Culture | Why Company Culture Is the Key to Long-Term Expertise

Brooke Page-Thompson and Lea LaFerla explore why fostering a strong company culture is vital for cultivating long-term expertise. Discover how a positive workplace environment drives employee retention, innovation, and success while creating a foundation for sustainable growth in today’s competitive landscape.

Transcript

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Folks, you are going to love this episode. It is a little bit of a different version for the SCORRCAST today, where I actually interviewed two different guests. We've got LeaLaFerla, who is the president of SCORR Marketing, and Brooke Page-Thompson, who is a partner over at Velocity advisory group. And today's topic is on why company culture is the key to long term expertise, talking about fostering a positive culture and environment inside your organization in the post pandemic world. So I think if you're somebody at any level inside of an organization, whether you are the CEO sitting on the C suite, or you are a doer, you're an executioner at the at the management level, or at the individual level, individual contributor level, you will get a lot out of this in terms of how you can operate to best build the culture and the community that you want inside of your organization. Enjoy. Brooke Page-Thompson, partner at Velocity Advisory Group. We specialize in leadership, development, culture, strategic alignment and executive coaching. And part of why we're so excited to partner with SCOR is a lot of our clients have communication and marketing needs that just is not a fit for what we do, and we're really excited to bring on thought leaders in this space to help us with our clients and just what we do on a day to day basis. Thanks. Brooke, I'm Lea LaFerla. I'm the president of SCORR Marketing, and SCORR Marketing is a full service marketing agency dedicated to the Health Sciences. We're getting ready to celebrate our 20 year anniversary, and in that time, we've served clients across the continuum of drug development, from discovery all the way through commercialization. And I'm really excited to have the opportunity to be on with Brooke today, because, you know, we've definitely seen the challenges of recruitment and retention within our industry, and SCORR as a marketing partner can really help develop out the strategy and the communications around retention, but we can't define the culture of the companies that we're supporting, so being able to have that strategic partner in the velocity group that really can help organizations build culture and retention so that our job as marketers becomes easier to really be authentic in The in the messaging that we're communicating, both internally to employees and externally to clients and potential clients in the industry as a whole. Awesome. Well, I am very excited Leah and Brooke, to have both of you on today to talk about everybody's favorite topic, which is culture. And I think the major question that we're trying to answer today is really why company culture is so important and such an important asset to long term company success. We know that over the last handful of years, especially, culture has become more of a hot button topic. You think about words like the great resignation, you think about retention and recruitment as a major problem, especially as we look at this health science field, you look at clinical research as a whole, that great resignation is something that I see, I feel like, every single day, on LinkedIn and in newsletters on a consistent basis, and really studies are showing and revealing a lack of Unity and understanding around the good clinical practices and how that pertains from the top down, when you're hiring and when you're looking for that top talent. And so we've got a handful of questions here. Why retention? What is happening right now in the clinical research space that makes staff retention such a pressing issue? I just read a study that was released a couple of weeks ago that cited that the life science industry as a whole had a 20% turnover rate, and when you compare that to other sectors, like the financial services or energy sectors, it's 5% higher. And so this is something that we've seen historically. We've known that the demand for CRA s clinical research associates continues to grow, and that we have this shortage of CRA s before the pandemic, that the pandemic only exasperated. We know that one in five research sites have a turnover rate higher than 30% and that scarcity of specialized experience the increase in competition and salary fluctuation make it really more important than ever that companies retain their key employees. Yeah, I love everything Leah brought up here, but I also know been seeing a lot in our clients. You know, a lot of these clinical trial companies were started with two or three people that are. Still in the leadership positions. They're still running the company, and they're not recognizing sometimes, because of the massive growth, they've seen how the culture has changed. And for some of them, they're actually seeing employees are trying to shift the culture into what it needs to be as they get bigger, and there's some retention, or there's some resistance to that, because they want it to be this little, tiny thing that they started, that they're so proud of, but they can't yet see what it looks like with this new group of employees that are coming in. And one of the things we'll talk about, I think, later, is around employees if you're not living your values, if you're not living your culture, once they come inside, they're not going to stay. It's just not part of what they do. They're going to go find another organization that matches what they need. So retention is a big deal because there is this delineation of culture that's starting to take place just because of the massive growth we've seen in the