 So welcome everyone to this session by Anna. She is going to talk on an interesting topic. Organization is a platform I am so curious to learn. Anna has almost around 15 years of experience. She is a business consultant, coach and a change leader who supports ambitious organization in improving their mindset, culture and performance. She is on a mission to alter the way that we see the change, empower the organization and individuals to reframe it as an opportunity for incredible growth and lasting transformation. She has worked with some big names across wide range of industries. She has a very unique approach that looks at the business holistically. She invites them to consider things from a fresh perspective, bringing new innovative ideas and a people-centric approach to the table. Without further delay, I will hand over to Anna for the session. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction. I would like to introduce you to my dog Thor. Thor is a very cute little dog. He fits in a hand, except he doesn't because that wasn't Thor. This is my dog Thor. Thor taught me a lesson about agile transformations and organizational change that I wanted to start with here today. As you can see, he's a big boy. That's me next to him, by the way, and I'm not very little. I am a full-grown size human. When Thor was around nine months, I really struggled to walk him. He was getting really strong. Yes, he has four legs and I have two, but I really realized that when it got to the incident of me getting a broken finger because he pulled me to the other side of the street to see another dog, I knew I needed professional help. So I get with a dog trainer who gave me a top tip for how to work with Thor, and the top tip had only five words. It was what's in it for me. So what I understood through that and through the training was that what's going on in Thor's head is that why should I listen to you? What's in it for me? Why should I go with you want to go? What's in it for me? There's not exciting stuff. That's what I want to go. What's in it for me? So in order to influence his behavior and also encourage a better ways of us living together, we needed to really invest the time into realizing what is beneficial for him. And the moral of this story is that when companies introduce agile, introduce change or transformation programs, they often think about all the different reasons why they need to change and transform, but employee experience is rarely one of them. So the key component to making any change lasting is to really think about what is in it for everyone and how can we make that change and transformation being a win, win, win as much as possible for everyone. So through my experience of working with multiple organizations on the transformation efforts, I have personally identified those three as top barriers to lasting transformations. So first of all, if we only focus on the small part of the organization and we don't consider organizations holistically, and we don't have the wider buy-in, they tend to fail. When the only change that really happens is the change that considers behavioral changes in the humans. So as soon as a consultant or the consulting company supporting an organization leaves, all the knowledge of them leaves with them because they haven't embedded behavioral change within that organization. And the last one is the lack of inclusive communication. So we under communicate the reasons for change. We don't ask employees how they feel about what we're changing. And we don't create that change with them. So there's lack of transparency and alignment. And one thing that every organization, regardless of the industry, regardless of the customer base and where you located, have in common is people. And only by putting people first, we can truly help that transformative effort of an organization. There are three things to putting people first. A, every person is unique. And as a people, when we connect it to our talents and gifts, we become really powerful and excited. And we like to work on the things that are meaningful to us. And when we do, magic happens. And when we can actually see the difference we are making to those that we are working with, or those who are we are kind of serving, then that's the one of the most fulfilling way that we can experience our place of work. So putting people first means that we've got to start looking at humans as individuals. And I love this quotation by Einstein because everybody is a genius. Each of us have this unique talent, this unique gift that we brought into this world and we developed and we nurtured and we craft. And if we continue to judge people by the ability to climb the tree, or in this example, judge a fish, and not necessarily looking at them what they're good at, but trying to pigeonhole them in the roles, then they will grow up and they will think that they're stupid. So let's stop doing that. Let's stop treating the fish and judging it by this ability to climb the tree, because people are so much more than they roles. Like, yes, I am a consultant, but I also believe that it's important to be a good role model for the younger people because I didn't grow up with any. I drink my milk, my coffee with oat milk, because I believe that real milk by cows is for calves. I have my German shepherd dog that you saw and I love going for walks with him. And those are just few things that make me somewhat more than just the speaker. And you have your own story and you have your own uniqueness too. And the way people show us that they feel appreciated and they truly feel who they are in the workplace is by engaging with that workplace. They will tell us how much they feel respected, appreciated, understood, engaging their work they do by this very clever time called employee engagement. And I love this definition because it talks a lot about our needs, but also about the importance of the connection and the contribution that people want to make in the workplaces. So let's look at some data. So 20 years ago, employee engagement or the engaged employees were only 30% of the workforce in the United States. And the question is, how much has that shifted in the last 20 years? We have been spending a lot of efforts in the last 20 years to try to improve employee engagement. And this chart only goes 2016. In 2020, that was only 35%. So then for engagement