Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): At the ocean for a conversation with a prominent people leader in the UK. So we’re so excited to have Joe Morrison (Guest) with us out of people at the European medical journal. Thanks for joining us Joe and you want to say hi to our listeners.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Hi everybody. It’s from you.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, thank you so much for being here Joe and we want to hear a little bit about Joe’s background. So with the degree here I messed it up with the degree from Wimbledon College in London England and a wealth of experience across sales recruiting and employee experience Joe’s mission is to make the world of work a better place at the European medical journal where Joe serves as the head of people his focus is to create an environment for gold medal winners to thrive and environment where people can be the best version of themselves. Joe uses a unique approach to the employer value proposition to unlock teams’ full potential and drive exceptional results. So we’re really excited to hear your unique approach and just tell us Are you calling in from today, Joe?

Joe Morrison (Guest): So if you said from London there and grew up around the Wimbledon area. We’re talking just off there about how nearly being a ball boy at the Wimbledon tournament. So I kind of know that part of London very well. I wish.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): That is so

Joe Morrison (Guest): We say so called nearly. I’m not sure if that’s cool. But we’re

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Still so far as a tennis fan. I think it’s great.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yeah, I’ve been close to some tennis players once before is about as famous as that gets but yeah, my friend and catching wasn’t as good but yet love the sport kind of a sporty person as well and actually leading on to where I’m working out the European medical journal we talked about that gold medal winning approach. I’ll CEO coincidentally massive sport nut looks performance high performance and Sport and being the best version of yourself is our version of gold medal So helping people each day being the best they can be

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Love that and I think having that kind of sports methodology there or comparison to having a little bit of fun competition can drive some performance in a friendly and exciting way…

Joe Morrison (Guest): That’s it.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): which is pretty cool.

Joe Morrison (Guest): And you don’t look great. Stance to have here because the link between Sport and high performance and work in the business environment is so strong. It’s not for everyone like we get it as people who are in sport and different things. So we do what we can to engage with the wider Workforce, but It does make it easier when you’ve Over in the boat in the same direction analogy or making you’re doing the extra time to achieve your goals and Allergy. They all kind of go hand in hand. So it works quite well.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So easy to really exemplify the vision to everyone right?

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean again we have what we call values Champions here. So people that represent our values and that they’re often people in a sporting world like Kobe Bryant being the epitome of hard-working terms of always being the first person that training working through broken bones to still be one of the best in the world. It’s things like that really tailor that message and…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Right, amazing

Joe Morrison (Guest): Show what it means in another context.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I love that and kind of giving a little background for everyone listening to how we made this connection to have this conversation today Joe and I had previously on LinkedIn which is an awesome platform as most everybody knows to connect with Incredible people all around the globe.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yep.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): But one thing that really caught my eye Joe on your profile was you had the statement about the section. You said I’m utilizing my unique approach to employee value In unlocking teams full potential and driving exceptional results. So we previously had an episode not long ago about the difference between employer value proposition and employee value proposition. And how you showcase the best for the employee and what’s in it for them. So speak to us about your kind of take on that.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yeah. Yeah. I’m more in that employee Camp side of things. Helping people understand what’s important to them is certainly my angle.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

Joe Morrison (Guest): I assume that it started with an exit interview early in my career.

Joe Morrison (Guest): The x is employed, worked in the publishing side of the business and was talking about the sales team and some of the benefits that they had trips to Vegas getting to go different kinds of conferences around the world and all this kind of thing, bear in mind with Central London. It’s not something that happens for everyone. And I said, you want to go to Vegas. Is that something you missed out on? No, absolutely not. I couldn’t think there was anything worse than going to the cross to the other side of world of your sales team, but Look, okay, you’re leaving there’s reason why you leaving but what is your Vegas in that case? What are you looking to get from your career? And they didn’t have an answer. It kind of started that journey and made me realize that there’s a gap between how we or our companies present their offering.

Joe Morrison (Guest): And the reality of what’s actually important in employees that are working there and that’s not just the wider Workforce for that could be what an operations person wants differently from a marketing person a manager might want from a contributor or somebody who’s been with the company five years and looking set for family versus somebody who starting out their career and wants to learn all they want to learn. That’s not to say that people who are starting a family don’t want to teach them to say they’re different examples of different types of people in the workforce. So more specifically I been a fan of EVP had created some EVPs in my previous roles in Recruitment and talent in particular and

Joe Morrison (Guest): Implementing the EBP really helped us understand,…

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): some questions

Joe Morrison (Guest): what is important to those different types of people across the organization and how can we better engage? And actually looking at some exit data after that ABP is showing us that actually we predicted why some of these people might have left our organization and now we’re trying to figure out okay, how can we stop that from happening in the future? How can we find people’s Vegas?