last three years. Yeah, Brooke, I hate, I hate the fact that I'm at this point in my career where sometimes I feel like the old lady in the room, and I talked about like the younger generation of workforces. But I mean, I think that there's that component of it too, right? Like we know that the purpose and the culture of the organization is probably more important to the next generation coming into the workforce than maybe it is to those of us are a little bit older. You've seen that with some of these clients as well. Yeah, there's actually an article that came out a couple weeks ago that said that Gen Zers and some millennials, the the lower part of the millennial group, the the younger part of the millennial group, they actually are defaulting to not having a job now, if they are taking a role that they don't like or they don't find value in, they're just quitting and they're staying home, they're not moving out of their parents houses quite as quickly, and it's just a different mindset because don't feel like they have to and that's a struggle for companies that are in high growth mode, because you're trying to bring this balance of talent, right? You're trying to bring in younger generation to train and upskill them, but you're also trying to bring in expertise, and there's this gap that's starting to happen, because culturally, if they don't like aren't they just going to go, you know, one of the things that I wrote down, Brooke, that you were mentioning, is the living your values, and I think it goes to that millennial and the Gen Z and the different generations, but also, really, anybody is you can't act it anymore. If you're going to say something, you have to be that on a day to day basis. You can't just have it on the wall and say, Oh, that's what we are. You know, you have to believe it. It's a day to day thing and something that you have to really live on a consistent basis. So I think this great starting point for this conversation. Yeah, I completely, wholeheartedly agree. Alec and I was just actually having a conversation with a client who will go unnamed about the fact that you can't just create your mission and vision and values and slap them up in the break room anymore, right? One of the reasons that I love working at SCORR is because we talk about our values. Our values are part of our day to day conversation and drive the decisions that we're making, and I can name all of them, and it's not because they're in a break room somewhere, it's because they really are part of our culture. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. And and a lot of a lot of clients, use values, behaviors, competencies as a hook for candidates that are coming in, right? That's part of the interview cycle. They they get this wonderful experience. They've got this great communication plan around how you're going to be and live when you come join us at this great company you're going to come work for. And if it's not representative within the first day that they're on the job, if there's a disconnect at all, they'll immediately start to question whether or not they've made the right decision. And more and more people are more likely to choose opt out, to just walk away, than to try and stick and make it work, because the message they were given in the recruiting cycle doesn't match the message they're being given once they're internal. And I think you kind of mentioned it there, and I think it's the trends that are happening, you know, and you mentioned the generations. But I think one of the things that we're going to hone in on as we move through these questions is even since the COVID 19 pandemic began, there have been trends that have happened, stopped, restarted, new trends, like, it's three years, and we're changing every 357, months. And so it is difficult, if you aren't constantly thinking about this, to keep up with everything that's happening. Let's jump to looking at Fall, falling retention rates, and kind of trying to understand the connection to a renewed focus on company culture and the workplace environment. And so how is that, you know, the lack of talent, but also the retention rate, how is this all tied and connected together with culture and with the workplace environment, especially with the remote workplace environment, versus maybe the in office environment as well? Yeah, it's a. Great question. I think what we saw, right, wrong or indifferent, COVID gave us an opportunity, and companies were given the chance to expand how they hire, where they hire, what they look for in a talent pool. And now employees expect to have a choice. They expect that you're going to give me the flexibility to work from anywhere, because that's just what we did. And now, if I'm not, we saw that early in 2022 part of the retention issue was there was mandates coming back from the C suite that you have to be in the office four days a week. I have a couple clients who did that, or velocities, had some clients that did that, and the the massive implication it had from a communication standpoint, was massive it. People were threatening to leave immediately because there was no change management around it. There was no prep time to say, we're going to give you three months to figure this out. What do I do with my kids? How am I supposed to get into the office? Now, I sold my car, right? People got rid of, like, natural things that we had because they weren't going into an office anymore. And if they didn't feel like they fit with that, they'd go find somewhere else to work. And so, you know what we're seeing a lot of, and I'm curious if SCORR is as well, is especially on the HR the CHRO side, the people and culture side of things. The last three years, they weren't able to spend any time really thinking about, what is our culture really look like now because of all the policy change that came out with, do you have to require vaccinations? Do you need