has only shifted by 5%. So it barely shifted. So what are we doing wrong? And what we're doing wrong is that regardless of the effort we're putting in to increase employee engagement, we are not putting people first, we are putting tick boxes first into the form of initiatives such as HR goes and do that survey, that's a HR thing, the human behaviors and how they treat it. They do the survey. And the longest I heard is it took them 18 months to get some results for actually people to hear anything about the survey they filled in, and nothing that's cascaded into the work. So it's not a job of just one department, it's something much greater than that. And what I want to focus on that, when I say putting people first, I don't say ignoring profits. Because when we put people first, the data shows us, and this is recent data, productivity increases, sales increases, profit increases, and those are much more significant numbers. We talking in double digits. When on the other side, we put profits over people, it costs a lot. So 350 billion a year, it costs the global economy productivity loss over the fact that people are disengaged. Because the one thing I forgot to mention, although in the US, the 30% is an engaged employee is that the 30% of employees are engaged in the workplace. Globally, that number is 15%. So that means that 85% of us on this planet are completely not in our element. We have this really locked potential of 85% of the workforce that is not doing what they love, they're not excited, they're not contributing in the way they can. And it's costing us a lot. So what I want to say is that by putting people first, we can create the win-win-win for everyone. So have the organizations been missing a trick? I think so. And I think what it goes down to is the fact that the visions for the organizations, as a statement, is always considering what do we want to achieve, what cause we want to contribute to? What are we striving for? What is our purpose? But it does not include things like what kind of organization we want to become. How do we want our employees to feel and be treated? And I think that's a miss. Because without that kind of vision where people can truly relate to and they feel careful, what happens is people perish. And I think that's what we have been observing in the last 20 years, that insignificant 5% just isn't good enough. So I have an idea that I'm here to share with you. What is that we can do about this? And what has been happening that is giving us hope and is giving out methods and is giving us a potential to overcome this? And I call it organization as a platform. So let's dive in what it is and what I mean. So this concept of an organization as a platform is based on the platform revolution. Platform revolution is a bad story behind some of the big brands you see on the slide, which most of you know and probably use every day like Facebook. So what happened in the platform revolution? The companies that started creating a platform for connecting participants with its customers and they've experienced an exponential growth. It was a completely new business model that knocked out that competition. So what happens in the numbers once again is those are just few companies that are in a similar business like BMW, Uber. And I'm going to just focus on one. So let's look at Hilton and Airbnb. There's a difference of 100 years between those two companies. Look at the number of employees. Airbnb with 6000 employees is able to make more than double of market capital value than Hilton. It's a mind-blowing number. And it's true that the value that Airbnb kind of got to is not because of what 6000 employees have done, but because of the platform they created and what they enable everyone, the millions of users to do. So what can we learn from those business models? So those are the four lessons I think that stands out and applicable to the organizations. The first one is the people are key. Without people platforms fail. Just like organizations. Without people, there'd be no organizations. So for example, Facebook heavily relies on its community users to generate content, like content, engage with content. And what happens is as soon as we don't have those interactions, they start thinking. So interactions is the second lesson. So enabling those interactions and providing the new features, new products, new ability to help them to interact and engage is part of the platform game. And if they don't, then we've got to find out what happened. How do we improve that quality and the quantity of those interactions? How do we improve the platform in order to enable people to be able to engage and create that value that none of those 6000 people would have been able to create? And the last lesson is that all that unlocks the potential. So it achieves the remarkable speed in value creation because it unlocks the ability of the human potential to be able to create that value for each other, not determined by the platform, but by connecting the customers they are able to generate value for each other. Platform companies are very powerful. And because they're very powerful, that can go into some dark places. But I am not saying that everyone needs to become a tech, that companies needs to become a technology platforms. So I'm not saying that they should be technology platform. What I am saying is there could be a platforms for value creation and positive change in the ecosystem. And this is where we're going to start diving into what does that mean for the organizations. So this is the definition of the platform, which probably many of you in this conference know very well, probably coming from technology companies, any network that enables and facilitates connections exchanges between parties where participants create value for each other and build value in the ecosystem. And on the right hand side, you can see roughly what that looks like. So in the context of the organization, organization as a platform is an organization which enables and facilitates connections between people. Those could be employees and customers in order to create value but also drive a positive change in the ecosystem. So how do we do this? So we've got to start with being very mindful and deliberate about the kind of changes we introduce in our organization. How we introduce them? Who do we speak to? What impact are they having