I think YouTube has covered it perfectly.

23:56Leanne:The last thing I'd say is, well, again, what's really frustrating to me is that these organisations, these leaders who are kind of enforcing this on employees to the point where they're now feeling powerless. Do you think that energy is not going to go somewhere else? That they're not going to be investing in the work, like they'll show up and they'll do it and they'll do it just fine. But that's why we're seeing all these side hustles popping up. and you know, it's, you know, you can't hold talent back. They'll find a way, whether it be with you on their own or with someone else.

24:25Al:Oh, what a line. So true. I like that one. Is that the subtitle of the episode? Oh, sure.

24:33Bill Yost:What was it? You can't hold talent back. They'll always find a way. Was that right? Okay, sure.

24:38Leanne:Yeah.

24:40Bill Yost:Put it on the t-shirt.

24:41Leanne:That's totally not the first time I've ever said that.

24:43Al:I said it all the time. I do. Okay, so in lighter news, I'm sure you all are aware of this new big trend of AI interviewers where you're going to talk to an actual AI avatar and engage with that as if you would in a normal human-to-human interaction. And I know it's easy to kind of take a stand on this, but I'm learning personally it's kind of a more nuanced take. Bonnie Dilber is a good voice to follow in the recruiting space on LinkedIn. she posted about how really like this enables them to process a whole lot more resumes than they would otherwise get people through that first round where they do talk to a human, where otherwise they would just be resume screening away because of sheer numbers.

25:27Al:Right. And so in that case, maybe it would make sense to try to do these if you're trying to float as many candidates as possible through through the pipeline. But what I've been particularly enjoying is these like TikTok trends of people who are recording themselves messing with these interviewers, It's just saying ridiculous things. And so the one that just jumped out to me when I was looking at stuff this morning is from Artiverse. Artiverse? I'm not totally sure. Artiverse, what this website is. But this story is, one candidate sends an AI recruiter into confusion. Grandzip, a satirical influencer, launched a faux hallucinated spiel during a job preview with Dana Whitfield, an AI avatar.

26:05Al:Instead of offering clear qualifications, Graham introduced a fictional identity and a stream of disconnected phrases that pushed the virtual recruiter outside its comfort zone. I'm Chick Habersplat, or Chick Bongo for short. And Q3 Pipeline, Salesforce, Kayak Margin, Graham said. The AI bot answered, it's a pleasure to meet you, Chick Bongo, accepting the invented name without questioning the sudden shift in the conversation. Graham continued with another strange credential. Six years of Sprucewood, actually seven if you count Richard. Dana Whitfield translated the statement into a conventional employment history, replying, it sounds like you built up a significant tenure over the last seven years, including your time with Richard at Sprucewood.

26:46Al:This goes on and on and on. I could read this for days. I've gone down the TikTok rabbit hole of watching people filming themselves doing this. And I think this is just such a delightfully unexpected outcome of all of this. Again, two years ago, if you would have said people are going to be trolling AI interviewers and posting it to TikTok, I would have said, what in the world are you talking about? But now this is a very real thing. And you can find this on TikTok, on the internet, and some genuinely funny content out there. And of course, as you guys might surmise, this is right up my alley.

27:18Al:You know, this is perfectly my lane.

27:19Leanne:I love this so much. I'm going to get on TikTok the minute we finish. I did what again is another example of just human creativity and humor and just all the beautiful things that make us human just coming even more to the forefront and i also it also reminds me of did you ever hear bill of that there was some kind of european like band and i want to say it was in like the 80s that recorded a song that was complete gibberish but to to central and

27:49Bill Yost:eastern europeans it sounded like english no youtube it youtube it so he's there and it's a

27:55Leanne:whole like music video and it's like it's one of those words like it kind of makes sense but it makes no sense at all. And I imagine that's how the AI is feeling. Like it kind of makes sense, but I don't get it.

