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On this episode, we discuss talent recruitment in a competitive job market — and the ways brands can innovate to stand out.

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How can brands leverage innovation to recruit top-tier talent?

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Discover how TELUS International’s business process consulting experts helped a leading telecommunications company drive improvements in its customer service delivery and efficiency.

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Maximizing profitability in telecom: leveraging customer insight for digital transformation excellence

Discover how knowledge management can boost organizational success. Explore challenges, best practices, trends and more.

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Your customer care agents may be well-trained in your product or service, but are they prepared to handle an emergency? Discover tips for making sure your team is ready for challenging support interactions.

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Bots are a friend to your customer service team, but they’re often seen as a foe. Learn how to change staff mindset and maximize the AI opportunity.

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Discover digital customer experience success stories and insights from leading financial services brands that can be applied across industries.

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Lessons in customer experience from leading banking and financial services brands

Introduction: TELUS International Studios, where customer experience meets digital transformation.

Patrick Haughey: Hello and welcome to TELUS International Studios, the podcast series about world class customer experience and digital technologies and how the two increasingly intersect. I am your host, Patrick Haughey. And in this episode, we deep dive into the critical role that employer-led training and development programs play in employee engagement.

Now, recruiting and retaining top talent has become increasingly difficult in recent years, and the very best employers put an awful lot of time and resources into keeping great team members fulfilled, rewarded and engaged. And it has been proven time and time again that corporate learning and development programs are a very important string to that bow.

So, to talk about why L&D is so effective and how organizations can best introduce powerful programs for their own team members, I'm delighted to be joined by Dan Pontefract, former chief envisioner and chief learning officer at TELUS, and very much still a part of the TELUS and TELUS International family. Dan's passion for this subject and his expertise in it really shine through in this conversation, and I think whether you're already very experienced in this area of employer-led education or if you're really just starting out, you are going to learn a lot from what Dan has to say. So let's get straight to the conversation and Dan starts by talking a little bit about his background in this field and his relationship with TELUS.

Dan Pontefract: I was delighted to be asked to join TELUS in 2008. At that particular point, the organization was looking to make a huge investment in its culture ultimately to, as Darren Entwistle, CEO of TELUS suggests, culture is your competitive advantage. And so, back then our engagement scores, employee engagement scores were kind of hovering around the late or high forties, low fifties.

And so when I joined, with a team of many people committed to sort of furthering the cause, what we did was we basically said, “How do we change the way leaders lead and employees feel cared about, in essence, in order to support the customer?” And so, through that and a myriad of different options and introductions and redefinements of how leaders lead and employees felt cared, we managed to, about four or five years later, get our employee engagement score, just a measure of satisfaction and how people feel morale-wise, up to 87%. And so, as a chief learning officer, as a chief envisioner, being part of that was helping people with collaboration skills.

Like, how do you recognize people? How do people feel as though they have a say, input into decisions? How do you work from anywhere back when there wasn't a pandemic? So all of these bits and bobs, Patrick, kind of formulated this culture that I think has become world-class and certainly organizations around the world looking at it as something that they might want to mimic.

So a wonderful time. We then switched to find ways in which to help other organizations with their own culture issues. And so, the chief envisioner title was a second outpost for me. We created an organization that went to market helping our TELUS clients and customers with their own issues or opportunities. And so, we envisioned, if you will, a better caring place of work for them and worked with them on that. And as much as I left full-time at the end of 2018, what I'm proud to say, Patrick, is I'm still in the TELUS and TI family by virtue of being on sort of a couple of retainer contracts to still support the customers that are out there, so glad to be here today with you to chat a bit about that and where the world is in this management leadership culture structure.

Patrick Haughey: Yeah, well, I'm not surprised you're still part of the family with achieving results like that in terms of employee engagement scores.

But it was actually, I think you may have semi-answered one of the questions I want to ask you, which is the word employee engagement or that phrase employee engagement, I think can sometimes be put into the bucket of those buzz phrases that we hear tossed around quite a lot, probably a bit, maybe a bit like company culture, mission and purpose. Sometimes it feels that they're being talked about by people that maybe don't really understand what they mean, or maybe being talked about because everybody else is talking about it. But I think you summed it up really nicely, maybe you could expand on that a little bit, just how the employee feels. Do they feel listened to? Do they feel part of something? It's probably quite simple at its core.