a mask mandate? Do you have to force people that don't have a vaccination they can't come in the office? Well, then do they still have a job? And HR was constantly fighting with these different scenarios that they didn't know what to do with and what happens you let the soft skill side of things kind of fall to the wayside, and now you've got all these managers and leaders that are like, I don't know what to do with my people. I have no direction. I don't know what our culture is, and I don't know how to align to this. And so that's where we've seen the pull really come recently, is there's this recognition at the C suite that, Yes, times are getting tougher right now, but our culture is really suffering. And then the question gets asked, What do you do if you're a hybrid working environment, and how do you build culture when you're not together? So what is it? How do you even do it? So that's something we're trying to work through with some of our clients right now, too, and Brooke, we're, we're like, seeing the exact same thing, right? You can, I understand both sides of this scenario in the ability to attract great talent by offering this hybrid remote approach. But I also understand, as the leader within an organization that is that way, like, how do you build the culture when you maybe hired somebody remotely that you've never met in person in my 25 years and as a leader and a manager, COVID was the first time that I ever would think of hiring somebody without sitting across the table from them and getting that in person. And so, you know, we work with some of our clients around programs to really focus on that, and there's a way to use the branding and the external messaging to develop out those programs that you know you're communicating on a monthly basis with, like your all hands meeting, where the the CEO and the C suite is talking about and demonstrating, you know, how the brand is applied internally in the culture. And there's lots of fun things that you can do with, you know, swag and giveaways, and just really, you know, if your culture is more of that sort of fun, energetic place to work, we're able to put together some programs. But again, I mean, it is, it is hard to to build that culture when so much of it, historically has been that water cooler talk or that, you know, opportunity to be in person together. And I think the cool thing, you know, not that you're the old lady in the room, because I probably could say the same thing. But, you know, I think the cool thing is, is that we really are at a pivotal moment where some of the old traditional ways of looking at branding, marketing talent are shifting because we now have more capability to do it differently, and the more you start to see the C suite hone in on it has to be this way. We have to do it the way we did it before you're just you're seeing all of a sudden, people are like, but why? Right? So they're asking a lot of really good questions, and it's forcing us to think outside the box. And so I'm really excited to see what 2023 looks like, because I think some really cool, innovative stuff is on its way. We're seeing it with one client. We're running their culture advisory board, and they're doing a massive onboarding of properties. So their culture is literally being defined as they onboard all of these people, and the advisory board is looking for what are the new. Innovative ways to get people aligned when we don't sit across the table from each other, we may never see each other again and and there's, you know, pockets of uniqueness in each of the properties, but yet there's collective energy around the messaging that we use and the brand that they all align to, and the stuff that's come out of the cab has been super cool. So I think this next year, we're going to see that from a lot of our clients. It's really interesting, because one of the sayings that I always say is, like the death of good marketing is that's how we've always done it. And if you apply that here, it kind of lends itself to the same conversation. I think it also is a great segue. You know, what are their hallmarks of a compelling and effective and attractive company culture. And it goes, you know, the first thing that I think of also goes back to that conversation about millennials in the next generation. I think if you think of what made a company attractive in 2000 you know, I think you could see a LinkedIn post every other day about the ping pong tables and the free soda and the foosball tables. But then, as Brooke, you were talking about the remote and the hybrid. You know, for me, when I think of this question, what are the hallmarks of a compelling and attractive company culture? It there's one word for me, and it's trust Right, right then and there that means so much to me as an employee who's in that generation, who has some of that in office and hybrid workspace. But I'm interested, you know, kind of a two part question for both of you here is, what are those hallmarks? And then, are there any that are specific or stand out within the clinical research or within the health science industry as a whole? You know, it's marketing's job to really highlight the uniqueness and the hallmarks within that company culture. I think it really becomes inauthentic, if it's like marketing trying to drive what that is, because then you've got this misalignment to your point about, you know, you know, we may, in the recruiting process say that we have trust and that there's, you know, autonomy in the work that you do, but then when you come and start, and it's like your manager expects that you're at your desk from eight to five every day, and that, I think that's where the that's where we get into these challenges. So I do like what Alex said about trust, and for me, you know, I read a book a number of years ago, pre pandemic, that was all about motivation. And how do you Daniel Pink's theory of motivation, and