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I love that. something that I think is intriguing about how you’re approaching this. It’s kind of understanding your customer and selling them what they need to solve their problem, but from an employer relationship, so I’m curious if you also have some experience in sales. How have you seen your sales experience tie to this role in leading people and finding your Vegas finding that passion that people have

Joe Morrison (Guest): Mostly for questioning and I don’t know I’m someone who left sales because I wasn’t the best salesperson in the world for a better off suit in a different environment but went to a recruitment agency. It’s out the frying pans and fire. But yeah to me looking back now I realize the skills that I learned there were asking those questions. Not often managers leaders. They don’t ask that question. what’s important to their employees is that we make assumptions far too often. And the more we ask those questions the more we’ll find out it sounds so obvious when you say out loud, but that what I think are the sales techniques to get a true or understanding where your employees are at.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Would you say that it’s the responsibility of the employer to help team members achieve their dreams?

Joe Morrison (Guest): I’d have some notes around this one. Is it responsible? Did you repeat that? Sorry, I’m gonna be blank.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): No, you’re good. Would you say that it’s the responsibility of the employer to help the team members achieve their dreams?

Joe Morrison (Guest): Right, I wouldn’t say it’s the responsibility but they certainly play their part. I think If we can find out what those dreams are first of all, then going back to that point about Arsenal’s questions, understanding what’s important to the employees. First of all, we’ll understand. If those dreams are relevant to the company’s vision, the company’s mission. It is if it is linked or we can find that link then we do play that part us as Leaders us as a people team wherever you are in a business can help use that link and create wins. So, how can we help you help us achieve our goals as a business? For me you have happy employees. And the happiness point that I talk about means that you have more engaging employees and ultimately they’re going to deliver better results because they can see the link between companies goals and hopes and aspirations and their own dreams.

Joe Morrison (Guest): then that’s where the win lies.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And that’s the part of preventing them from leaving too. Right and it prevents

Joe Morrison (Guest): They call it preventing or actually finding the point where we know they’re going to leave and accepting that. So for example, I’m not speaking out here. We’ve got someone in the tea. He’s a real high performer who wants to sell their own fashion business one day. That’s not what we’re doing here as a medical journal. We’re elevating the quality of the network, really not creating a new line of clothing. But here knowing that we’re supporting that employee with strategic decision making financial planning mentorship from a CEO who set up a business and grown as to where we are today. that treats their role like they’re already running their own business and they’re more engaged with the work. They’re showing more of an interest and they’re getting better results. It’s like The challenges we know they’re going to go and we know at some point, but actually we work together and get the best that person and look what when they leave they look back and go back to help me achieve my goals. It’s

Joe Morrison (Guest): So yeah, prevention is the idea if it’s preventable if somebody’s thinking because the free that we deliver is going off before they eat it. We can fix that. But it’s a link for the right reasons and we’ve done all we can while they’re here. That’s a bit right? You’re still finding happiness at work.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I love that. I’ve also seen that type of scenario where there’s open communication between the employee and the manager, representing the company. Hey, I have this long-term career goal that doesn’t align with where the company is going, but I’m aligned with what we’re doing now. What I’ve seen that achieve is, just as you said, greater productivity while they’re there but also a better transition as that person is leaving the right, better hand off of responsibilities and insights and perspective to help.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): The company will be able to move forward in a more productive fashion. I’ve seen people talk about the term employee lifecycle, which I actually don’t like either…

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yeah.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Because I think it’s a mislabeling. We’re not looking at the birth or the death of a human, we’re looking at the employment life cycle and the lifespan of the employment relationship. That’s how I like to look at it and we need to understand that there is a healthy amount of turnover that we actually want. Of course. Sometimes we can get someone to stay for their next chapter of their career growth at the company, but it’s all about alignment, the individual achieving what they and the companies achieving what they want to achieve at the same time if those two things are aligned then everything’s great. But when one side or the other becomes misaligned like the company sees that the employee isn’t, contributing to the goals or the employees that

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): their position at the company isn’t contributing to their career goals. That’s where there should be a change.