Dan Pontefract: Indeed it is, and I think it's also fraught with issues. So I don't want to suggest to anyone that I am not listening to my own cognitive biases out there when it comes to employee engagement. It is both a quantitative measurement, so there are organizations that will work with you to assess your employee base numerically, and so it's a Likert scale, and you sort of go through a bunch of questions and typically it's twice a year. But what I'm more interested in, of course, Patrick, is the qualitative anecdotal evidence that does come in those twice a year or hopefully every month type of surveying with your team members and what they're saying about your culture, your team, your leader. You know, how you serve the community, that you're not just serving shareholders, but that the company cares about its total stakeholder composite.

And so when you really come down to it and, I guess, define what employee engagement is, it comes down to: does that employee care about their role, their purpose, their boss, the way in which they are able to create value, who they serve?  And you're right. It's factors like being listened to, able to give input, recognized, professionally developed, empowered, autonomous, an individual able to look at the bigger picture and say, yeah, “I helped us get to the moon. Here was my portion of that mission.” And when the anecdotals and the evidence and the qualitative feedback suggest that the employee, the team member will say good things about the organization and its mission at the barbecue, at the football match, at the ballet, you're winning and you're winning over the hearts and minds of your team members in order to then what?

I mean, it's a business. You still have to think about EBITDA and profitability and revenues and customer satisfaction. So this is not naivete, but it is a measure of crafting a culture in which you can both win over and support that employee’s sense of purpose, their life purpose, but also equally addressing what is the organization's purpose, which is to serve its clients and ultimately, any of its stakeholders.

Patrick Haughey: And before we get into that, sort of the learning element of that, you mentioned a few different ways that it can be grown and employees can become more engaged, and education through the workplace is something that I know is a big part of that and you have a lot of experience in, so we will spend quite a bit of time speaking about that. But to jump back to the fact that you mentioned that this started in 2008, it feels like almost that TELUS may have been slightly ahead of its time in so many ways. Employee engagement is, as they say, so hot right now. For the last two or three years, everything has been about employee engagement, but this was 13 years ago. So is that just my perception that it's being talked about more now, or was this quite early to be focusing so heavily on employee engagement?

Dan Pontefract: Well, sometimes you're lucky and sometimes there's coincidence and I was fortunate to be in the boat of both and the fortune was tagging my wagon, so to say, to the pretty astute and brilliant vision of Darren Entwistle. I mean, anything that he conjures up seems to touch to prescience and so, for him, circa ‘06-’07, he's dramatically changing the way in which he's thinking about how to serve the customer. And so coming in at that time, I think was my luck. And then the coincidence was, of course, me coming into an organization that was supported by Darren.

I'm, I guess you might say, a try things and ask for forgiveness later type of guy. So I had an opportunity to do things that supported employee engagement, I suppose, but in a futuristic almost way. So I'll give you a couple of examples with my CLO hat on.

Typically, and still today in millions of organizations, induction and onboarding is kind of like a two-day class with about a million PowerPoint slides. And you sit down, you have a coffee, maybe a croissant, and then you leave after two days and hope for the best. And I didn't think that actually worked. That's certainly not engaging, and that's not allowing the team member to feel wholesome to the choice they just made was to accept a job offer, and then to be part of whatever it is that they've accepted to do.

So, I believe that it's sort of a 90 day induction opportunity, and it starts before day one, i.e., before they start in the halls or online with their team. And so, we created essentially like a scavenger hunt where the employee had a list of things that they had to kind of go do over those 90 days and those 90 days included things like networking, things like finding the values on a wall in their office, things like finding several buddies that they've never met before in different units.

I mean, the list is quite long in a myriad of different things they had to do, but it was all about culture building, was all about recognizing what we were doing and how you might do it differently than our competitor or even another high tech or telecom organization. I even went so far, Patrick, as to, instead of just having face to face, which sounds weird because we're talking now 2009 when this started, we created a virtual world. And the virtual world with avatars, et cetera, was a place in which, over a period of time, within those 90 days, they would meet as their kind of new hire cohort and they would go into this virtual world and actually learn things about TELUS in these big kind of auditoriums and meeting rooms and rooftop decks and looking out at the stars as a team right across Canada, as opposed to just, everyone in Montreal or everyone in Vancouver go in a room for, as I say, 16 hours straight.

So again, back to the question and the point, I was lucky. And then I think there's some coincidence with me being one of those, let's just do it and let's do things that are going to impact and further the cause of how you really got to think about the employee mindset and they don't just want to be a bum in a seat. They don't just want to be a number in an Excel spreadsheet. They want to feel part of something. So do everything you can in whatever it is that you're doing to create such a culture that allows that purpose to be found and thus enacted.