how did you really get the best out of your employees? And it starts with that autonomy, right? The ability to do the work in a way that is unique and works for you, and that ability to continue to grow and develop, and then the purpose piece of it really pulling it all together. So interested in what you have to think, to say there, what we're seeing, and I'll, I'll get to the clinical trials healthcare space here in just a second. But part of what we've really seen highlighted the last few years around culture is to Alex point, trust is a big one. Um, autonomy people have really appreciated the last few years of not not being expected to be on at the same time all the time, because life just kind of happens, and knowing that there's some flexibility here is helpful. The counter to that is, we did that for about a year and a half, and now, now that you're working from home, it's like, well, no, your office hours, right? And everything looks like we were going back into an office space. And that's been really hard for some people to transition to because their life changed and jobs didn't change with it. And I think that's companies that have been on the forefront of, how do we evolve the way we look at work and the requirements of people doing a specific role or task? Does it matter if they're on from eight to five every day? It does it make sense if we know you're you have little kids at home that we give you flexibility to do drop off and pick up, and then you pick up where you need to at night. So I think we've seen a little bit of both on this the clinical trial space. They seem to work all the time. They're gone 24/7, and so I actually we run a program called Emerging Leaders, which is a nine month immersive leadership development program for about that mid level, director level, and what we've seen, we do it for a lot of our life sciences companies and clinical trial companies, and they, what we're hearing from a lot of them is they don't mind the work, because they love what they do, and they're being Given the chance to make a difference for not just themselves, but for the world. I mean, imagine being part of a trial with a drug that goes to market, and you get to see it on a commercial. Yeah, how cool to say I was part of the team that did that, and so there's this connectivity to the work that they do. There's true passion around it. I. But what we're finding is there's also the teams that don't have one of the topics we cover is around psychological safety, and this was based on Amy edmondson's work with Google. They actually did a study called Project Aristotle, and the New York Times did a huge write up on it, but they found that it wasn't that the most effective teams didn't have the best IQ scores. They had the most psychological safety, and that's what we're finding, is in this remote world, that is even more important than anything, because if I don't feel safe enough to talk to you about how I feel or be authentic in who I am, if you if your values don't allow me to do that, then I'm just going to turn my camera off. I'm not going to engage on Zoom or teams or whatever platform you use. I'm going to multitask, and I'm going to just do the bare minimum. This concept of quietly quitting really comes from a lot of that not feeling like I have a place and a place and a voice to be heard within that place, and that's why you start to see people just trickle out or do the bare minimum and just stay in a job, and then they they really frustrate their leaders, because what am I supposed to do with them? I can't engage them enough. And that that's we're seeing that in a couple of groups, where the leaders just aren't very strong, and they actually were promoted into a role that maybe they shouldn't be in. Maybe they're more geared towards individual contributor than they are to managing and leading teams. And that's on the business to start to figure out is, what do we really need from our leadership teams? I think that's a good point. I wondered, if you know, talking about that collaboration right in zoom, and the ability to sort of turn off in collaborative environments if you don't feel like you're really engaged, if, if there's, you know, opportunities, one of the things that we've been working through is like, how Do you create those sort of collaboration spaces that are maybe more unique than zoom we're looking at, like virtual reality and augmented reality, is opportunities to have some of that team, collaboration that is maybe fresh and new. To your point about innovation so that you get that engagement back. Is that something that that you're seeing too? Um, we don't see it as much in the leadership development side. What we're seeing is this desire to bring people back together in real time, and the struggle now is because everyone's in a financial crunch. They they don't know how they're going to do it, but especially at velocity. We're hearing this from a lot of our team. We're all virtual, and there's this need. They're like, I need to see the team. I need to feel connected. And I think that, you know, some of these new platforms that are out there that help drive some of that connectivity are helpful for people who are really comfortable being home and a little more introverted, because I can, I can control the environment in front of me, whereas a lot of them that need the social interaction, they're, they're begging for companies to start bringing people back together either one time a year. Do town halls together, and so we're, I think we're going to see a little bit more of that this year. Just don't know how it's going to turn out, because of how much it costs. Jumping back, Leah, you mentioned this earlier. You know, we talk about business strategy and the culture of the business, and then marketing plays a role, right? I think that's something that you and I say all the time in all of our meetings. Marketing's