28:05Al:And I will say we're in a very, like the AI interview, they'll do better, right? If you all remember the rocks on pizza era of AI, that was funny. AI is no longer telling us to put rocks on pizza. So like they will close these doors eventually. So I think it's important to recognize when we're in this moment where you can exploit this thing before they close the door and you can exploit it for good, which is making everybody laugh. And I think in a world that has a really tough job market and prospects and economy and you know name it a little laughter is definitely a good thing especially in this specific lane totally agree we're in the we're

28:38Bill Yost:in the will smith eating spaghetti version 0.1 of ai recruitment and yeah in a few short months that it'll be perfect as if as if the man's eating it himself right we're talking of spaghetti and breaks and hoops we're going to take a short break here what i try and do here you see is make the worst link into the break I possibly can with no relevance whatsoever. We'll be back with Truth or Lie. You know what it is. If you don't know what it is, you'll find out in a few seconds. See you in a second.

29:04Leanne:Welcome to the break.

29:05Bill Yost:Yes, my favourite part of the show. These two idiots have stopped talking.

29:09Leanne:Yes, I want to tell you about my new favourite podcast. No, that's a lie. It's my old favourite podcast. I've been on this one for a while. Didn't know where that was going.

29:16Bill Yost:Didn't know where that was going.

29:17Leanne:It is called I Digress. It is hosted by Troy Sandage and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

29:26Bill Yost:Yes, it's got shows that are under 30 minutes and I digress helps eliminate complexity, complications and confusion in your business with frameworks and strategies that achieve scalable and sustainable success. At least that's what it says here.

29:37Leanne:And if you do want to hear a really personal story, go to episode 136. This is Troy's honest account of fatherhood, killing hustle culture and what really matters when you stop performing and start living with intention.

29:50Bill Yost:Listen to I Digress wherever you get your podcasts.

29:53Leanne:That concludes the break.

29:54Bill Yost:Let's return to the scheduled programming.

29:56Leanne:Back to the studio.

30:03Bill Yost:Welcome back. Welcome back. This is our Truth or Lie segment. It's the time of the week we take a popular workplace idea and ask if the research actually backs it up. Leanne's doing it this week. She's been, she does it most weeks. I've had a couple of weeks off. You have. We had it. What a dream. We had Danny in last week and we got someone else in a couple of weeks time. so stay tuned for that this week we're testing the claim that purpose makes people work harder so this is the basic idea if you give someone a reason beyond the paycheck they'll go further try harder put in more they're just going to be a dream employee start off with leanne then we'll go to bill leanne is that true is this have we got any science behind this there's a load of

30:41Leanne:science behind this and i think it's something we've all heard of isn't haven't we that that kind of purpose is the key to productivity. But I do need to kind of talk about what it is that psychologists are testing here because we use slightly different words for things. We do look at purpose, but in this context, what we're really looking at is a sense that your work matters, that your work is meaningful. And we study that a lot as psychologists, like decades of research looking at looking at this and also in terms of work harder what does that mean that's a bit vague for psychologists what do you mean work harder well yes we could talk about things like productivity and performance and we do but i think the key thing here is what we call organizational citizenship behaviors you can always rely on psychologists to be snappy can't you ocbs as they're abbreviated that's technical term for basically going the extra mile helping a colleague who's drowning a little bit maybe volunteering for something outside of your job description um or putting in effort that nobody's tracking nobody even knows that you're doing it but you're going the extra mile um if we talk about working harder like that then it's it's measurable and we do have lots of data so in terms you're with me so far yes yeah with you leanne okay cool so in terms of the argument for that um purpose is good for um for performance and all the good stuff's i want going to start with a large study by a psychologist called Alan and many of his other colleagues.

32:10Leanne:They poured together 44 pieces of research that covered a sample of more than 23 ,000 people. Al, what is that called?

32:18Bill Yost:Meta-analysis, is that right? Beautiful.

32:20Leanne:Yes, it is. Yes, it is. They found that when somebody experiences their work as meaningful, which is basically purpose in action, three things happened. First, they were more satisfied with their job. Second, they were more engaged. day-to-day and third they felt more committed to the organization those three things are what psychologists would deem attitudes so they're how somebody feels so the next question needs to be do those feelings then start to impact how people behave and the answer is basically yes so meaningful work was also linked to these organizational citizenship behaviors so going the extra mile helping colleagues putting in all the all the effort so they did find that there was this kind of chain reaction of events so meaningful work created these positive attitudes these positive attitudes influence behavior yeah yes cool so then we have some other researchers who basically found the same but they look specifically into what the outcome of these extra um mild behaviors were so these ocbs they found that teams were more productive they made fewer errors they needed less management intervention and were in the end more profitable so there's this direct line from how a person experiences meaningful work right through to actual hard business performance

