89. Announcing Employalty (Joe’s New Book is Here!)

Transcript – Episode 89: Announcing Employalty (Joe’s New Book is Here!)

Joe:
Today’s the day. Get ready BossHeroes, because my first new book in nearly five years is here. And today, you are getting an exclusive sneak peek. That’s right. We’re gonna reveal the title, the cover, and even share an excerpt. It’s happening now on Boss Better Now.

Jamie:
You’re listening to Boss Better Now. This show is sponsored by Joe Mull and Associates. Now here’s your host, speaker, and author, Joe Mull.

Joe:
Welcome back, BossHeroes to the show that aspires to be food for the boss’s soul. I am so very glad to have you joining me today. And this week, in particular, it’s a very special week. This week marks the official reveal of the name and title of my new book. There’s this sort of long pre-launch period that we go into, and this week marks that, and we get to share with the world something that has already consumed my life for the better part of a year.

Joe:
And we thought about the best way to do this on the show, right? We thought, do we do a whole big production? Do we put all sorts of bells and whistles into it? Do we have  special guests? What’s the best way to do this? And eventually, our own intrepid producer, Jamie said, Joe, I think you should just turn on the microphone and talk about the book.

Joe:
And so that’s what we’ve decided to do. I’m gonna tell you about the, the title and the cover and all of that in just a few minutes, but I feel like I owe it to you to, to tell you the very short story about how this book came into the world.

Joe:
This book exists because I was stumped by a question at the end of a podcast interview about a year and a half ago. And it’s funny because I don’t even remember what show it was. I don’t even know that I could go back and find the episode. But the interviewer and I, the podcast host, and I, had just had this really rich conversation about where commitment comes from at work. And this is really what’s at the center of my subject matter expertise. I’ve spent more than 15 years teaching leaders how to be better bosses and what the conditions are that lead people at work to care and try and give it all they’ve got.

Joe:
And so, for more than a half an hour, we really sort of dove into all of the different things that leaders have to get right in order to activate emotional and psychological commitment among employees. And so, as he moved to wrap up his show, he fired off one final question. He said, all right, Joe, let’s get you outta here on this. Let’s put a nice bow on this. Put this in a tidy package for our listeners. In one sentence, where does commitment come from at work? And I went, well, you know, I don’t think I can give it to you in one sentence. You know, as, as we just talked about this whole time, it’s a whole lot of things that we have to get right. And then BossHeroes, I proceeded to recap our entire conversation in the world’s longest run-on sentence, ever recorded on a podcast.

Joe:
I am slightly embarrassed by the word salad that tumbled out of my face when I was doing this interview. Have you ever had one of those experiences where you started talking and you heard yourself talking, but you couldn’t stop talking? That is what happened to me on this particular day. And my answer wasn’t wrong, it just wasn’t concise. And for days afterward, that bothered me. I kept thinking in one sentence, where does commitment come from at work? And I thought, boy, we really do a disservice to leaders, to, to executives, to business owners if we’re not able to answer that question concisely. You know, think about all the things that leaders have to get right in order to get people at work to care and try and give it all they’ve got. It’s almost like you have to memorize a doctoral dissertation’s worth of research in order to really know and understand what gets people engaged at work.

Joe:
And so, I kept thinking about this. I kept thinking we don’t serve organizations and leaders well unless we’re able to communicate a simple, clear, usable framework that tells leaders and business owners exactly what to do to create those conditions at work that lead people to thrive. Boy, is it any wonder we struggle to understand how to turn ordinary people into devoted employees because there are so many things we have to get right? And so, I kept thinking about that question in one sentence. Where does commitment come from at work? And I, I decided that that was a project I needed to tackle. I set out to find the one-sentence answer to that question. And really this required me to marry together several things all at once. Obviously, we have a boatload of social science research that helps us understand what activates commitment at work, what leads people to join an organization, stay long-term, and give it all they’ve got.