function is, is to support the business, and marketing's function is also, you know, to support the culture. Again, it's not the culture, but you can really display it. And I actually think about one of our clients who said, you know, he wanted to use marketing as a way to to show that people should want to work with and work for their company, because the brand was was so relevant, the brand was fun, it was smart, all those things. So, you know, this is for both of you, but I think, Leah, maybe we start with you. Is, is what role or what part does, you know, marketing, does branding? Does messaging play, maybe not so much in crafting the company culture, but helping it be shown internally and externally, you know, on a consistent basis? Yeah, I think, I think it can play a really big role, I think especially if that brand and that messaging is authentic and really speaks the culture of the organization. And I think Brooke, you and I have had this conversation in the past too, about like, seeing consistency. We talk about marketing externally, and that we know it takes a minimum of seven times before somebody's going to recognize your brand, and as many as 50 times before you might enact a buying decision. You can take that same right formula and put it internal, that that that messaging really needs to be consistent to employees so that they on. Understand, really, we're not just, you can't say it once a year and expect every that everybody's going to get it, that it really needs to be communicated consistently internally as well. And I think when you talk about, you know, the messaging and how it shows up, it's, it's how it's having someone be able to craft a story like I think what SCORR is able to do for a lot of clients or organizations is what's our voice? How are we showing up in the marketplace? What's the personas we're looking to target and hit in the messaging that we have, and being able to layer that internally as well. We see that in a lot of culture programs that either we're running or being run internally, because they've just got a great culture team, is the more they're clear on who they're communicating to and what the message needs to be, the more consistent they start to find The vernacular becomes similar across the organization people are collectively moving in a direction because they believe and they buy into the messaging, because the voice is resonating with them. It's it's true, it's authentic. It's you know, you you've seen CEOs in the past that talk a really good game during a town hall, but they're known to just be complete, you know what's outside of a town hall, and that messaging is not good for employees, because they're looking at that saying it's two different people. So how do I relate to you when you're in the town hall? But then know that if I see you in the hallway, there's a very different person that's going to come at me, and it's it's what we find is values mission statements, mission vision, values all of those things that are done at the top and they're set at the top, if they're not lived by the senior leadership team, it don't work. Yeah, right. It did. You can just throw them out the window and just pretend like you don't have one, because people know authenticity right away, and if they don't sense it from their leadership team, they're not going to embrace whatever the mission, vision and values are well. And I think Burke, I'm thinking about the approach that we take to building a brand externally, and that approach really starts with us doing an assessment, talking to the key stakeholders within the business, understanding from that C suite what the goals of the business are, what they see their brand and their value and their differentiators to the marketplace. But we don't just take that then we go talk to the customers and understand from the voice of the customer, are these the things that you know? You know, what's, how do you choose a partner? What are you looking for? What are the differentiators of this particular organization? So that we can make sure and fact check that we're not getting into that like, speak about, you know, companies speak in silo, and Alec and I joke, and we talk about this all the time, because I work, I've worked with clients that are like, we provide white glove service, right? We are there. We're accessible. You get the A team, and that's what you're hearing from the leadership team, and that's what they believe. But then you go and talk to the customer, and the customer's like, I haven't nobody's emailed me back in like, a week, right? Like, I can't get a hold of anybody. And so it's like, well, I can't have a brand externally that talks about that level of service if it's not true in the marketplace. And I think what I'm hearing you say, and completely agree, is you have to take that exact same approach internally. You can't just take, you know, the word of the leaders within the company. You probably also need to gut check with all of the rank and file employees to make sure that that there's a connect there. Yeah, and things like, you know, engagement surveys. We we love it when our clients use employee engagement surveys, because the data is true, and I know sometimes it's a little subjective, right? If you depending on the time of year that you do it, don't do it around bonus time. And if the bonuses weren't very good, right? Don't do it then, but, but if you can catch the employee bases true perspective of the business, and you have a leadership team that's willing to be introspective and look at it from a holistic standpoint, you start to see this like, oh yeah, we probably should work on that, because I've gotten feedback on that before. I just didn't realize it was that widespread. Like, not everybody you know could see this behavior or this issue, and they're, they're really important too, because we're finding, especially in this industry, there's some