Joe Morrison (Guest): yeah, and often the challenges because look I understand that not all employees feel comfortable bringing those ideas like If you’re working in a medical journal, would you naturally feel comfortable about talking about running a fashion business? Probably not naturally. but actually worse if you didn’t tell us about that and you stay in the job where you’re not really passionate and you’re just trying to be happy and pretend you’re passionate about the work you’re doing when your mind is elsewhere. And the productivity could not because they’re a bad performer, a bad person or the wrong person that time. It’s just that they become disengaged and we still lose them and we don’t know why we lost them. Or we keep them and they’re unhappy. It’s like we do that employee life cycle. It does feel like it’s a good old bad.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Exit when sometimes I think it’s more about the right timing exit. But the average life cycle of the employee here in the UK is something that’s less than two years now going back 20 years. It was more than 20 years ago. It’s more like a five to ten year life cycle.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): your character, right?

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yes, I’m saying Yeah yeah, but again, we have to understand that now it’s two years to get the right people when we can help them achieve their goals, and we’d rather they stay five years and their happiness is either goals here. But again, it’s not necessarily A Bad Thing standing the right way and again you plan for their succession.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So you mentioned earlier how it’s important to get that information from your employees to understand what they want. What’s their biggest? And so what process do you guys go through to get that information without making I guess it becomes too personal or getting too deep into their personal lives.

Joe Morrison (Guest): The challenge with that is people’s passions are. really personal by nature so they’re often things that people deeply care about they are going deeper into their personal life. They can offer an extension beyond the workplace. And so it gently puts those nudges in the right direction rather than the big Sledgehammer approach of This is your goal. How are we going to achieve it? We’re gonna do it. I’m revealing a bit more of the onion here. But we do that by helping people get out of that comfort zone. It doesn’t have to go too deep into personal lives to start doing that or stop having a different mindset where people feel more comfortable about leaving their comfort zone.

Joe Morrison (Guest): But I’ll use an extreme example. One day at work I was in the office speaking to our CCO saying that I always wanted to jump out of the plane. I’ve been talking about it for five years and every year I want to do something different and this was the last year something I wanted to do. And he just said look why just did it. I said, that’s before I started making excuses and I’ve got the money in your account because it’s just a day off. So have you got any health reasons? Why can’t I do it? Have you taken risks? Have you got anything where you can’t do it? I had the answers that were not all of that. It’s like going and booking it. I’m gonna do it. bit of coward as I rather than just say yes and book it. Do I shout it out to our Packed office said look I’m jumping up a plane. I’m gonna book it today. Who’s with me?

Joe Morrison (Guest): Policy nine people put their hands up and we went and bonded for and look it was for different reasons. I haven’t seen many companies do that. But that didn’t happen overnight, right so that took conversations that you might have had with people before about personal stories where it means something to them to jump out the plane or It’s been a fear of theirs for 10 years and this is the opportunity to do it. But sometimes it could just be opening that door for people to jump out the play again. For example, we don’t necessarily need everyone’s job at a plane to be successful in the organization or achieve their goals, but we’ve done things. On a smaller scale we had a golden goal task in January.

Joe Morrison (Guest): We printed little cards that said golden goals had a branding on it, left them on a desk and said right down your goal for the next month something you want to achieve could be a personal professional goal Financial goal that you have. It could be part of an annual goal that you’re doing in one month, but write that down and put it up on a wall. such as small tasks that again one of those gentle nudges 30 more employees, but 80 employees here 30 the employees put their goals on the wall. And then the next thing like, I had that goal a year ago. I achieved it by doing this or have you seen this training course, you do online that helps you do that or I’m not buying lunches anymore. I’m gonna bring in my own pack lunch. It’s like just that accountability encouragement and safe space to

Joe Morrison (Guest): to uncover people’s passions and what they really want to achieve again, not going too deep in that scenario makes a huge difference. Some people are still doing them now. We’re in April and some people are still doing those two.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So I like this idea of just taking a piece of paper and this seems so informal and relaxed to get that kind of feedback and be able to have that personal connection with your employees as opposed to doing a formal survey. That’s Anonymous or something like that where you’re trying to get the feedback, but I think that approach is very gentle as he said and it seems like a very smart way to create a culture and environment where people feel connected and where they feel like they’re heard and that you care.