Joe:
I also have nearly two decades of experience speaking and teaching on leadership and engagement and retention and working with organizations of, of various sizes and in all sorts of different industries to help them understand how to be the kind of leaders that know how to cultivate commitment. But we also have a lot going on right now in the world in this sort of post-Covid job market, and we’ve talked a lot about that here on the show — about all the forces at work that are influencing hiring and turnover and staffing and retention. And you, if you’ve been listening to this show for any amount of time know that this isn’t a blip that just occurred during and after the pandemic. You’ve heard me talk at length about how we’ve seen voluntary turnover increase really for the last 12 to 13 years here in the United States.

Joe:
And that what’s happening isn’t that people are quitting their job, they’re switching jobs, and more specifically, they’re upgrading and they’re upgrading in pursuit of better quality of life after decades of overwork and and being underpaid and higher degrees of stress and burnout and bad bosses and toxic workplaces and unfulfilling professional responsibilities. And so, all of that had to be synthesized in some way. And so, it took me a while, but I ended up coming up with the one-sentence answer that one sentence took me on a journey that I didn’t expect. I did not have my next book on my radar. And then one day when I got that sentence right, it hit me all at once, this is what I need to do next. It’s what I need to speak on next. It’s my next keynote. It’s the next deep dive training program I do with my clients, and it’s the next book.

Joe:
And once I got the sentence right, I literally sat down at my desk and wrote out a four-page outline for the book that took me on an even cooler journey. The idea, the one sentence became a framework, became a scorecard that employees have internally and that organizations can use to understand how to find and keep devoted employees. I took that framework out to my clients, to companies, and organizations. Spoke about the framework at conferences and at leadership development intensives. Shared it with my audiences for the better part of eight months as I wrote the book, got tremendous feedback from many of you who have seen the framework and that framework ended up becoming this book.

Joe:
The one-sentence answer, by the way, to where does commitment come from at work is that commitment and retention appear when employees get to do their ideal job, doing meaningful work, for a great boss. Every story you have ever heard about why someone took a job or left a job or decided to stay in a job comes down to those three factors. Every piece of research that you will encounter and the research that continues to be released around what’s influencing turnover, retention, and engagement at work comes down to those three factors, ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss. Those three factors make up the framework that I write about in the book, and I go into detail in the book about the dimensions of each of those chapters, each of those factors … you know, things like flexibility and compensation and belonging and trust and purpose and workload.

Joe:
These are all dimensions to the kind of employee experience that we know leads employees to join, stay, care, and try. And when the time came for me to package all of this into a single book under the umbrella of a single idea, I realized what I kept coming back to was this notion that leaders and business owners need to create a more humane employee experience. And what ended up happening is that I made up a word. We know that finding and keeping devoted employees requires a combination of employer loyalty and humanity. If we want employees to commit their whole selves to us, we must demonstrate a commitment to their whole selves. If we want employee loyalty and commitment, companies and leaders must commit to employer loyalty and humanity, or as I call it, Employalty. That’s the title of the new book. Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work.

Joe:
I am so excited about this book because that umbrella idea Employalty gives us a single concept we can hang our hat on. It gives us a conversational way to talk about all the things that we have to get right in a post-Covid world to attract people to our teams or to keep those folks who have been so dedicated and such high performers on our teams. We need to commit to Employalty. We need to commit to a more humane, more personalized employee experience because that we know is what triggers commitment from employees at work. And I’m, I’m resisting the urge to just walk you chapter by chapter through everything that we do in the book. But it’s really divided up into a couple of sections. The whole first section of the book outlines everything that’s going on in the labor market right now and really does shine a light on the things that we’re getting wrong about The Great Resignation.

 Joe:
It goes into depth about dehumanization and how years of treating people, not as whole people, but as a commodity, have resulted in this wave of voluntary turnover. It goes into great detail about some of the experiences we had during the pandemic and the way that they influenced people being braver about wanting to try something new. And then it introduces this framework. It says, if you want to keep top talent and ignite commitment in the new age of work, you have to engineer an employee’s ideal job, doing meaningful work for a great boss. And then each of those factors is a multi-chapter section in the book. There are a lot of things I’m excited about with the book which by the way, is available right now for pre-order. You can pre-order the book. There are three primary places I can direct you to Amazon, Barnes and Noble. And then if you like to support indie bookstores, which I do, you can go to indiebound.org, I n d i e b o u n d.org. The book is listed there. You can order it and it will be sourced through your local independent bookstore.