Patrick Haughey: And really interesting. And I hope you took out the IP rights on that virtual world, ‘cause you could really cash in right now, where we're at. It's funny when you look back on that and the virtual nature of it and how natural it feels now, but how new it must've been then. So let’s focus a little bit on that, that element of learning and professional development through learning in a workplace. This is obviously one of the key weapons in your armory, so to speak, when it comes to developing employee engagement, is this one of the things that you found is very effective at making a team member feel more part of the team.

Dan Pontefract: You know, I have always been personally one of those curious souls and whether that's a book, a conference, a person, a website, a course, all of it intrigues me. And that sometimes is my downfall because I might go down the rat hole of learning more than I should about a particular topic. But that's my own, it's my own burden, Patrick.

When you think about it from an organizational perspective, and TELUS Canada has just over 30,000 team members across the country, and when you look at that size, you say to yourself, you can't possibly put everyone in a class every day, can you? But that is still today, as we record in 2021, the mindset of many leaders and organizations that training is an event that you send your people to either the course or the e-learning course, right, so the face-to-face or the e-learning. And it's a bit balderdash to think that way.

So if you break it down and you say, well, what is learning? And you start with that question and you say, well, first of all, it's not just an event, it's not just a course. And you say, well, how does learning occur? Well, learning happens everywhere, not somewhere. Kind of look at that. And you say, okay, well, if learning happens everywhere, how is that learning happening? Well, again, it comes in three real, I guess, basic ways.

There's ways in which we formally learn. I have a bunch of degrees, so that means I must have gone to some universities to be accredited with these degrees. So that must have been a formal learning exchange. Okay, so there's formal learning. There is classroom and e-learning, obviously, Patrick, learning. But then I've always argued, and I’ll, until the day I'm six feet under, state that the more places in which we learn are actually informal and social. So if you kind of think about the triad - formal, informal, social - if we're spending 70, 80-ish, whatever percent of our time, learning in informal and social ways, where is that happening? Well, that's happening in our networks. That's happening on the Twitters and the DMs. That's happening in ways in which that's not necessarily formal. So you could argue that the informal and the social are non-formal types of learning.

So when you start there and then you reeducate both leadership and the employee base, that learning is not just an event, that it happens in formal, informal, social ways, then you get leaders saying, “Well, you know what? You could create a five minute video and send that out to your team and have a discussion about it. Isn't that learning? You could go to a conference, there's formal learning, take back some of the bits that you've learned, and then have a lunch and learn. Isn't that kind of an informal exchange? Why, yes, Dan, it is.” Okay. So, I mean, I could spend hours on this, Patrick, but you get the point, right? As long as you then say, it's not just an event, it's not just e-learning, but that there are a myriad of ways in which to both define and enact what your learning culture is, then, here's the key piece, then you extend that to leadership.

Because leadership is also, funny enough, equal parts formal, informal, and social. So when leaders get off their high horse and melt the Teflon suit that they seem invariably to wear every day to work, they then realize that, well, if learning is equal parts formal, informal, social, then maybe I, as a leader, also have to be equal parts, formal, informal, social. And so, yes, like, Patrick, there's times in which leaders have to make tough decisions. That's formal. Leaders have to approve an expense report. That's formal.

But imagine if they open up their hearts and minds a little more to be more informal and social with the team. What type of learning culture do you think then begins to take shape? One that's open, transparent, collaborative, caring. And now you're talking about culture change. So your question actually opened up two, sadly, so sorry about that. But I wanted to explain that because that is, in essence, a playbook for how other organizations and leaders can look at the “well, what is learning to you?” question. Actually, learning is leadership. Leadership is learning when you unpack it and define it in these formal and formal social ways, then you have yourself the beginnings of culture change.

Patrick Haughey: Yeah, that's that. My question did open up a lot and it's all really interesting and important and relevant because I was going to ask you about the need, like the fact that we all learn in different ways. Some of us love to open a book and devour it cover to cover, but some of us can't stand doing that. And we love to listen to something. We're auditory learners. Then other of us like to view things. So in everything you just said there about the different ways you can sort of bring learning to the workplace, I suppose it's ticking all those different boxes in terms of learning styles, too. It's a variety and it's reaching different people in different ways.

Dan Pontefract: This is exactly it. I mean, I have, I don't know how, but somehow I've written four books and I know in totality now that there have been more audio sales of the books than the written copy. I also know that I have more views on the TED Talks I've delivered than in total audio or written book sales. So I'm aware that people do have these different styles and inklings on how they might want to learn. So if I'm proud enough to know that it is not all about one modality, a guy here who's writing and speaking and thought thinking for a profession, then, again, CLOs or CEOs or COOs, you need to start thinking about what your culture ought to be and how people want to express that or learn or lead or be part of that. And it is going to be different strokes for different folks, as they say.