Joe Morrison (Guest): It is an EVP the way we did that was similar. Yeah, we literally took all of our reasons for working. So from Vegas trips to weekly meetings and put them on literally printed cars. I’m quite a visual preschool teacher. A pretty good theme on the table and go. How important is this versus? What’s the impact on this versus how well do we deliver as a company? So it’s basically an engagement survey on a table, but It’s a gentle way of people just literally putting their cards on the table and saying what’s important to them and that we could eliminate the things that they didn’t care about and focus on the things that they did and celebrate the things that he said we do really well and work and the things that they said we didn’t so again, that’s where we start to understand how we can.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Make those gentle changes that make a big difference and improve engagement within the company.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): and this method you guys have a certain Cadence that you try to do this where you pass out these papers and have them posted up. Do you guys do this pretty often or is it a more random thing?

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yes EVP, that’s something we’ve introduced as more frequent. But again it’s a bit like engagement surveys every six months and say an idea but coupled with some of those other smaller I know challenges or other opportunities because again my idea of Engagement is that there’s not one size fits all you do this task and everybody’s engaged will like my Vegas is somebody else’s nightmare.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

Joe Morrison (Guest): It’s like there’s so many different things that make up what engages the workforce. So there’s some that don’t work. There’s some things we’ve tried that people just don’t get on board with but I’d like to have a regular Cadence and as much as possible non-anonymous create a safe space the more times you do things where there’s no.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Nothing goes wrong. No one gets fired. We improve more than we don’t and it becomes easier and easier The More We Do It?

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): You know what? I’m fascinated by this concept. Essentially what you’re doing is you’re unlocking interpersonal relationships within your company. It’s not this super formal process. That’s a mandatory manager to direct report employees. it’s open invitation to everyone to write down their goals their dreams their passions, and if

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Or when there’s some commonalities between peers, maybe they’re in the same team. Maybe they’re in a different department. They’re making stronger and new connections with other individuals in the team over shared interest shared passions and that’s creating also as a byproduct and you can correct me if I’m wrong here, but I would assume it creates as a byproduct greater working efficiency in the organization because there’s trust and friendships that are being strengthened. We’re people inside of a company. We’re not computers that you just upload a program and then click go and it runs right like there has to be some time involved in some communication involving some experience sharing to essentially build these relationships that drive greater productivity and output.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yeah, it’s the difference to me between artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence. the artificial intelligence till they can learn passion and how to unlock passion with a I’m sure look short what happened. It doesn’t replace the motion of intelligence and again passion. It’s a line I said before and I’ll say it again. But passion is contagious. There’s a spark. It’s hard to define. We can’t say all of a sudden that now all of our employees are 10% more passionate. But we’re sharing more of the passion that we already have and that’s the difference. That’s the contagious bit.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I love that. It’s amazing what we can accomplish when we have that passion driving our actions.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yeah, and that’s And I found mine here. Like we say that what’s my Vegas is that Employee Engagement piece? And that was the flip that made me think actually this is what I’m passionate about and it just opened so many doors. Reach it out to someone on the other side of the world about podcasts or whatever. It might be. not so many doors

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I love that. So I’ve got one more kind of digging deeper question for you, Joe. Different individuals as you mentioned have different passions. One person’s passion could be another person’s nightmare. So from a managerial standpoint, how do you balance equality with personalization? So you’re not maybe introducing favoritism by saying? Hey, so it’s over here. You want to jump out of a plane. I’ll jump out of a plane, I can’t do that when there are 500 employees at a company.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Yeah.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): How do you balance the two?

Joe Morrison (Guest): Of course. Again, I think on the one hand more options like variety understand that, Where you haven’t diverse Workforce, If you don’t think you have a diverse Workforce you really do diversity of What people are passionate about could be where that lies?

Joe Morrison (Guest): On the one hand I think having the right level of leadership available for the employees that you have in your Workforce can make a huge difference because again when you start getting 500 600 a thousand plus employees. It’s not easy to just shout in the office as you’ve already said, not easy to shout in the office. Let’s jump out of the plane’s day and Soldier engagement issues. But if there is a group of 20 people doing that in a company of a thousand, that’s one area where engagement is going to improve and they get out. We spoke right at the top of his call, our CEO being a sport now. We understand it for everything sports related in terms of how you achieve your goals. It would just switch people off even applying let alone being engaged when they’re here. And so more variety is the way I’d look at that in terms of How we look at progression I think is one area that has been.