Joe:
Now, there are a lot of things I am excited about for this book. I am really proud of how deeply researched it is. There are nearly 200 research studies and articles that support many of the assertions in the book, all the data in the book. You know, it’s not enough to make a case for why generous pay, for example, increases loyalty and actually can save a company money. You’ve gotta be able to show that. You’ve gotta be able to back that up with research, and I’m really proud of, of the ways in which we kind of prosecute the case for a more humane employee experience.

Joe:
And in the back of the book, you’re gonna find citations for every single assertion we make, every data point, every quote, it’s sourced, it’s legitimate, and we use that to prove the case. The other thing I’m just so excited about with this book is the framework. In the conversations I’ve had for years with leaders, it really does come down to giving people utility around what we teach. Giving people clear, substantial takeaways that they can go back to their organizations and apply. And when you give people this framework of ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss, and the three dimensions of each of those factors that sit underneath them – you’ve created this sort of nine-dimension scorecard that every leader and every company can use to evaluate what they’re doing well and where they might be falling short in creating the kind of environment that we call a destination workplace.

Joe:
And that’s really one of the big questions that we pose in the book. Are you a departure organization or a destination workplace? Because a destination workplace checks all nine of these boxes on this internal employee scorecard. Think about that. Every single employee in every single company in every single country on earth is walking around every single day with this internal scorecard that determines whether or not they give it all they’ve got at work. Whether they stay, whether they care and try, or whether they start looking elsewhere, or whether they start doing the minimum and going through the motions. Imagine how powerful it would be to understand exactly what’s on that scorecard and to be able to check all the boxes next to it. Imagine the kind of transformation you could create for your organization if you knew the exact buttons to push and levers to pull, to activate the emotional and psychological commitment of the people in your enterprise. Imagine if you knew the exact features and experiences that your company needs to provide to create a line out the door of people looking to apply.

Joe:
That’s what this framework does. That’s what I’m so excited about, is that we really have boiled it down to one sentence. But of course, we go deep in the book, and we not only give folks a framework but there’s a whole chapter at the end about implementation and about the assessment and the training and all the other steps that we need to take to turn our organizations into an employee organization. I am, I am really excited about some of the support we’ve gotten for the book. I’ve gotten some early endorsements on the book that have just taken my breath away. You know, when I think about, you know, I’m just this guy in a corner trying to talk about leadership, and I’ve got this little podcast that people seem to like, and, and when we reached out to some people, some big name people who’ve never heard of me, let’s be honest, they don’t know me … but I reached out to them and I said, Hey, it would really be an honor if you would take a look at this book and the ideas in the book and maybe consider endorsing it. And my goodness, wait, wait until you see some of the people who have endorsed this book. I can’t tell you that yet because that has not all been finalized. But wait till you see who’s on the front cover of this book. I’m just knocked out, wait till you see some of the names on the back cover and, and on the inside. Selfishly, I know I shouldn’t need people who are more accomplished than me to validate my work, but boy, it’s awfully nice.

Joe:
The other thing that I’m excited about, and you know what, scratch that without question. The thing that I am most excited about with this book are the stories. I have always had a love-hate relationship with writing. And a lot of the writing I’ve done in the past has been a little bit academic, right? When you have to try to prove your case for certain things related to HR and business and leadership. You, you’ve worked with a lot of research and numbers and big ideas. The only writing that I have ever really, truly enjoyed was painting pictures for people with words. And I really leaned into that.