disconnect at the leadership level. They've, they have a CEO and maybe a couple of others who started the business, and they're still running it, but now they've hired all this really good talent to come in and fill in the other roles, and they're all scratching their heads thinking, What have I signed up for? And like, there's no cohesiveness here. We don't we don't talk about the hard stuff. We just all nod our heads and say yes. And so having. Tools like engagement surveys, having consultants who can come in and say, let's talk about your brand, let's talk about your voice, let's talk about what's happening in the room. Because when we run leadership programs for their middle level leaders, the first thing we hear after Module two is, have our C suite gone through this yet they would so benefit from some of these tools and and it's, it's always this, like, yeah, it's really good when you, when you get that feedback from the business, because it's just a feeder to say, Can we do it differently? Can your messaging look different? Can you be more holistic in the communities that you're reaching out to, both internal and external, because the message is getting lost in translation once they're here. Yeah, so many, so many follow up questions and call outs to to that entire section. I think that's its own topic and Blog in its own right. I think, you know, the two, the two call outs that I have, I think, is the the story is so important. You know, we talk about it from a sales and a marketing standpoint, and I think you guys were going even a little bit deeper. But one of my favorite activities is, if there's a product team, a customer team and a marketing team just going and asking them to talk for 30 seconds about the organization, and seeing how different those answers typically are because they're looking at it from their point of view, and even that little bit of inconsistency can can go a long way. But I think the other one that is so relevant in 2023 and it's something that Leah and I had to talk about when I first started working at SCORR, is personal brand, you know? I think that is, I think that is so important for culture, and from a marketing, branding messaging standpoint, is allowing your employees in today's environment to have a personal brand, and how that is actually an asset. Whereas, I think five years ago, even let alone 1015, years ago, it was concerning that person was going to leave. We can't have their face on this. There was, there was a lot of fear to it. I think personal branding is really relevant in today's culture especially. Yeah, I love the personal brand. I always come back to, I have, I've worked for two different people in my lifetime that were very concerned with, let me, let me rephrase this, they were not experts in the field they were in, and they hired really smart people, but you weren't allowed to have a voice. And so I remember being told on multiple occasions, you are a direct reflection of me, therefore you must say what I would say, even if it was different than what my personal expertise would still would tell me to do, and just sitting on that for a while and thinking through this is younger in my consulting career, and thinking, How many times have we done that to a lot of people and squelched this creativity that's there, or that psychological safety to have A voice it's different, or an opinion that might be different. It's not to say it's contradictory, it's just different, and that needs to be okay. And so this concept of a brand, we actually take clients through a leadership brand exercise, where they're not only looking at their personal brand and how they show up in the world, but now they're looking at, how am I showing up for my team? Is the message that's in my head about myself, the same thing that my team would say about me. And we've had a couple of people actually come back after that exercise and say, I'm in the wrong job. I'm in the wrong career, because what I'm passionate about has nothing to do with what I do every day, and this is why I don't like what I do. I don't like my job. I don't like the people I'm around because I'm being asked to do something I have no passion around. And it's giving them permission to think outside of that, to say your brand is your it's represents who you are, and you're going to have one regardless if you know you do or not, you already have one, a personal one and a leadership one. So I love that Alec of the concept of personal brands are really important for people well, and Brooke, it made me think when you talk about, you know, your expertise and wanting to really leverage the expertise of the team right for a lot of the clients that we work with, that is the differentiator for their organization. They've got therapeutic expertise, they have project management expertise, they have manufacturing expertise. And so, you know, really being able to leverage the expertise of the collective and not just of one or two figureheads, and then it also makes me think about innovation and the fact that you need those differing opinions to really be able to drive innovation. And I think those expertise and innovation are such important parts of the life sciences and drug development that I think companies that are trying to squash that are doing themselves a huge disservice and so interesting. And when you talk about innovation, having a safe place to fail, Yeah, huge, right? That's that's a big one. And some of our clients in this industry are like, we were okay with mistakes, so long as it doesn't impact a client, or, you know, any of the research that we're doing, it's we encourage people to try, at least try something new and learn from it. And then the ones who are very rigid and buy the book and say it has to follow this way every time, their teams have a lot of turnover, because they can't do the same thing every day and get the same enjoyment out of it, it