Patrick Haughey: What I will say to that, to move slightly to the side based on something you said a moment ago, where you have the boss who's very good at the formal stuff, but is not engaging in the informal or the social side of things. But I think sometimes bosses become bosses because they are very good at the formal stuff and actually they're not great at the informal side of stuff. And sometimes when they try, it's just a bit awkward for everyone. And is that a factor and is it something that leaders need to be aware of that, even though they should try the informal side of stuff, but maybe just to recognize sometimes that, it's not you and maybe you shouldn't.

Dan Pontefract: Well, I think Dilbert's made a profession and a career out of that entire situation, and I think that's part of it. And again, this is where senior leaders, and particularly CLOs, CHROs, right? People's chief people officers. I'm hoping that their ears and feet are to the ground, ensuring that you don't have that catastrophe from a people, culture or caring perspective. And I've seen it firsthand.

I'll give you a quick story, a non-TELUS story, but there was an individual who’d been promoted to vice president. And this was circa 2006, prior to TELUS, at another company I worked for, a large multinational, and he's promoted to VP. And a lot of people were like, “Whoa, we hope he doesn't get promoted,” and he gets promoted. And so, sure enough, six months pass. And in my particular role, I was in a learning and engagement role similar to the one I had at TELUS, and I have now had all 12 direct reports reach out to me at one way, shape or form, global role this person had, and say, “Why is this individual, like, I am dying here. What can we do? Can you help me?” And it just came to the point where the executive assistant also reached out to me and said, “I got to leave, Dan. This is not working.” And so, if, however the senior leaders had taken a look at Well, what got you here is not going to get you there type of theory, Patrick, which is you might be really good at numbers or, or driving results, but if you are completely devoid in the human empathy and compassion and engagement and caring trait or DNA traits, then what that, that notion of driving results, and if you're a director or manager and you got promoted to VP because of that, but you're missing out the other part, you will be found out fast. And in this case this guy eventually got sacked.

Patrick Haughey: Yeah, very good point. And one of the things we are hearing time and time again, particularly in a mid-to-post, well, COVID world is that the leaders who have shone are the ones with empathy. The amount of times I've heard the word empathy, and in the same sentence as leadership, in the last 12 months has been incredible.

Dan Pontefract: Well, let's look a year ago-ish. So, this is a kind of a U.K.-Ireland example. You've no doubt heard of a firm called Sports Direct, and its founder and CEO, we’ll leave his name out, felt that when the pandemic first hit and the U.K. and Ireland went on lockdown, that the workers of the Sport Direct shops were actually considered essential workers because people needed athletic wear in order to survive the pandemic.

And I mean, he got completely roasted because he forgot way even how to spell empathy. And eventually, a week later, he rescinded the order and allowed people to be locked down from home because it's a pandemic. But there's a classic example of like, dude, what are you thinking? It's crazy.

Patrick Haughey: Very good. I remember the story well. Just a couple of things before we move to wrap up. In terms of the types of learning that you outline and the many and varied and multifactorial types of learning, if you apply that principle when you were developing at your learning programs, are you also catering for the different generational differences, I guess the 50 year old guy who's got three kids and has only a certain amount of time outside of work or even energy inside of work in some ways after the day job is done and, you know, the differences between him and the 20 year old girl who's come in bursting with energy and can give 150 percent to everything that is thrown at her. Do those different learning types kind of cater for both in that case?

Dan Pontefract: I’m going to be a bit of a flagrant foul issuer here, and I don't believe in generational divide issues. What I do believe, however, in are human differences. So there are 20 year olds that are completely overwrought by technology and can't keep up as much as there are 78 year olds and vice versa. So to me, in the workplace, what you need to think about are offering up learning in ways that meets that team member at a place in which that they're going to feel comfortable.

I've met scores and scores of 70 plus year olds that are coding, that learned to code, that have taken on that plasticity within the brain and the neurology that confounds many of us in ways in which we thought, well, we didn't expect that. But oh, my gosh, that's fantastic.

So again, I'm not necessarily trying to combat you here, Patrick, but in the organization, rather than generationally looking at it, I look at it as human differences and again, it goes back to your, almost like your topology. What is it that you're providing the organization that meets learners or team members where it most suits them?

And again, back to the examples we've talked about today, it may have to be ways in which, that allow extroverts to talk through their issue, their opportunity, their learning outcome. Introverts may need more self reflection and ways in which to go through material on their own.