33:45Bill Yost:outcomes nice isn't it good stuff yes it sounds fluffy now anymore does it mean i know i know

33:53Leanne:but psychologists we panic we start to doubt ourselves when we see correlations or things related really really strongly because it's not always that common to see strong correlations between things in behavioral science so we start to panic that we're actually measuring the same thing so for example can we be sure that meaningful work and something like work engagement are two different things or they're the same thing and which one comes first so are we engaged in our work and therefore finding meaningful or do we see the work is meaningful and then engage more

34:27Al:chicken and egg and psychologists obsess about chicken eggs they do they do so they went to

34:33Leanne:answer this question and what they did after some very very clever statistics i simply do not understand they found that meaningful work does in fact come first so it is this chain reaction Meaningful work influences positive attitudes, then work engagement and satisfaction, and then all the lovely behaviours and then the performance outcomes. So it does look as well that this meaningful work can be instigated by somebody like a manager.

35:00Bill Yost:So that's the case for, and I think I'm sold on that so far. Bill, do you think there's going to be a decent case against?

35:08Al:I think you could probably make a decent case against. I will say to all of the research that Leanne was outlining there, I always say my very favorite type of research is the kind that just affirms every single bias under the sun. I know psychologists don't like that, but I like when my biases are confirmed because nothing that Leanne said there was like, wow, that's surprising. Right. Because if I'm going to take the counterfactual to what she was saying or the counterpoint to what she was saying, who is going to like want to wake up every morning and be like, I hate my job. I hate my company.

35:36Al:I don't find the work meaningful. And then go and be a rock star performer in the office. It just seems really unlikely to me. So intuitively, yeah, I'm probably for this argument. And the research does sound compelling. But, you know, I'm still open to hear the against, certainly.

35:53Bill Yost:Okay, Leanne, let's have a go. And then we'll make our decision whether it's right or not in the end.

35:57Leanne:Yeah, all right. And the problem is that sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. So there was a review which is similar to a meta-anarsis in 2023. they pulled together 20 years of organizational research and they found a consistent pattern in what they called the dark side of meaningful work so jobs that score highest on meaning so things they looked at with animal shelter workers firefighters healthcare staff teachers also show some of the highest rates of burnout and compassion fatigue and their explanation was that when someone is deeply committed to the work organizations can use that commitment to justify bad pay, excessive demands, poor conditions, because the worker's own sense of purpose is going to drive them in these OCBs that we talked about to still keep going the extra mile.

36:54There was then a 2020 study using a large Australian survey that basically

37:00Leanne:backed this up. So workers with secure, meaningful jobs had the best outcomes. They were calm, they happy low stress but workers with meaningful and insecure jobs that were sold on purpose particularly in things like gig or temporary work reported high stress and frequently had to hide from their employee and their colleagues just how hard they were finding this and that that mask really had an impact again on their well-being um so yeah this this kind of insecurity was bigger than the kind of purpose was was able to buffer there was another paper in 2017 that gave us a name they called it existential labor um and it's what happens when organizations actively manage meaning and push values and mission on staff to boost motivation um and employees respond And by not kind of feeling this work is meaningful because the conditions within the organisation aren't facilitating or odds or this dissonance or the behaviours aren't backing up the mission that is being pushed.

38:16Leanne:And they basically then saw this as fake and it resulted in disengagement, cynicism, which is a key symptom of burnout and a breakdown in trust. we also see this as well in trauma exposed professions um so slight trigger walking trigger warning i'm going to talk about um sensitive topic here so if you're not in the mood skip forward to 60 seconds um a 2019 study of 151 child abused pediatric clinicians found meaning in their work was actually linked to um to lower burnout and genuinely protective but then there was a separate study of organ and tissue recovery professionals who work is about purpose-driven as it gets really you're literally saving multiple lives they found that actually repeated exposure to death and trauma eroded their sense of identity safety trust and regardless of how meaningful they found the work it didn't stop them from experiencing problems with burnout and well-being um so yeah there is other other studies that look at kind of the ethics behind this and and whether purpose can be used to justify harm in certain professions and organizations um and worth being honest as well about the studies backing the four case um i must point out they were almost entirely self-report surveys taking at one point in time um and they were nearly all samples from Western societies.

