HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
The Flexibility Revolution with Dessalen Wood, Syntax
The days of mandatory office attendance are (mostly) behind us, but how do you maintain a vibrant workplace culture when your team is scattered across 15+ countries? In this conversation, Dessalen Wood, Chief People Officer at Syntax, reveals the company's innovative approach to workplace flexibility that's become their competitive advantage.
Drawing from 25 years of experience across retail, entertainment, and technology sectors, Dessalen shares how Syntax transformed workplace flexibility from a pandemic necessity into a permanent, branded employee experience called "Global Flex." Unlike companies that offered remote work only to later withdraw it, Syntax made a public commitment they couldn't rescind, complete with company-wide town halls, dedicated branding, and clear guidelines addressing when, where, and in which country employees can work.
The results speak volumes—Syntax recently earned Great Place to Work certification across all eligible countries with over 80% employee participation. Rather than mandating office attendance, they create meaningful in-person experiences that naturally draw employees in, resulting in growing participation rates year over year. As Wood explains, "The biggest buzzkill for an employee experience is the word 'mandatory'... The word trust and having experts and mandatory cannot be in the same sentence."
Dessalen also unpacks the challenges of developing leaders in a global organization, emphasizing that leading across cultures requires far more adaptability than simply managing remote teams. At Syntax, over 50% of leaders manage team members in different countries, necessitating a leadership approach that respects cultural differences while maintaining core company values.
Whether you're an HR professional seeking fresh approaches to remote work policies or a leader navigating global team dynamics, this conversation offers practical insights for creating authentic workplace cultures where flexibility enhances rather than diminishes employee engagement. Connect with Dessalen Wood on LinkedIn to continue the conversation about evolving workplace strategies for today's distributed workforce.
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Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannum, and in this episode we're going to talk about workplace flexibility, and joining me on the show this time is Desalyn Wood, chief People Officer over at Syntax. Hey, desalyn, how are you today?
Speaker 3:I'm great. I'm great, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you, bill.
Speaker 2:Beyond my short introduction just a moment ago, Des, why don't you take a minute or two, introduce yourself and also share the mission of Syntax?
Speaker 3:Thank you for introducing me. I'll tell you a little bit more about myself. I've been in the HR or people and culture, whatever you want to call it for the last 25 years and in that time I've seen a huge transformation in the people and culture function and in the work environment and work models, so this is a really exciting topic. My role has been Chief People Officer at Syntax for the last three and a half years and we're a company that's grown incrementally over the last several years and we're in many countries around the world. Syntax is an IT and professional services company and we provide managed services as well as professional services in ERP and cloud. Excited to be talking about flexibility at work today.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show. Yes, you've worked across a wide range of industries. I was looking through your LinkedIn ahead of our interview, doing my homework, so you worked, for example, from retail to entertainment, to tech. How have your experiences in those different environments shaped your approach to building workplace culture? At Syntax?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, it's an interesting thing because I started out in the service industry or the retail industry and I spent most of my career, I would say, in that frontline industry, working with a very hardworking demographic that didn't necessarily choose that career, and you're creating an employee experience in an environment that's quite challenging. It's open all the time, it's open late at night and on holidays, and you want to have a great environment with employee development and retention, and yet you're in an industry that doesn't have very high margins and therefore doesn't have a tremendous amount of money to invest, and so you have to be really scrappy and creative to create value within that framework. You also have a challenge of having a difficulty in differentiating yourselves. You also have a challenge of having a difficulty in differentiating yourselves, so your turnover the number of people who are leaving, is typically quite high, because you can get similar jobs elsewhere and everyone is competing for the same talent, and so, at the same time, you're investing and attempting to retain to make sure that you're getting your return on that investment.
Speaker 3:So this was a big challenge for me was creating great environments in a very volatile demographic of people Coming to tech. The biggest difference, I would say in tech is that you know this is a team of experts, of professionals who have been educated and selected to be in this industry, professionals who have been educated and selected to be in this industry and you're looking for different things than people are looking for in the service industry because you know the kind of quality of life concerns change, and so here people are looking for interesting projects and career challenges and growth and global projects, and so you have a different set of expectations around how a company differentiates and provides value to that group of professionals than you have in a frontline retail environment.