Ambiverts may need both. So if you kind of look at it with the extrovert, ambivert, introvert spectrum, and then from their later on experience, okay. Well, maybe some folks can “get it” quicker. Maybe some folks will need a little bit more time. And then you look at modality. Well, some folks will want a combination of your media outposts, right? And some may want just one of the X number, 9, 10 that you've offered. It's all good.

So it's kind of like a quilt rather than a lane in a swim - like, people say, “Stick in your swim lanes and offer it in those swim lanes.” I don't agree. Take out the lanes. Put everyone in the pool, but figure out like what type of PFD is required in order for everyone to float.

Patrick Haughey: Excellent point. Really, really excellent points there. Make perfect sense. Do you ever come across, uh, em, employers and companies that you work with where the person, where there's a bit of a fear about training people up so well that they feel beautifully qualified to leave the company and join a role elsewhere that you've just trained them up for. Can that be a bit of a dilemma for people?

Dan Pontefract: I think it's the best dilemma ever. And the reason being is this: if A) your organization is not investing in your people, be it your core folks or sometimes what are called then the next layer, the high performers, the top 10, different organizations have different nomenclature for it. Where do you stand? Why would you not invest in your people? There's where culture comes in, right?

So if you're investing in your people and you've created this wonderful culture and you have career pathing and promotion opportunities and meaty projects, and maybe you have set up a gig economy inside the organization so that you can have 6 12 month rotations, or sinking their teeth on these meaty, awesome projects that otherwise may allow them real world learning as opposed to just sort of the investment training that we're talking about. That's all culture based opportunity. And what does it do? It builds in retention. So for those that may want to think that we shouldn't invest in these people because we invest in them to a point where they're going to leave. Then that's a lost investment.

Well, I say take the risk, but take the risk with the building of that culture that makes it so difficult for them to want to leave because you've created so many different ways in which for them to feel engaged. It is a yin-yang, not just the yin.

Patrick Haughey: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. If a company is listening now and they haven't a particularly well developed learning program, professional development program, how would you suggest that they make the first steps? Because I'm sure listening to everything you've just described, it might seem like, wow, that's years in the making and God, how are we ever going to even get started on this? So how would you suggest they could start?

Dan Pontefract: Well, I mean, let's - we'll talk about culture and engagement second, but first, when you're kind of looking at the learning side, I would, first of all, look at the budget audit. And that's exactly what I've done twice now in two, like, large CLO roles I've had. You look at the budget.

You say, how are we spending our money right now? So whether that's the investment on the team, whether that's with suppliers and partners, whether that's with technology or often learning teams do not invest in the technology and I say, “Okay, well, there's the pie. How do we best want to use this in that formal and formal social split that I alluded to?”

And then once you kind of say, “Well, here's a general idea. Let's look at this first year, maybe second year,” Right? And then get feedback, iterate, et cetera. Then I go to, I mean, no learning function inside any organization can do it on its own. Let's be clear. And so, then you kind of look at the internal stakeholders. Who else is doing learning in the organization? And everyone's doing learning if we are following the formal and formal social rules, right?

So that means there's probably lots of opportunity in which to partner inside the organization, or at least to make sure that you're partying with rogue groups, if you will, so that everyone is singing from the same choir sheet of what is learning in this organization.

So get the definitions down. Make sure it's systematized so that everyone is following the same narrative, that it's not just all kind of training here, that's a classroom, are you learning? Or, in fact, there are some orgs that kind of think that they're so progressive that they don't have any of that and they just do all the social stuff. Well, that's not good enough either, Patrick.

So again, budget, definitions, reach out to the stakeholders internally, and not centralize, I'm not a fan of that, but I am a fan of redefining to ensure that it's systemic to all employees so it's clear, so that there's one message, that it's “Oh!” So then, act two would be, “Alright, from that investment perspective,” and this is where it really comes in, it's “Who's investing what and what technology and can we be part of that?”

So when a learning team starts investing in the organization's technology and investing the budget, typically that's partnering with the CIO and the tech team there, or maybe a line of business. So I will often, whether I'm consulting or working with an organization in that manner, or as I've mentioned with the TELUS example or the one previous to that, SAP, you walk over to the CIO's door on that team and say, “How can we partner?”

Now, most learning people don't do that. But you should go into partnership with the CIO to say, “I want to invest in the organization's technology. That's how strongly I believe in it. So how do we win here?” Then number three, of three, I guess I'll suggest and stop there, is I would fire your suppliers.