39:48Al:This made me reflect on the times in my career where I've experienced burnout. Non-zero, probably less than 20. Don't know how many times I could actually put a pin on it. I think as saddened as I am to say, I think about half of those were self-inflicted in that I found the work so meaningful and I was in this like learning sponge mode where I would be like making dashboards on Saturday night. Nobody was asking me to. I was just like thought it was important work, was super interested in developing my own skill set. And I kind of just like found it fascinating to work on. And that was good for developing myself from a technical skill set capacity.

40:27Al:But I definitely burned myself out unnecessarily because I found the work so both externally and internally meaningful. And so that part, I felt like you were speaking right to my soul there where you were explaining that because I felt this and this does seem to me like it still seems if it's an it's a net good but there's some

40:47Leanne:things you should watch out for no exactly you've nailed it purpose does make people work harder um that is that is true but it does come with a warning so while there is genuine evidence that shows that purpose does increase effort and performance and over years of data um and different different professions like I kind of said you can't have too much of a good thing which I think is your example bill just which is perfectly perfectly demonstrated purpose and meaning is not going to ever replace things like job security fair play fair pay fair treatment it's not going to help you manage your work-life balance it's not going to going to help you set firm boundaries it's going to do the opposite of that and if you are in roles that have high emotional labor or exposure to trauma then this is also really on the organizations to put in the things that are going to support people long term so real systems policies support um yeah you can't just have a sense of purpose and hope it will prevent burnout what we do know is that too much meaning does typically result in burnout excellent well i spell it the excellent that's not excellent

41:58Bill Yost:news but it's i think this is really really interesting and something which i all of us share this we've all been in parts of our lives where we've just gone a little bit too far down a rabbit hole of something we think we care very very very strongly about and i think i almost feel like you have to as a rite of passage you have to ideally earlier in your year when you're a bit more resilient you can bounce back quicker you have to care too much about something and go whoa hold on i should probably learn where my way to stop and not do dashboards on a uh on a saturday night rather than um going out and doing well i was gonna say do more fun things but at the time that's probably the funnest thing you could think of bill wasn't it i really liked that tablo license

42:37Al:at the time just those consulting days were were a vibe and then google as well just when i had interesting problems to solve sometimes those saturday nights are when you really get the quiet time the pings aren't going off no emails are coming through and you just need to like dedicated focus on something that said i have two kids now that's no longer an option my work day is pretty

42:56Bill Yost:much constrained to the work hours very good brilliant thank you my love uh so that that was my lovely and not necessarily my love bill although if you want that if you want that that touched my heart i'm i'm i'm warmed thank you al oh you're welcome my love okay so if you've got your own truth or lie that you're either something you want leanne to cover or you perhaps you want to come and do it yourself have to check check out the show notes there is ways to get in touch we're always open to people and we've had a couple of people come in and we've got some more people in the pipeline so it is time for i'm just reflecting back on my on my link towards the towards the break and i'm a little bit disappointed because as you were interested as you were talking about uh about purpose i was thinking i should have said spaghetti talking spaghetti pastel oego and then gone with that and and i would have been so proud of that but i've already

43:41Leanne:thought of it now i mean that would have been a beautiful beautiful moment but i'm glad you shared it with us so it can still appreciate it.

43:47Bill Yost:I wanted it on tape. I wanted people to understand that I do have a sense of humour, it's just it's slightly good. It's not very good, it's slightly delayed. Okay, on to my favourite time of the week. It's the time for the World Famous Weekly Report where I put your questions to the end, but today I'm not putting questions to the end, I'm putting to Mr. Bill Yost. 35 ,000 people on LinkedIn think he's awesome. Well, 35 ,000 people on LinkedIn follow him. There's probably 135 ,000 people who think he's awesome.

44:11Leanne:Those lurkers. Those lurkers, yeah.

44:12Bill Yost:Yeah, bad for them. Just the best guy in the world. And also, big shout out to his mom, Sharon. Cookiesworth Sharon, I think is the domain. If you are in the US, you're going to go and buy your cookies from there.

44:24Leanne:We'll leave a link in the show notes.