Speaker 2:I'm curious now what role does leadership development play in syntax and strategy, especially as the company continues to scale? Are there specific traits or mindsets you aim to cultivate in emerging leaders?
Speaker 3:So it's such a great example of a question, because when you're a multiple, we have had a lot of acquisitions and so you have a lot of people who came through smaller organizations. And one thing typical of smaller organizations there are exceptions is that there is less effort and less time spent in leader development and more time in technical kinds of training, and the luxury of a larger environment is then you have an argument to create leader development, to have succession plans and to talent map, and so those are our processes and practices, that we were able to bring a large group of leaders that, while they had been leaders for long periods of time, they might not have experienced any development just because of the nature and size and scope of the company they were in. So to me, one of the benefits of coming to a larger mid-market organization is that we do have a leadership framework and a point of view that we can bring. So, to answer your question, what does it mean at Syntax, to be a leader? One of the biggest things that we've been focusing on? I would say it's two major areas, and that's obviously remote leadership, because we are a remote and hybrid and flexible environment, and the other one is global leadership and I would say global leadership is actually far more challenging to learn than remote leadership. I think it doesn't get the same energy and maybe the same spotlight, but global leadership is challenging. I'm gonna use myself as an example.
Speaker 3:I've been in large companies, canadian and US retail players and different exhibition and you know types of environments. This was the first time I was in 15 countries with many different ways of doing things and each culture is different. Each kind of you know. The way we treat employees are different, the expectations are different and having to have a leadership role and over 50% of the leaders at Syntax lead globally, meaning they have one or more people in a different country. The assumption that you can cut and paste your leadership style from your country onto somebody else's culture is a mistake and we see this really often.
Speaker 3:So what I would say I have learned is you can be a global company in the sense that you have offices around the world, but the home base is really where the culture comes from and all the leaders are generally anchored in one or two countries and they lead the same way for everyone. The syntax model is quite different. We want you to have a global mindset, meaning that you will be able to be flexible and lead differently for each of the different countries that you're in, and we encourage our leadership roles to be placed in all of our countries, not choosing certain sort of A countries that get all the leaders where the B and C countries don't, and so pushing ourselves to have leaders lead from different countries. And so, even though our home office is in Canada, pushing to not have our leadership all based in Canada and have them in our countries, whether it be Slovakia, india, mexico, spain. We have leaders all over the world and those leaders lead global teams as well.
Speaker 2:So I'm curious. Just a quick follow up to what you said there. It's important to be sensitive to cultural differences when you're leading a global organization, of course, but to use the Simon Sinek term, starting with, why is it also important that employees, particularly leaders within an organization, buys into the why of a company, but buys into the values of a company, regardless of their geographic situation?
Speaker 3:I think companies have a lot of taglines. They say they're one company, they talk about belonging and they talk about their company values. And again, what does that mean? It really means a consistent set of experiences, and one of the challenges companies have is that they have an external facing message about what their company is about, and then they have an internal reality, and I've been very sensitive to that, growing up in the retail industry, where it's a lot of young people and they're not very fearful of expressing their dissatisfaction with companies online, and I think that that taught me to make sure that you don't claim to be something that you're not going to be able to do. And so when we're looking at how we have people identify with a company, regardless where they are, you have to choose which things are going to be very important that will be foundational and felt everywhere, and which things will be different because each country is different.
Speaker 3:And our CEO his name is Christian Primo. His tagline when I started with him was boutique at scale, meaning we're not a huge player where everything is a machine and we're not a teeny mom and pop, but we have aspects of both. We have to be able to scale, but in the times of leadership development and people and culture. But we also have to understand that we have differences that we wanna be aware of in our customers as well as our employees. So I use that boutique at scale, which was really a tagline for our customers, for myself personally. We have a lot of differences inside our countries to honour those country cultures, but we have some prevailing themes that are experienced by everyone and that's really what we drive through when we talk about leader development and leader expectations. Are those consistent factors. I'll leave the local factors to my local teams to work on with leaders, but globally we all talk about the same important factors of differentiation to make sure Syntax stands out as an employer of choice.