has to look different. Yeah, I love that. I'm gonna, I'll put a pin in it, because I can talk about it for for three hours, but I just finished reading a book called jump starting the American economy, and they were talking about how you have to have a an environment for innovation. You can't say you want innovation, because if you say you want innovation, you're actually creating an environment which leads to the I burn my hand on the stove, and now I'm never going to put my hand back on the stove again. An environment of innovation, there's no stove. You're you're failing, you're getting up. You're failing, you're getting up. But if you just say you want people to innovate, but you don't actually have the the system for it, you know, I'm not the biggest process guy, but you still have to have a process for allowing people to innovate. And so I think that's a really good call out there as well. Brooke, okay, this has been an unbelievable conversation, but let's, let's go to the status quo. You know, how are, how are people reacting? How are people adjusting to everything that's happened over the last handful of years, especially, is the industry evolving? What's working? What's not working as part of this and part of this adaptation here. If you would have asked me this question early, mid 2020, my answer would be different than it is now, and a lot of that's because this industry, we saw a lot of turnover and retention issues. And so what we were hearing from a lot of CHROs was, I am almost paying double for the same role just to get bodies in the door. So they were literally throwing money at a problem, which is what we do right when we need when we need staff, it's the first thing we think of is, I gotta hire a bunch of people, but we forget about the ones that we still have, and now there becomes this discrepancy of because, guess what, whether we believe it or not, they all talk to each other, this generation, especially, they all talk about what they make. And imagine being a loyal employee for five years and you've gotten one merit increase. You're just grateful to have a job, and now your peer, who has two years less experience than you, is making more than you. That's a problem. And then HR was forced with, well, what do we do? We can't afford to pay everybody that same amount of money. So are there other initiatives and things that we can give out to them to make it meaningful to work here. And that was, that was about nine months ago. Now, HR is reevaluating, you know, do we? Do we need all these people? Is this even the right configuration of a workforce? We opened up the recruiting efforts, and we've hired in states that we've never worked in before. We're now playing paying employment taxes in places that we didn't have entities in. We have to worry about health care in states that we didn't have health care coverage for. Is it worth it to pay for it? And if it's not, then what do we do? We either force you back in and make you move, or we eliminate a position. And if, if they've made a decision, which I don't know about you, but I have a lot of CHROs that have probably made this decision seven times now, hybrid versus everybody back in the office four days a week, and it's this, it's whiplash effect that's starting to happen for people where they're just like, whatever. They're going to change their mind in six months anyways. But the ones that are talking about actually giving up property is the interesting one, because they're putting a stake in the ground and saying we will be remote for forever, and that means that we may need a smaller workforce, because we don't need as many bodies as we used to to get the work done. And it's it's just shifting in a direction. I think it'll pivot again in six months. But right now, a lot of a lot of the clinical trial companies that we work with are seeing this struggle of, we gotta cut headcount by 10% where do we go? And that wasn't the case nine months ago, right? Yeah, what are the missed opportunities? What aren't we doing correctly? How can we find things you know, that a company could do to take a more active role in shaping the workforce? What can we do tomorrow to make a difference already? One thing I wanted to make sure that we hit on a little bit in this conversation is especially when we talk. About culture, communications, marketing for a lot of these clinical trial spaces, a lot of the clients are typically smaller. They don't always have a huge infrastructure. You know, 500 to 1000 people, they may not have a marketing department. They may not have a communications department, and there's, there's this expectation that HR has to fill the gap for all of it. And it's actually not an HR initiative. It shouldn't be owned by HR. And if, if the C suite has passed it off to the HR team to go figure out you're going to miss the mark, because HR isn't always thinking about the broader cultural implications. They have a lot of employment law in their heads. They have a lot of industry regulation that has to be abided by if they're in multiple countries. They've got works councils and unions to deal with. They're not always going to be on the forefront, which is why culture needs to be a collective organizational viewpoint. And the more you can take it off hrs plate and put it back into the business, the better it's going to be. But some of the things that we see that break down and Leo, I don't know if you had anything to share on the I was just going to say 100% agree with that Brooke and what we're seeing. And you know, when we think about marketing budgets, is like, traditionally, We counsel clients on the percentage of, you know, revenue goals to put back into marketing, and how that looks from a digital perspective, and how much you should be spending on trade shows, but definitely over the last couple of years, saying to them too, like employee engagement, retention, that needs to