The reason I say fire your suppliers is because they're still living in the anachronistic world of training bums in seats. So, once you've defined everything, looked at your budget, partnered with the CIO, figured out what technologies you want, then welcome in the right suppliers under the white label of your organization, it's called TELUS International, to then supply you side by side with your own team members with the right training through the right formal and formal social means.

You do those three steps, you're going to be eons ahead of every other organization. But then, of course, make sure equally at the same time your CLO team and you are working with whomever else to make sure that the culture and the engagement factors and the criteria we set there are equally done at the same time.

You really can't have one without the other. Learning needs the culture to be that formal, informal, social, collaborative, transparent, open, work from anywhere type of culture to succeed. Otherwise, it sits on its own island of misfit and outcast toys.

Patrick Haughey: It's really clear and really interesting stuff. Um, Dan, I'm about to wrap up, but before I do, I was looking around your excellent website and you can give out the address before we wrap up. And I came across, I'm not sure if it's a short course or what it is, but it really caught my eye. And I think it was something like a course entitled, “You can't manage time. You can only change your behavior” or something along those lines. And because I think particularly in the last year, time management has become incredibly difficult for many of us because we don't have the traditional barriers of walking out the door of work and walking back in the door of work.

There isn't 10 minutes between calls anymore so that you can actually go to a different room. It's now calls back to back. And I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed and feel like they are not managing their time. So I'd love to briefly mention, talk to you about that thing that you mentioned, you can't manage time, ultimately, you can only change your behavior. What did you mean by that?

Dan Pontefract: You are astute and kind at the same time, Patrick. The fact of the matter is we are, prior to the pandemic, frenetic, distracted, and stressed. Essentially, if you recall the Pixar movie “Up”, we’re like the dogs that had the talking piece and we say “Squirrel!” essentially every four seconds.

Then the pandemic hits. And everyone's sent home, and now, because people don't have to commute from wherever to Dublin or from wherever to London, they've got an extra hour, maybe even two hours a day they don't have to be on the trains. And so now all of a sudden they're like, “Oh, we could use that time.”

Both the employee says that, and somehow leaders have suggested that there's more to do now. And because we're in a pandemic and lonely and in lockdown, we're like, “Ah, I’ll just keep working. You know, why worry about my health and fitness and why disengage myself from the laptop. I'll just keep plowing down.” And we've seen, Patrick, what's happened over the last 15 months, the frightening stats of mental health and wellness, physical wellness or unwellness, I guess, and so on. Okay, so here we have now we've layered on prior to the pandemic, that distractedness, that freneticism.

We've got the pandemic. Now we're overburdened with actually more work and COVID-19. What does it all come down to? Leaders, team members both think that we can sort of time manage ourselves and it is the worst phrase, I think, in all of corporate lexicon time management. Yeah, come on. Like you can't manage time. The only thing you really can do is change your behavior that relates to time.

So what are behavior changes? Okay, so can a leader talk with the team about what are the norms that we want to utilize in order to be healthy, i. e. the team norms? So, for example, should we have back to back meetings? That's a great example, Patrick, but let's just say you have to have, Patrick, you have to have back to back meetings. Well, then do the meetings have to be 60 minutes? Maybe they should be 50. And that 10 minute break, or even 45, that 15, 10 minute break allows you to get up and go to the loo, make a latte, just have a brain break, go outside and catch some vitamin D. In Outlook or Google, whatever your calendar is, why do we default to whatever is, like, stop!

So there's one example, you're behaving to the technology and you're not managing time. You're just misbehaving. Now then, what about capacity? Are leaders asking themselves “What's the actual capacity of my team?” Now, here's where time comes in. You and I are equal. We both have 168 hours a week to use. Now, arguably, your organization and mine pay us for 40 of those 168.

Okay, so if you're a leader, have you figured out how many team members you have, multiply that by 40 and with all the effort that's required to do the projects, the day to day, the operations, keep the lights on, whatever you're doing, do you have, if you have 17 members, 280 hours of work figured out? A week from a capacity perspective? That's a behavior. You're changing the behavior of how you're looking at your team, not managing their time, but looking at it behaviorally, “What do we do with 280? And how as a team, can we make sure that we're not overburning the team, pressurizing them, putting them through an inordinate amount of stress?” and so on.