Speaker 2:Syntax recently received its Great Place to Work certification Congratulations. Can you tell us more about that and why it matters?
Speaker 3:So I can tell you something that probably won't surprise you, and that's every CEO will eventually tell a person in my role I want some of those badges. Where do we get those badges? I see badges on everybody and there's different kinds of badges. You can buy badges, just so you know. You can buy all sorts of recognition and you can have recognition that you submit based on your media about your company. So basically, it's a, it's an application. And then there's the hard ones, and that's the ones where your employees have an anonymous survey with a lot of rules about what you're allowed not to say and say, and you still write your own narrative about your company, but then it's tested with a survey to your employees, and those are the ones that are the scariest but they're also the most valuable to get, because if you get one of those recognitions, your employees know that they gave that input, and so to me it was the sweetest thing to go after, but the hardest thing.
Speaker 3:So I told you I started three and a half years ago. I didn't do this the first year. You can't just go and say, hey, employees tell everybody how great we are. They have to experience some really important and meaningful events in their life cycle in order to be able to complete that survey and to get recognized, and so you have to be really intentional about that. And then, when you drop that survey and to get recognized and so you have to be really intentional about that and then when you drop that survey, you're still worried. You don't know what's going to happen.
Speaker 3:This is not monitored internally. I have no sense in the dashboard what anybody's saying. So it was exceptionally meaningful, and on a few levels. One is that we had over 80% of our employees participate, far above the required threshold. To me, the most important level of engagement, the number that matters more to me than any percent I can give you, is the number of people participate. Non-participation is a very strong message, meaning that I don't have any faith. Participation doesn't mean high scores, but it means I'm still in the game. So I was really excited that we had high participation and then, over the top, thrill that we were certified in every country that we were able to apply for.
Speaker 2:As a people leader. How do you try to encourage that participation? By the way, do you gamify? Do you incentivize? Are all of these wonderful numbers of people who did respond just that engaged with the company culture? Is it a bit of all of those things?
Speaker 3:So it's an interesting way. Okay, so I've been doing surveys for 15 years and actually worked for a company before that specialized in this. So it's a little bit. I would say I have a pretty good time doing this thing. I can tell you for great place to work. You are not allowed to incentivize pizza party or push. What you can just do is send reminders.
Speaker 3:So one of the things that I can do that I was able to do is I like to do country competition. We are, all you know, everybody. We belong to so many different groups at work. We belong to syntax as a whole, you belong to your function or department and then you belong to your country and everything I do I talk about on those three levels. Here's the company identity. You have your department, team or function identity and then you still have your country identity and in fact, the country identity is the one that likes to probably be almost the most competitive.
Speaker 3:So I would just put up countries, you know, cheering them on. I would, you know, put question marks next to the other ones, and it was just fundamentally an email campaign. And then I would let our country leaders which is a really important role that we have, our country leaders who hold in all different positions in the organization, but they've been named a country leader because of their strength as a leader. The country leaders then do the work for you because they just want to beat each other. The country leaders then do the work for you because they just want to beat each other, and so it's a self-fulfilling where I just do some nudging. I think I once called myself chief reminding officer. I basically am just sending reminders all the time and then I let the countries fight it out and they always deliver. You know, some get to the 90s and some just get in at 82. But they all get there.
Speaker 2:So, as I mentioned in the intro, today we're talking about workplace flexibility. I remember during the pandemic I'd speak to lots of senior leaders and they'd say to me, bill, the days of needing the employees in the office are over. Forget about it. It's been a terrible time time, this pandemic, but the big silver lining is we trust our people. Now they can work wherever they want to. Those same leaders are in many cases clawing back their employees, making them come back to the office at least a few days a week. Others are saying, oh, we're not that mean, but they've got to be in the same time zone, etc. Etc. You know they're going back certainly on what they said a few years ago.
Speaker 2:Personally, I'm a a big proponent of being able to work remotely if you can do the job and you can demonstrate to others that you are committed and you are productive. But this is not an interview with me. There's a question coming here somewhere. The question for you is, with an ever increasing push to return to the office, what is syntax'sax's take on? Mandatory in-office time versus working from home, versus hybrid? Tell us more about the ways that you guys are approaching it.