44:25Bill Yost:We will. Bill, are you ready for question number one? Yes, I am. Let's do it. So this one's titled, Can I actually be honest in our engagement survey? The king of engagement services in the room. We could not have picked a better question. In fact, we definitely did pick it because Bill wasn't coming. So, this person writes, My company runs an employee engagement survey asking about culture, managers, job satisfaction, and even whether we're thinking of leaving. They say it's anonymous, but I'm never quite sure how anonymous these things really are. Is anyone actually looking at individual responses behind the scenes?

44:58Bill Yost:I also wonder whether being too honest can come back to bite you. If I'm critical, could that affect how I'm seen for my promotions or pay rises? And if I'm just really positive, does that make me look like someone they don't need to worry about? Bill, I suppose the question we've got here is what actually happens to engagement surveys once we submit? Are they truly anonymous?

45:21Al:I love this question. I know it's been on the mind of every single employee who's ever filled out an engagement survey. The very first thing that I should say before I get into the longer response is no, simply it's not an anonymous survey. You are putting your information into a survey platform or a Google form or however they're capturing that information. at the very least your device IP is there. But if it's a well-run survey, they're also intentionally collecting a lot of information or rather tying your responses into your workday or your HR information system set of records so that they can do more analysis on the results themselves.

45:59Al:Because if you think about a survey, it's not just the company level, it's every manager can get a report and we're gonna do reports for the countries and we're gonna do reports for the functions and we need to cut it up, down, left, right, and center. This means at the end of the day, we need to know who said what on the survey. So when we launch these surveys, it's always under the verbiage of confidential. That's the important distinction here, anonymous versus confidential. I talked to Al about this on our last show. You can go back to whatever number that was if you wanna hear about this in detail.

46:27Al:But for the purposes of this conversation, just know that yes, your answers can, at the end of the day, be tied back to you. But, huge but here. Remember what we're doing when we're collecting an employee engagement survey. We're asking employees to give their honest and truthful feedback at scale, frequently, and optionally. Optionally is the key term here, right? You can say, nope, I'm not doing it. There's no penalty for not doing so. Or at least there shouldn't be if it's a good program. No one should ever, ever, ever feel pressured to fill out an employee engagement survey. That said, I do know this will happen in pockets.

47:06Al:there are people who will try to gain response rates and make a competition. And if their team is at 88 % and other teams at 90, they might start saying, hey, everybody take the survey and things could get weird. Putting that aside, let's just say in general, that shouldn't happen. So the ultimate worst thing that could happen to an employee engagement survey is everyone stops answering it. And we know this to be the case. Both at Google and at Netflix, I've launched, I'm over a dozen employee engagement surveys at this point. And we know that we need to treat that data with the utmost respect and expose just the bare minimum amount that we need for productive analysis and reporting for the business, which means in principle, there are a very few number of people who can actually reach in and identify responses to an individual person.

47:54Al:At Google, I was one of three people who could do that for a long time. And it was me and two other people just like me, I'll be totally honest, we have no interest in what you're saying on the survey. We're just trying to get that freaking thing to the leadership and out the door because it's a big program at the end of the day. And when you've seen the volume of feedback that we've seen, there are no surprises in there, right? And we take great care so that managers, leadership, anybody that's not that core survey team cannot trivially identify you through reportings or other means. If we're doing our job well, you should never be able to get to what an individual said, because we also do not want to, we're employees too.

48:32Al:Like we don't want to set up situations where retaliation could happen or awkward circumstances could result in you just going, you know what? I'm never taking that survey again. Cause that's the ultimate worst thing that can happen for us. I need to go find new work. Cause we're not going to do a survey anymore. If people can't, um, if people refuse to respond to it. And so that's why I like this domain specifically is because it's so optional, right? It's something that's freely given from employees to the business. And so to that end, I would say, take a look at what's called the consent language in your survey before you take it.

49:06Al:It might be buried under a link or it might just be right there before you start the survey. But any survey that went through a legal review will have this language that outlines specifically who and what is handling your data. And using that, I would say, apply your judgment, but also assume good intent. Like these employee engagement teams are doing it because they're honest and they're earnest. And the companies might not like the results, but it's still incumbent on the survey team to report them accurately. So respond freely. And if you are retaliated against in any way or this becomes a challenge, go right to HR.

49:40Al:HR is not going to like this either, I promise you. No, nothing to add.