Joe:
In this book. I interviewed some incredible people for this book. I interviewed the CEO of a non-profit out on the west coast who was able to find a way to raise the minimum salary for his employees to 70,000 thousand dollars a year, a number that’s almost unheard of in nonprofit sectors. And I tell you the story of how he did it. I share the story of a small practice group in the northeast who overcame a massive hiring shortfall, a staffing shortfall that was crippling their clinics predominantly by changing a job description, reinventing a job description, and then putting some onboarding pieces in place that ended up bringing in more candidates than they ever expected. I share stories from other CEOs. I share stories from both men and women who have gone from awful working circumstances into some tremendous employment situations. One of my favorites is the story of a professor who became a priest.

Joe:
But there’s one story in the book that I thought I would share with you today, maybe to give you a little flavor of what the stories sound like in this book and some of the ideas that we’re talking about. It’s in chapter seven, which focuses on flexibility. It’s not gonna surprise any of you that we have to write about flexibility in the book, right? We know that this is the number one most requested workplace benefit now in the world. And by flexibility, we’re not just talking about remote work. We’re talking about do I have some autonomy? Do I have some choice? Do I have some influence over where and when and how I work? Flexibility is one of the nine dimensions of Employalty. It’s one of the conditions we need to create in order to get people to join, stay, care, and try. It’s one of those nine check marks on that internal scorecard that people have that we have to check if we want them to think of us as a destination workplace. And so, without further ado, I will share with you an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter Seven of Employalty – Chapter Seven: Flexibility.

Joe:
I’ve got an offer for you. Jack Merrill, director of support services for Trover Health System in Madisonville, Kentucky stood before his eight-man HVAC team in the hospital conference room. These men didn’t know why they had been called to this meeting, but they weren’t nervous. Some leaned back in their chairs, others propped their feet, all in heavy treaded work, boots onto the conference room table as a group, they sat with their arms crossed and their hats pulled low. Their worn and stained coveralls in stark contrast to the sterile white walls of the meeting space. When Jack spoke, their friendly chatter quickly stopped. I know we’ve lost a lot of guys to the factories in town. I know you can go work for GE and get paid more. I can’t compete with that. I wish I could pay you more, but I can’t. There is, however, something I can give you here that you can’t get there. I can give you more time. The men in the room stared at their boss waiting to understand how would you like total freedom to decide when you work, how long you work and when you don’t work? How would you like to be able to schedule around other things outside of work, like family time, whenever you want. How would you like to be able to pick upside work for extra money with local contractors anytime you can. He had their full attention. Now, the way I see it, he said, pointing to the list he’d made on the whiteboard behind him. I have to have a hundred percent of this work done by the last day of every month. His list was detailed. This team was responsible for the monthly maintenance of 660 heating, cooling, or refrigeration units in 36 buildings across 12 counties in western Kentucky. The Traver health system included a hospital, dozens of outpatient clinics, and numerous office buildings every month. These men worked in operating rooms, cafeterias, and on building roofs. They maintained MRI and CT scanners in any place where there was heating, or cooling equipment stake regulations, mandated servicing, and documentation monthly without fail. In addition to ongoing maintenance, this team was also responsible for all service calls related to heating, cooling, and refrigeration. Whenever something went on, the fritz members of Jack’s team got a work order, traveled to the site, ordered parts when needed, and made repairs. Most months they could barely keep up. They were chronically short-staffed and relied heavily on overtime to stay on top of the work. Here’s what I propose. Jack told the room, if you complete a hundred percent of the preventative maintenance every month, complete all work orders and make sure we always have at least one person on for coverage, all without me having to manage any of it. I don’t need to know when you’re here and when you’re not schedule-wise, you can do anything you want. You can come and go as you please. Jack, let that last sentence hang in the air. There were no more boots on the table. Now, every man in the room was leaning forward. After a moment of stunned silence, a long-tenured technician asked the question. Everyone else was thinking, what’s the catch? No catch, really? Jack replied, you each gotta average 40 hours a week across the month. You gotta get all of this done with no overtime and you have to manage the whole thing yourselves. No more service calls coming to me. You keep me out of it. The men in the room looked at each other, smiles crept across their faces. One by one, they started to nod. Oh, and one other thing Jack offered. We have to have 100% completion every month. Not 99%, not 99.9% the first time we failed to clear a hundred percent of all maintenance and work order requests in the in a month. This all ends, no excuses. You do whatever it takes. He didn’t know it at the time, but with one conversation, Jack had seated all the ingredients for employee. In the months to come, Jack would witness a complete transformation. That supercharged employee engagement, elevated customer service, saved tens of thousands of dollars for the health system, drew the best talent in the community to open positions, and profoundly altered the way he would lead teams for the rest of his career. Most notably, in the 10 years that followed that meeting, the HVAC team at Trover Health System never once failed to reach full completion of all their work in a single month.