Speaker 3:Well, I can tell you, the biggest buzzkill for an employee experience is the word mandatory. Got to be really careful how often you use that word if you're going to say you have a wonderful corporate culture. So that's something that I've always been really cautious about. You know, what we did here is something I think pretty exciting, and it might not sound that exciting from the beginning, but if you go with me here to where we are today, it is exciting now. But dial back to 2022, right as we're coming out of Omicron and companies are saying things like we're going to continue being flexible or we're evaluating it or we are flexible only to a year later. Change your mind.
Speaker 3:And my CEO, again Christian, said, right as I was starting, I want us to stay flexible, and we were not necessarily a flexible environment before. We had offices full of people and we'd actually just expanded three of our offices and done renovations, so we were in the same boat of expensive real estate that might be empty, just so you know, that's probably the biggest deterrent of flexible work is empty offices. And so when he said I want to be flexible, I was like great. He said I really want to make this part of what makes syntax different. I want this to be basically the foundation of our employee experience, and I thought, okay, this sounds interesting. But at that time, over 90% of tech companies were still entirely flexible. So to me it was like, great, we're going to say we're flexible like everyone else. That's kind of like saying I have a brown dog, okay, so does hundreds and thousands of other people have a brown dog. So saying we're going to be flexible wasn't this exciting statement anymore. And so one of the things I said to him is, if we're going to do this, we need to name and brand it and launch it. Launch it with a real, I would say, point of view on how this flexibility differentiates and defines our employee experience. But here's the caveat we can't roll it back. You can roll back, we're going to be flexible, for now we're staying flexible. We still believe it matters. You can't roll back something that you name and launch on an employee town hall as a foundational part of your employee experience, and so this was a big commitment.
Speaker 3:So we branded it Global Flex with this element called Global Tourist. We got a logo, we got all the different swag for it, and we had a global town hall and we launched it, and when I mean launched it, we explained exactly what we meant about three different things what does it mean to have flex time? What does it mean to be able to choose around the way you're going to work? What does it mean to have flex workplace and location home or office? And then, what does work from anywhere really mean? And we were able to clearly define those three factors in it there's a timing of the day, there's a location office, home and then there's a country factors in it. There's a timing of the day, there's a location office, home and then there's a country aspect to it. And we were able to show all three and then layer them together under this name of Global Flex and essentially have people enroll in the program.
Speaker 3:So this is where I would say was the big differentiator for us and because of that, even when I've had different leaders challenge, send me the. Which company is now rolling it back? Should we? I'm like we can't. You can't drive your car looking through a rearview mirror, you look through the windshield and, yes, I'm aware there were things you liked about it, but we're not going backwards and that's been something we've held strong to and, in fact, the more companies that have rolled it back, the better it's been for us so I loved everything you just said there.
Speaker 2:However, my job is to be devil's advocate, okay, so really can you never roll back? I mean, we're living in uncertain times right now. Uh, jobs are not as easy to come by. Uh, there are various tariff wars going on around the world which are affecting economies. Ai is taking over lots and lots of different uh tasks of people and, in fact, taking over entire jobs. Um, there are certain statistics, by gotler, for example, that by 2030, 30 percent of jobs that exist today will not exist anymore. Uh, bill gates came out just a few weeks ago, as we record this episode in, in middle of june, saying by by around same sort of period, a lot of people can expect to only be able to work two days a week because AI is replacing so much. So, in that kind of context, those companies that are rolling back and insisting that they get to be more selective about where their people work are they onto something? Just putting it out there, just playing devil's advocate?
Speaker 3:I think what's an interesting thing that you're bringing up is there's a perception, if you say you're flexible because, just so you know, we continue to have our offices, we did not divest of our offices, we shrank some of them, we right-sized them so they'd be more intimate there's a perception that if you're flexible, that nobody shows up for anything, that you can't find anybody anywhere. That is, in fact, not the case when you have an attractive employee culture. One of our big pillars of our culture in our countries is to have a community. So we have our corporate social responsibility, we have training, we have a town hall strategy where we have reasons to come to the office that are mostly social but also for development and also for team building. And what we have seen by offering this flexibility and not rolling back, is that we have actually seen participation grow incrementally every year and every event in our offices, and so it gives us this, I would say, a challenge to have to create meaningful experiences.
