How to build relationships with your employees using the Win-Learn-Change tool

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Episode Summary

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the world had to adapt to a new way of life and work. Remote work has become commonplace, and both companies and employees are facing many new challenges. Mutual trust has become very important, and companies have been looking for ways to drive the engagement of their employees.

Even before the pandemic, so many organizations struggled to hire someone for entry-level positions. But a lot of companies don’t accept retail experience as one of the entry points, even though retail could be great preparation for a job in sales. 

In the new episode of Taking the Lead, Christina Brady welcomes Gianna Scorsone, the Head of North America at Aircall. Christina and Gianna get into why retail is a good starting point for a sales job and discuss the importance of creating more empathy in the workplace.

Guest Profile

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Key Insights

Episode Highlights

Engagement Surveys are Fantastic

“It’s not just rolling out an engagement survey but sharing the results with the entire organization. And then, it’s creating a plan — how we’re going to go about improving some of the opportunities identified — and putting the responsibility and onus on the business leaders, the directors, the managers, and people with teams to also address the results with their teams. So actual feedback, getting more feedback, getting more context, and taking action based on engagement results are really important because that’s going to show that we actually care. It’s going to show that you want to further build that culture where feedback is welcome, appreciated, and used to harness greater results.”

Set Boundaries and Build a Good Relationship with Work

“Don’t text or Slack after a certain hour, and don’t expect your employees to work on the weekends. And if you do, create really clear boundaries around why you expect them to, in certain cases — a client escalation, a massive new deal that we want to close before the end of the quarter. Make sure that people take a vacation. This is vastly important. We know studies show that when people take a vacation, they’re far more productive, they’re able to communicate better, and they’re able to collaborate in a more functional way. So tracking vacation, not to be the police about it, but to make sure people are taking it. […] I’m not a mom, but I see a lot of moms. I saw what my sister was going through, and it was intense. But I also saw the stat, and it was interesting. It was something like, ‘Women found the pandemic to actually be a little bit easier on their workload while fathers found it a lot harder.’ And I think that’s so interesting that it changed this dichotomy a little bit on who is expected to do all of the caretaking, extra work, and homework.”

If You Have Emotions, You Will Have a Healthy Balance

“One of the components to creating boundaries and having that healthy balance is emotion. I think it’s really important to recognize — and this is something that I’ve worked on over the years and need to continue to work on — that I’ve always driven my self-worth through work. My self-worth is attached to my job: having a job; what I’m producing; what I’m doing; and the validation that I receive from it. And it’s very specific to the one function that I’m in or the job that I happen to be at, and it has to be that one, and I can’t fail. It’s a very unhealthy relationship. And it’s only over the last few years that I really started to flip that narrative and say, ‘It is okay. Look at how much experience [I have], and how I built myself up and got to where I am.’ I don’t think that I’m the only one to share this or to feel this way.”