Joe:
That excerpt is the beginning of chapter seven of the book, which goes on to talk about how Jack in great detail created this highly flexible environment for his workforce and the incredible transformation that resulted. It goes on to tell the story of how he applied these principles in nearly every other department in the hospital, and how nearly every time people told him it wasn’t going to work. And then it did. And it goes on to talk about what the ingredients are to that approach and how you can use them as a leader on your own team.

Joe:
So, there you have it, friends, that’s the news Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work can be found by searching my name on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at indiebound.org. I mean, you can also search the word Employalty, but it’s a little tricky to spell.

Joe:
I’m learning that I, I’ve done a couple podcast interviews and media appearances already in early support of the book, and people are tripping over the word I’ve, I’ve had it introduced as employability, not, not quite, it’s Employalty, E -M-P- loyalty, E M P L O Y A L T Y. But it’s probably just easier to look up my name.

Joe:
So go to Amazon, go to Barnes and Noble and type in Joe Mull, and you’ll see it listed there. Now, I will tell you, if you’ve gotten some value out of this podcast over the years, if you’ve found help or support in the BossBetter emails that we’ve sent out, it really would mean a great deal to me if you would pre-order the book. Now, early as we go into this early launch season, it turns out that pre-orders are really quite important. Pre-Orders signal to retailers whether a book should be taken seriously When early pre-orders come in, retailers go, oh, okay, this book might make some noise. Let’s make some room for it on our shelves. And they end up ordering in more copies and giving that book a little bit more attention when deciding what to showcase to their audiences. So, if it, if you wouldn’t mind, go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or indiebound.org and pre-order employee this month. In fact, we’ve decided to do something that I think is kind of cool specifically for people who want to use the book as part of a book club where they work. This has happened a lot with some of my previous books. What we’ve decided to do is create a book club kit. So, if you order 10 copies or more in the month of December or January, we’re gonna give you the book club kit for free.

Joe:
The book club kit includes a kickoff video from me, a robust discussion guide to use with the book in your book club, and an implementation checklist that you can use to follow along and see if you’re actually applying the work that was advocated for in the book. All you have to do is order 10 or more copies and then just send an email to hello@joemull.com and just include some kind of proof of purchase. We don’t care if you just send us a screenshot or a receipt or a confirmation number. We are expecting that most people are gonna operate with integrity around this. So, all you have to do is order 10 copies or more, 20, 30, however many you need for your book club group, and send an email over to hello@joemull.com with some kind of proof of purchase, and we’ll get that book club kit to you with those assets that you can use.

Joe:
All right, friends, that’s the show for this week. Thank you for the privilege of telling you about this project and this journey. And hopefully, this will be a resource that you get as much value out of as possible.

Joe:
Next week on the show we have decided that I am going to pull back the curtain a little bit on a part of this journey that was really trying a few weeks ago. We had to make a, a very high-risk decision about the future of this book. And that wasn’t something that we were ever going to make public because not everybody wants to know how the sausage is made, right? But I’ve alluded to it in one or two places and have had a lot of people who have responded really positively to the story about the choice we made with, with some of the direction of this book. So, we’ve decided that I am going to pull back the curtain and share that story with you on next week’s episode. So, watch this space, make sure you’re subscribed to the show and make sure you tee up that episode for listening next Sunday or next week once it’s released.

Joe:
In the meantime, thanks for listening, and thanks for all that you do to take care of so many.

Jamie:
This show is sponsored by Joe Mull and Associates. Remember, commitment comes from better bosses. Visit joemull.com today.