49:44Leanne:Brilliant. And definitely go and check out Bill's full episode. We'll leave a link in the show notes because you go into it in loads more beautiful detail.

49:50Bill Yost:episode 283 go to truth lives and work.com forward slash 283 and you'll get the full episode there fantastic i knew you were the guy to answer this and we did we did talk about that but lots of other things in the other episode question number two is all about getting tech interviews and someone's asking has it have they completely changed so they say i'm applying for mid-senior roles i've got six plus six years plus experience including several years at manager level good SaaS names on my CV, strong results, an MBA and a decent network. A few years ago, even in a rough market, I could usually get a phone screen call.

50:24Bill Yost:But now I'm tailoring every application. I'm applying early. I'm messaging recruiters. I'm using mutual contacts. I'm getting absolutely nothing back. I've had 30 applications in the last few months and not a single interview. So this person asks you, Bell, is this the new normal for experienced candidates in tech? or is there something that works better?

50:45Al:At first, I want to acknowledge to whoever submitted the question, that fucking sucks. I'm sorry. This is a really tough market. It's got to be frustrating as all get out to be having a strong resume in hand, being confident about that, being able to speak to your abilities and just not even be able to get the phone calls. I think, unfortunately, this is a long tail reality of lots of layoffs in this industry over the past four years. There's just a huge supply demand imbalance. For instance, I posted a role on the employee engagement team in Talent Analytics and Netflix on LinkedIn. And after two or three days, it had to go down because there was like 3 ,000 applications or something more.

51:28Leanne:It was just a lot. It was so many.

51:30Al:Actually, I don't remember the specific number, so don't quote me on it. But it was just a tremendous amount of applications came in. And it was just like, we can't process this. And it's just it's a combination of lots of people are looking for work right now. And I do think there's lots of like AI junk resumes flooding the lane. Like there's definitely fake candidates out there that are happening quite a bit. But assuming the majority of all of these people applying for just one role are like legitimate humans that are just looking for work. Yeah, unfortunately, I think this is the real reality, even for experienced candidates to get around it.

52:03Al:As much as I hate to say it, referrals are probably your best path. if you know anybody who works for that company, try to do it because what I've experienced, at least in tech, the referral will at least get you to the resume screen. You'll still, you could still get screened away. I've seen, I've referred a lot of people who just got screened away at the resume side of things. It's just like, well, fuck that sucks. I thought they were qualified. Um, because you're still up against a very, very big pool of other candidates, but a referral at least kind of guarantees you're going to get eyeballs on the resume.

52:32Al:And from there, it's a little bit more in your control because you can make sure that resume is absolutely perfect and tailored as the question submitter mentioned. I've also seen just just just unconventional ways work on social media now, too. I'm not saying like go out and just like start to, you know, harass companies or whatever and through tagging them or whatnot. But companies are online, too. And if you do some sort of interesting work, we've seen you've we've seen instances where you can get roles or at least gigs out of being able to demonstrate that work in some useful capacity. So your portfolio still matters, I guess is what I'm getting at there is just have the strong portfolio behind the resume.

53:10Al:Try to get a referral if you can. I will say that this is a slippery slope. I know it's enticing to message like every person you're connected to on LinkedIn and ask for a referral. But like I personally try to only really refer people that like I've worked with and can speak to their work capacity because I still like find that there's an element of integrity that we should hold for referrals. so I wouldn't advise just like coldly asking strangers for referrals it could work for you I definitely heard work before but you might just end up turning people off and I know that's that's tough because it's a tough job market and people are going to do everything they can to try to to get a leg up and get employed so I get it excellent advice excellent advice thank you very

53:53Bill Yost:much and yes uh let's hope that everything works out for you because that's uh that's a tough situation to be in Lee thoughts before we go on to the next one just very briefly I've I've coached

54:03Leanne:a few people through layoffs including people from from big tech and one of the things that we talk about a lot is in climates like this when there is such a large pool of candidates and so few vacancies the the challenge we often have is people untangling their work identity and even personal identity from big tech from being a googler from working at netflix from the twitter layoffs that is such an ingrained part of of who you are as a professional and to an extended person because it's it was you know it's like there's a big lofty dream and you managed to achieve it and you've been living it and breathing it and and sometimes there is a point where a bit of this untangling can actually help you look at the market a bit differently in terms of other opportunities that might be out there that maybe aren't in a big tech but will still allow you to do a job that you really enjoy that you find meaningful that's going to use your skills and maybe even a stretch a bit a bit more because you're not kind of got the the kind of corporate resources of big tech so i think if anyone is really struggling and has had a long job search that isn't fruitful i would say this is also a really good time to do some work on on yourself in terms of what you want from your work from your job how that feeds into your your identity and perhaps then it may start to open up um opportunities you hadn't considered previously