be part of the budget, and that needs to be part of the marketing plan. So coordinate with your HR teams. Let us talk to your HR teams to really help. Because, to your point, for the last several years, they've been talking about all of the other issues about back in the office, not back in the office, and not really thinking about how to communicate that brand, that message, internally, and that's where I think the marketing team can be a big support, and finding a partner could be a big support, because your point, if you've got a really lean marketing team that's focused on, you know, helping drive revenue, and you ask them to take on these, you know, initiatives, they're, they're going to fall to the bottom of the priority list too, every time, every single time. And a lot of what, you know, we, we saw this in, what was it? 2008 when the last financial crash happened, and everyone was like, oh gosh, you know, pull back on it all, all expenditure that is not mission critical. And you know, you saw things like leadership development, culture Marketing and Communications, executive coaching, like that kind of stuff they stopped paying for because they thought that these soft expenses were things that were just easy to get rid of. And in reality, what ended up happening was, three or four years later, they had massive dysfunction at the senior leadership level. They didn't know how to help support their existing emerging leaders into the roles they were being promoted into, because there's no development happening. They were expecting it to be osmosis through just sitting in a room with someone. Oh, you should therefore know how to do this. No, I don't know how to do this. There was lack of career direction for a lot of people. And the I think the one thing that we're really seeing from our clients right now and encouraging them is, don't to your point. Leah, don't cut that budget completely out. Because develop is spending money on your people is one of the best investments you can do, because they feel like you value that they're there. They feel like they you're investing in me to be a better leader. I want to do that for you because I believe in what we're trying to accomplish. So the the missed opportunities, a lot of times we find in in downturns that we're going through right now is this knee jerk reaction of cutting some of the softer stuff that not all of it probably needs to exist in totality, as it may have last year. But don't take it completely away, because you're gonna you're gonna actually lose people because of it. Your talent retention will not increase. It will decrease well. And I think it's that tie to the customer service profit chain from a business perspective too, right? Like you, all of a sudden, now have a group of internal people who aren't as engaged, who aren't giving that same level of service to your clients, and your clients aren't necessarily coming back for additional revenue and organic growth. So I think there's a way to tell that message to the business as a whole, to investing in those those people really has an effect on on your profitability going forward. So we've, we've wrapped up here, and I think it's only fair that I, as the the judge or host of this conversation, get to put the both of you on the spot or. Right now, which is, you know, really just your final thoughts, right? Like, I think we've talked about seven or eight different topics, and they all hold importance. But when we think about, you know, that premise that we set of how positive and uplifting culture can, you know, support retention, build long term teams of dynamic and diverse professionals, and how important that is in 2020 23 moving forward, I'm interested. And Brooke, I'll put you on the spot first. But you know, what are your final thoughts from today's conversation? I do want to make sure and highlight the people. Side of business is the most important side of business, and if you miss that because of a little bump in the road from a financial standpoint, or, you know, a market or a trial that you're working on doesn't go to market quite as fast as you thought it was going to or there was a hiccup in the process, don't immediately move to cutting the things that connect people together. And that's really what we're here to do, is help bridge the gap in the connection. So if companies don't know how to do it, SCORR is a great option to help with the messaging and it to find that voice and and developing your people around their voice and how to stay relevant in in the shifts that the market's going through. I think that the the people side of this is so important when we go through hard times, they're your only real asset, right? Without them, you can't do your business, and so don't not invest in your people, even though it's 2023. Is a little tough right now, I 100% agree Brooke, and I think it's like, you know, as a business, how do you make sure that you're thinking about the long term success, as opposed to, you know, to your point, a blip in the road, and positioning yourself to take advantage. I mean, there's definitely, from a competitive standpoint, there's definitely opportunities in down markets to really take advantage and grab market share and be that other people might be laying off that a team that I'm really looking for to run my clinical trial, so why not really use it as an opportunity to double down and and grow my business that way? I love it well. Brooke Leah, thank you very much for for this conversation. I think everybody who listens to this, and however we use it's going to get a lot out of it, so I appreciate it. As always. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The SCORR cast, brought to you by SCOR marketing. We appreciate your time and hope you found this discussion insightful. Don't forget to subscribe and join us for our next episode. Until then, remember, marketing is supposed to be fun. You