So there's tactics that are actually behavior changes that leaders and team members, both for myself and as a team as a whole, need to take and what I get so disgruntled and as Denise knows, my better half, very grumpy about, when I don't see teams and leaders taking the “time” - pun intended - to change the behavior of how they want to operate. I see it all time. I see the stress. I see the overburdening loads. And then what happens, Patrick, is disengagement ensues, and it's all related back to culture. If you don't care, they'll leave. And I think, I'm not trying to be apocalyptic here, but 2022, if leaders don't figure out for the rest of this year, 2022 is going to be a day of reckoning or a year of reckoning because we haven't figured out how we're supporting our team, whether it's with this behavior of time point or the general relationship to engagement, and you're gonna see a lot of fleeing of team members going to places and leaders whom do.

Patrick Haughey: Yeah. And after all the investment put into those employees with like, what a waste in so many ways. And I think what really strikes me, Dan, not just about what your answer there, but in so many of the ways that you've described how to approach certain things, you've got a really clear sense of process, how these things can be process driven, made into systems, which I think makes it all feel more achievable because a lot of this stuff is quite nebulous, maybe. It's not a spreadsheet, it's humans and trying to kind of marry humans with a process-driven successful approach, I think, makes it feel a lot more achievable and like it can be made into a success. So I'd like to thank you for your time, Dan. Would you like to tell us where people can find more, maybe your website, more about your courses, your books?

Dan Pontefract: Sure. Thank you. First of all, I wanted to thank you for this great discourse. You're deeply thoughtful, so thank you so much. Also, I think you've just given me the idea of a fifth book title, at least. So through this, I loved your line that you just said: it's not just a spreadsheet, they’re humans. I love that.

My last name is sort of hard to spell, but if you want, it's DanPontefract.com. But the book that's most recent is really summarily about caring and that's probably easier, it goes to the same place, but it's LeadCareWin.com and that book is nine very down-to-earth leadership lessons and behaviors. And, as you mentioned, one of them is actually called “stay present” and that's the behavior change versus time management change opportunity of the nine there in the book. So again, thank you so much. Love this. And one day we might even clink glasses in a pub and share a beer.

Patrick Haughey: Wouldn't that be lovely? Wouldn't that be lovely? Well, hopefully soon. Dan Pontefract, previously chief envisioner and chief learning officer at TELUS but very much part of the TELUS and TELUS International family still, and author and leadership strategist too. Thank you so much for your time and we'll catch you soon.

Patrick Haughey: And I hope you really got a lot out of that interview, whether you were already experienced in this whole area of employer-led education, or if you're just starting out, I think Dan's experience and passion and expertise really shone through and I hope you took a lot from it.

That is all we have for you for this episode, we are going to be back very soon with another episode of TELUS International Studios. TELUSInternational.com is the place to go if you want to find more, find out more about the company that brings you this podcast, TELUS International. Take care in the meantime and we'll see you soon.

On this episode of TELUS International Studios, we’re joined by Dan Pontefract, previous Chief Envisioner and Chief Learning Officer at TELUS. Dan launched the TELUS Transformation Office to improve workplace culture and the TELUS MBA program via University of Victoria. He speaks about the purpose of L+D, and how nurturing employees to further develop their skill sets can improve confidence, drive, fulfillment and overall company culture.

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Podcast Banner Dan Pontefract

(Previously recorded as TELUS International Studios) COVID-19 restrictions have greatly impacted higher education, leaving students young and old asking the question: “are traditional degrees even worth it anymore?” This question is especially relevant as more and more organizations are offering training/development programs for team members.

To learn more about TELUS International and our digital CX solutions, contact us today.

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Employers as educators

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Robert Zirk: Brand loyalty isn't what it used to be.

Research from TechSee, a technology partner of TELUS International that provides visual customer experience solutions, shows that more than one in three U.S.-based customers aren't brand loyal and would leave for a competitor if the right opportunity presented itself. And the SAP Emarsys 2023 Customer Loyalty Index found a 14% drop in the number of U.S.-based consumers who considered themselves loyal to one or more brands.

Those numbers might seem alarming at first glance, but they don't mean that loyalty is going away altogether. Today's customers are looking for personalization, speed and convenience, and as technologies like AI continue to be leveraged to enhance the customer experience, this represents an opportunity for brands willing to put in the work to swim against the tide.

So today on Questions for now, we'll ask: What does customer loyalty look like in the age of AI?

Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS International where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

Robert Zirk: Before we get to our big question, we need to start by clarifying that when we're referencing loyalty, we don't mean "loyalty programs" like frequent flyer miles or a freebie after a certain number of purchases. That's a distinction one of our expert guests was keen to emphasize.

Shep Hyken is a keynote speaker, author, host of the Amazing Business Radio podcast and customer experience expert with more than four decades of experience in the field. He views loyalty programs more like incentivized marketing programs. They can be a great tactic to deploy as part of your overall marketing strategy, but shouldn't be confused with the overall concept of customer loyalty.