Speaker 3:And now we see people say you know when is my team going to meet? Oh, I didn't know you were going to be in town. I would have come to the office people talking about it'd be great to know who's in town so I can come in and having a bit of FOMO for not being at the office when there's cool things happening, but we don't use the word mandatory. To me, the word trust and having experts and mandatory cannot be in the same sentence. We have to be attractive and we have to be intentional, and that is something that our team works very hard on, and we help leaders understand the value in creating moments. But we have allowed people to come to this on their own and because of that, the win is so much sweeter okay, great answer I.
Speaker 2:I tried to throw you a curveball there, but you knocked out the park. Very well done. Uh, we are already coming towards the end of this particular conversation. Just a couple more questions for you. I guess the next one is what else? What other programs does Syntax offer to keep employees invested in the organization and the culture?
Speaker 3:That's a really interesting question because one of the things that we have been some, you know we've had faced challenges like everyone else is, you know, do we hire people all over because we can, or do we want them to be closer to one of our hubs so they have the opportunity to attend events? And how do we balance the fact that great talent is everywhere and it's also kind of cozier to have your talent closer, because the challenge is how do I participate when I can't drive or go on a train to get to the office? So one of our, I'd say, most successful events was earlier in this year. We had about 800 participants, more close to 3000. And that was one of these challenges, these step challenges to plant trees. It's called the tree challenge and essentially by country, depending on the number of steps you got to plant trees, and I believe we planted about 5400 trees to plant trees, and I believe we planted about 5,400 trees, walking 60,000 kilometers, and there was a leaderboard by country and so many people were participating. It was literally people were just trying to walk around the room do the challenges and this was global. So you need to create events that everybody can participate with and interact with and we kicked it off and then we did an award ceremony at the end.
Speaker 3:So this is where I talk about being intentional around companies. So our CSR, which is our employee resource groups, environment, mental health we have events every month. We have in country events and we have virtual events. And whether you go to your vegetarian cooking class class or you go to AIDS Awareness Day, I don't care, I like that. It's in your calendar. We pop it into everybody's calendar and you see it, because seeing those moments shows that we care about you and we care about creating special moments, whether you participate or not. You know there's a yoga this week. I don't know if I'm going to get to go, but just seeing it in my calendar in the morning, I was like, well, it's cool, there's yoga this week. And so we have, I think, done a really interesting job at having a lot of different things going on for neurodiversity, women in tech, veterans. We do so many different initiatives that I think create an identity, even though we're dispersed around the globe and even in our own cities.
Speaker 2:My daily steps. Target is 9,000. I've just come back from a hiking weekend. I did 22,000 yesterday, pretty happy with that. My legs are aching today. Okay, last question for you is how can we connect with you? So is that LinkedIn? Do you want to share your email address? I bet you're super cool and all over TikTok and Instagram and places. And, of course, how can folks learn more about Syntax?
Speaker 3:Well, we have. You know, our Syntax careers page has our roles. We also post them on LinkedIn. So I would be excited you know, I literally can say excited for anyone to apply so that we can get to know you and your qualifications. We have so many roles in technology as well as in the traditional support functions.
Speaker 3:I'm Desalyn Wood. I am the only one, I believe, on the entire planet. That's probably difficult to say, but I am the only one. So if you did want to find me, you could, and so I would definitely be. Linkedin is my favorite place. I do post, I do share content and I really love it when people reach out, especially if they want advice or they just want to talk through a challenge. When I do sometimes talks like this, other HR professionals reach because it's a continuous thing you've got to talk about. You know, remote work is not going to stay alive and well if you assume a decision three years ago is relevant in three years. You have to nurture that message and you have to evolve that message. So if anybody does want to reach out for some guidance on that, I would be very happy to help.
Speaker 2:Well, that just leaves me to say for today thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR Chat Show.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Bill. It was a really fun discussion. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:And listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