55:23Bill Yost:good advice good advice right well just to finish off and round off should we talk about something a little lighter and uh should we talk about whether it's worth posting on linkedin anymore so this person writes says i keep seeing advice that if you want to grow on linkedin you need to post every day or at least several times a week uh but lately it feels completely random you can spend ages writing something useful and disappears while some throwaway posts by a guy with a pirate flag in his name suddenly take off. I'm trying to use LinkedIn properly, not become an influence, just build my network and hopefully create some opportunities.

55:58Bill Yost:So does posting consistently actually matter anymore? Or is it more like commenting personal stories or having a really clear niche? What's most important? We've got the right person in the room to answer this. Bill, talk.

56:12Al:So first I have to say, I started my little LinkedIn crusade punching at the thought leaders and the bland, just performing art LinkedIn posts that people were putting up with their thought leadership and all that nonsense. Recently, I've been trying to promote some stuff that is in the realm of thought leadership, like my live streams at a conference or this personal project that I did around superhero box office data that I wanted to share with people and found myself so freaking mad at the algorithm because those posts just didn't work, like not even for me. Right. And it's just I had this feeling like I got a big following.

56:48Al:I'll just post this and it'll happen. And like, nope, those are just some of my worst performing posts, period. So, yeah, thought leadership is just it's tough right now if you're trying to like actually post like and I and I I punch at the term thought leadership, but I kind of mean this broadly is just like if you're trying to post like helpful industry stuff or tricks about how to do your job or how to handle difficult interactions at work, like stuff that would actually be useful for somebody to read for whatever reason it's just not rewarded with the algorithm at this point in time like i think this the cheap jokes the throwaway stuff memes like they are having their moment on linkedin i thought this would have passed if i'd be totally honest because like a year ago when weird linkedin was popping memes were a thing i'm like how long did that really last on linkedin but like there's still some accounts that do pretty well just posting memes i will dabble in them a handful of times but I typically keep it like in the data analytics space.

57:40Al:I can keep it contextual to my content pillars, but there are accounts who are just reposting memes from Twitter and like doing fine. And that just like seems really strange to me for a network for what LinkedIn purports to be. But to answer the question specifically, like I would advise growing your LinkedIn presence just as a fail-safe mechanism in case something might go wrong at your job or more succinctly having a personal brand that you could lean on if things, if it becomes a rainy day is not going to hurt you. Doing it through posting alone, if you're a small account is going to take a while and it's an uphill battle.

58:18Al:I mean, even it's like a night and day difference now from just 18 months ago when I started of how easy it would be to just like grow an account. It's harder to get followers. It's much harder to get exposure right now. You're fighting in a sea of AI slop that's just creating so much noise that the algorithm sometimes can sort through, but oftentimes struggles with. So I think the answer is actually right there in the question. It's commenting. So I would just look for accounts in your niche, your industry, your field, whatever you're interested in. Turn the double bell notifications on for them.

58:51Al:You go to their profile and you like click it and then you'll get in your notifications every time they post. Go into those posts and engage with them. Leave a thoughtful comment, press the like button. If you really, really like it, press the save button because that functions as a super like for them. And the creators like me really find that helpful when you press that button. But then I think what you'll find doing that over time is you'll grow a community of people because those people will come to your posts too and start to engage. And you'll just find yourself all at once having like a group of people on LinkedIn and you won't feel so alone anymore.

59:25Al:And I think once it feels less alone, it becomes a whole lot easier to just show up and post and be yourself. And so does it matter? Yeah, I think it matters. Like I wouldn't be on this show, period. Leanne saw one of my posts, thought it was funny, or Al saw one of my posts and thought it was funny, connected me with the other one. And like now I've been on the show twice. It has led to tangible opportunities for me and brand partnerships that just straight up paid me money. Like I'll be totally honest. So like there is upsides to doing it, even though it's very difficult in the immediate start of it.