Shep Hyken: What it really drives, and I love this, is repeat business. Now, my question to the people that do these types of programs is simply this: if we took away the perks and the points, are we strong enough in the experience to make customers still want to do business with us? That's true loyalty.

Robert Zirk: In his book, I'll Be Back: How to Get Customers to Come Back Again and Again, Shep dives deep into the concepts of customer loyalty and retention, and clarifies the difference between repeat customers and loyal customers.

Shep Hyken: Sometimes we think customers are loyal to us because they keep doing business with us, but sometimes it's just easier to do business with us than switch to a different vendor. Sometimes it's, you feel like, "Eh, these sticky solutions make me want to stay. Even though I'm experiencing frustration, I still stay."

So one of the things we want to find out is why does a customer keep coming back? Is it because, if we're just, say, a retail location, is it because I'm closer than my competitor? What happens if a competitor moves one mile closer to my customer or even just a quarter of a mile? Does that mean I'm going to lose the customer because that customer was more interested in convenience? Then they were my store, I just happened to be the more convenient store at the time.

What about price? We advertise low prices. Does that mean the customer is going to go wherever the lowest price is? If that's the case, they're loyal to the price, not the business. Maybe it's somebody inside our business. This happens, especially in the B2B world, where an inside sales rep decides to move to another company and in the process may end up taking customers with them because it turns out that the customers love the rep and it just happens to be where they were working.

So all of these factors need to be considered to understand: why does a customer keep coming back? And are they truly loyal or are they coming back for other reasons?

Robert Zirk: Shep challenges leaders to think about customer loyalty as something that's built one interaction at a time.

Shep Hyken: I did a keynote speech for an organization and we talked about loyalty and I said, "Here's the way I want you to think about it. Think about: 'What am I doing right now as I interact with this customer?'"

At this moment, as the customer interacts with us in any way that they do, to ensure that the next time they do what it is that we sell, they're going to come back and want it from us because of the experience we're giving them right now.

If it's people to people, are we doing all the things that are expected? Are we showing empathy, concern? Are we supportive? Is it an easy experience? Was it easy to reach a person? Was it easy to get an answer? Are the self service options intuitive? Is AI being used to deflect human-to-human interaction, or is it used to support and augment the interaction?

All of these things go toward creating an experience that makes the customer want to come back.

Robert Zirk: In a TELUS International survey, 62% of US-based consumers said if they had to choose between the two, they would prefer a more personalized customer experience over one that takes less time. Furthermore, 55% of respondents said that nothing excuses a bad customer experience.

And while it's important to consider the questions Shep raised from a business perspective, it's also valuable to take a step back and look at how your customers think about loyalty.

To do that, I spoke with Colin Shaw, who's dedicated the last 22 years to helping leaders and brands improve their customer experience. He's the author of seven books, co-host of The Intuitive Customer podcast and among the top 150 business influencers on LinkedIn.

To demonstrate his thesis on loyalty, Colin has a question for you:

Colin Shaw: Who in your life are you loyal to?

Robert Zirk: Consider anything and anyone in your life. Take a second... Okay. Did any of your answers include your partner, family or friends?

Colin Shaw: Absolutely. And that's what everybody answers. Everybody answers family and friends and your family and friends can do things to you that you don't like and that bug you and annoy you, but you still love them and you're loyal to them.

Robert Zirk: So now, Colin has a follow-up question.

Colin Shaw: If I was to turn around and say, "I've got this really great family. They're a lot cheaper to run than your existing family. Would you fancy swapping?"

Robert Zirk: Which... you'd almost certainly say "Absolutely not."

Colin Shaw: And that's the point I'm trying to make is that loyalty, true loyalty, is an emotional attachment. You have an emotional attachment to your family and your friends and they can do things that you don't like. But it's not based upon price. It's not based upon the running costs of the family. All too often, businesses look at loyalty as a transactional thing when it's not.

Robert Zirk: In other words, it's important to remember that loyalty isn't built only on rational decisions, but also emotional connections that are formed through memories.

Colin Shaw: Loyalty means that I have dealt with this company in the past and I am now going to go back to this company. So, by definition, there is a memory. If there was no memory, you wouldn't be loyal. because you wouldn't know that you'd been there and therefore it would be the first time and it's like the first time every time you went to that company.

But you are making a decision based upon the last interaction or the first interaction that you're having with that company. So the really interesting question starts to become how our memory is formed.

Employers as educators

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