Joe Morrison (Guest): I guess if we are talking about the risk of favoritism when you see people progress in a company. The way we do it here is to have a kind of two problems approach to that. So on the one hand. we’ll do a really clearly defined structure that people What to see their career what to see it Matt’s out from they can see what that ladder looks like. They can see that path, the tree or whatever you want to say and say look if I achieve X I will get to X. And have that opportunity for people to do it. the bit that I don’t think necessarily answers the question in terms of this sin of risk of favoritism or any of those kind of an equitable scenarios happening but to create your own path Opportunity so you’ve got that defined clearly. This is what it is like or I could actually achieve anything.

Joe Morrison (Guest): If I share more if I’m open about what I want to achieve if I can. Demonstrate how it benefits the company goals and the vision of the company.

Joe Morrison (Guest): the piece that I think keeps that all together is values. So for me regardless of your background, your upbringing, your education, your social status, whatever it might be. values that an organization can match the values of Any individual if they’re done, Of course. if they’re set out in first place, it was actually one of the team’s goals here as an example is to be a magician. He’s in the sales team and we know that actually a lot of the skills from Magic are transferable to sales.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Does he magically produce cells? I’m wondering if there’s a

Joe Morrison (Guest): They come up nowhere. But again, it’s like I use that versus somebody who wants to set up a business in fashion. There’s some people who just want to do a really good job being an ant. I’m looking for a team of the best financial accountants. if they don’t necessarily want to be a CEO. They don’t want that but they’re path is to be the best of that. They don’t want to progress, which is probably the wrong thing to do. But again, showing that there are those options telling those stories getting employees to tell those stories who work here rather than just the head of people on a podcast actually get these employees telling those stories and it’s again back to that point about passions and contagiousness.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Hearing somebody who wants to excel in Magic might encourage somebody who wants to excel in finance. It doesn’t have to be that they’re for ways of progressing. I think that’s

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think that makes a lot of sense. I’m balancing, having some options of people to choose of things that could kind of incite some passion or help people identify that within themselves and I think having the right level of leadership like you mentioned is also key you can’t have one manager for a team of 50 people and expect the same level of connection as a rat of one manager to five or something like that, so

Joe Morrison (Guest): It’s where I see the growing pains in the company now and the previous company in particular where we really did scale up at PACE. that it’s more than nicely where the growing pains are when that structure. Getting lost or the values getting lost is another one way, you forget about your values. You just try to fit people in where they care and keep an equity when you just trying to pick people in is completely difficult

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think it’s so great to hear what you’ve done to help your employees clearly Define within themselves and communicate that to you and just to have that Clear Vision for themselves of where they want to be what their goals are that what their vision is what their Vegas is and I think we just so appreciate having you here today. And was there anything else you wanted to add before we wrap up?

Joe Morrison (Guest): yeah, just one thing and I think we did make it clear in this anyway, but that the idea of helping people find their happiness is the difference is that we’re not telling people why they should be happy. We’re helping them find out for themselves. And that’s the bit the more we can lock that. The more engaged people will be because if we start saying you go to Vegas with us, you’ll be happy. That’s where we start getting wrong if we can help people understand what is important to them. That to me is what makes a real difference with happiness engagement results. So I’ll leave it there.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): We’ve experienced that first chance too.

Joe Morrison (Guest): 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): So I agree completely you need to find out what they want and help them achieve that and that care is what helps people want to stay in that environment because one of the top things we see is that people want to stay because of the people they work with and the people that they report to that they feel cared about seen and heard.

Joe Morrison (Guest): That was the top of our EVP. So the most important thing we delivered the most was the people. So again, the other side is we’re leaning into that. They say nice one to lean into when you’re head of people.

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I absolutely love that. Thank you so much Joe. We appreciate all your insights. I think that listeners are gonna find some great things that they can implement in their own employee value propositions that they were working towards and for those employees listening they can help communicate and find out what their vision is. So thank you for all your thoughts today and… Thanks for listening. Please Subscribe and so you don’t miss our future episodes. We have wonderful people. They come and share their insights. Thank you, Joe. Appreciate your time today.

Joe Morrison (Guest): Thanks very much.