59:58Al:So just find your people, make comments, thoughtful ones. make people laugh every now and again post stuff that you personally find interesting interesting and i think everything else will come out in the wash or maybe i'm just a naive optimist jerk but

1:00:14Bill Yost:you know i'd like to think it's all true and also there's something in this email that says um i'm trying to use it properly not become an influence just build my network and hopefully create some opportunities well why are you worried about followers why are you trying to count followers look at engagement if you do a post and you've got 60 followers but you get 45 likes wow you're doing so much better than some of these people who've got half a million followers and you know as a percentage they'll get 0.5 percent likes leah you're another linkedin queen what do you think

1:00:43Leanne:i'm nowhere near bill's level but i dabble one thing i have definitely found because mine started to kind of have a little gross but about this time last year when linkedin seemed to be having a moment my reach is in the toilet and has been for a few months but my engagement is all right and I think it is because I did exactly what Bill said where I just generally wanted to get to know people and people that made me laugh or laugh or said something I found interesting I was like you're my people I want to know you more so I think now when I look at my LinkedIn post I might not have as many impressions but I'm still getting you know loads of comments from people that I know or people that I've kind of been in their LinkedIn world for a while as well.

1:01:21Leanne:We have met so many cool people through LinkedIn. And when I started LinkedIn, I hated LinkedIn. And I hated it because I was seeing content that I didn't enjoy consuming. I think as much of LinkedIn is kind of training your feed, as Bill said, to kind of request notifications from the people that you do enjoy following. Because if you're enthusiastic by reading content that you're enjoying, it kind of motivates you to create content it motivates you to comment it motivates you to get involved and and one thing i can absolutely guarantee is somebody who is who has done a podcast for four years two episodes a week if you don't enjoy it it's just too freaking hard

1:01:57Al:so find the joy if there's something there and i will say i i do appreciate 35 000 followers big numbers are fun but i truly don't look at that to the degree that i would engagement rates on my post and the community that i'm bringing to the comments like i actually take the most pride in the fun laughs that happen in the comment section of my posts. Oftentimes I'll make comments that are like, as always, the real jokes are in the comments because what they said is arguably funnier than what I posted. And I acknowledge it. You know, I welcome it actually. So I like to think of my comment section as kind of a cross between a town square and a circus.

1:02:33Al:And I just want everybody to have a good time.

1:02:35Bill Yost:There's a guy called Aaron Francis who I think is amazing. And he says to be interesting online, be interesting offline. And I think that's such a great way of looking at it yeah bill bill bill yoss thank you so much for coming on if people want to find out more are you on any social platforms at all linkedin bill yoss with the

1:02:53Al:pirate flag i'm on tiktok i post there occasionally but not very frequently anymore uh and cookies worth sharon.com buy some cookies please yes definitely go and check those websites out check

1:03:03Bill Yost:our show notes uh coming up on thursday we don't know because we're recording this a few days before and i'm not quite sure when it's going out but it will be a really great it's gonna be someone awesome oh it always is always someone apart from that one person you know episode like

1:03:14Leanne:i can't say which episode they weren't very good yeah yeah now everyone's gonna be scrolling back

1:03:19Bill Yost:through and thinking who are they talking about talking about me and if you're that one person then yes we were talking about you okay right so uh if you want to connect with leanne go to linkedin and search for leanne if you want to follow the podcast it's on all over linkedin um and if you want to subscribe leave some comments in if you're on spotify we're enjoying the spotify comments yeah loving them say some stuff and we'll share them with bill and uh i I don't think Bill can comment back. Maybe you can. We'll find a way.

1:03:41Leanne:I think he can. If you're on the Spotify, Bill, I believe you can. Yeah.

1:03:44Bill Yost:Oh, sure. Yeah.

1:03:45Al:Let's have fun in the comment section. I'll see you there.

1:03:47Bill Yost:Brilliant. Anything to add before we say pastel away go?

1:03:55Bill Yost:She's shaking her head. Bill, anything to add before we let you go?

1:03:59Al:Remember that everybody everywhere is just faking it. We all have imposter syndrome. You can figure it out. That's all you leave it on.

1:04:07Bill Yost:Mic drop See you next week Bye