getting the feedback on those changes? And the changes and the ways in which we are creating those new forms of the organization are very important. And there are four pillars that I have identified and I feel that are essential in order for organizations to be platforms for positive change. And those four pillars can help us to guide what kind of changes we introduce and what do we need to consider. The first one is connection. It is essential that in this new way of thinking about the organization, we've got to connect people to their strengths and their gifts and talents and skills. We've got to connect them to the purpose for themselves but also for the organization. And we also connect them to that higher purpose that Gala was talking about. So connection between people are key. The second is collaboration. In today's world there is very little that one person can do alone. So by collaborating with each other, by collaborating with skillset and abilities we don't have, we are able to create that greater value for the team, within the team, for the organization, for the communities. The third one is compassion. So compassion is being able to see others' people pain and being able to consider how is that I can help. So there is a lot of pain in our organizations today. Whether that's a personal pain because of the changes we're going through and sometimes they hurt because they undermine the role that we thought we had and the authority that we had. But there's also pain in the managers trying to figure out the right way to do and the way to overcome the challenges changing market conditions. There's a lot of pain in leaders because the thing that worked about 10 years ago are no longer working and they've got to really change the way they do business, the way they communicate and way too often we're still acting from the place of that pain rather than trusting our employees and really taking that leap of faith. And as being able to recognize in ourselves and having that compassion that everyone around us is going through something, people are good by heart and they're just trying to do their best and being able to help them, it's very important. And the last pillar is contribution. So contribution is playing our part in bringing some kind of positive result or making something happen. And that contribution, all of those four things, can happen at different levels within the ecosystem of the organization. So the ecosystem of the organization as I said already, it's all around people and they are different actors within that ecosystem. And the center for me because we put people first as other employees. We've got the customers that we're serving but we also got the investors, the shareholders, the people who provide in the current economy our ability to do it and profit and returns for them are important and yet possible when we put people first. They are partners and suppliers and how are we treating, are we connecting, collaborating with them, respecting them, appreciating their pain. There's communities in which we operate and there's also our planet. So how could we do business that could drive a positive change for all of those actors? Could we? Well, it's not a coincidence. Then in 2019, on the 19th of August exactly, this was released by the business round table. It was done in the United States again, however the message is fantastic. It's a statement of the purpose of a corporation. And I think many of us regardless way in the world we are can relate to this. So while each and individual companies serve its corporate purpose, we also share a fundamental commitment to all of the shareholders, driving value for the customers, investing in our employees, dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers. I like to call them partners supporting the communities which we work in, protecting our environment and generating long-term value for shareholders. Each of our shareholders is essential and we commit to delivering value to all of them. This was signed by 181 CEOs. So if there is a time for this message I'm trying to land, I feel like the time is right, the time is now, the movement has already started. But let's leave you with something really practical. So what is that you can do in your organization when you go back to work on Monday? So the first one is connection. What is that you can do? And as I said, the very important part of the connection is our connection to our purpose, understanding ourselves, helping us to step into that personal power I spoke about at the beginning. One of the ways to do that is having a mentor. And probably many people would love to have a mentor or maybe you already do. But if you haven't, how many people have you asked? And maybe it's not words waiting for the initiative from your company. Maybe it's worth tapping into your network. It's as simple as asking someone. But what do they say no? Okay, I've got something for you. That's a top tip. The way to approach someone to be a mentor is to really highlight what is that you admire in them. Because people love to help. So if you come to someone and say, oh my god, I am so impressed how you handle the situation. And I was wondering if you would be open for a few mentoring sessions. I would love to learn and I would love your help with improving my communication skills, because I was really impressed how you held it. And I would love to be able to do the same. Someone will be chatting. They're just like, oh my god, thank you for asking. I didn't even notice. If the person is very busy and say I would love to, but unfortunately they don't have time, you can say, oh, that's okay. I totally understand. If there's anything else that might be able to be a good mentor for me, would you please let me know? Or would you please give me their names? And they will say, sure, if anyone comes to mind. Always thank them for their time. So just ask and they don't have to be in your organization. They might be the people you follow on LinkedIn or someone you've met at this conference. If you look up to them, just ask. Take ownership of growing your own, your personal and professional growth. The next one is collaboration. And here I want to talk about the time we spent talking directly to the customer. There's been a lot of focus on the customer communication, UX, even the keynote by Jeff Godhell. It was about driving outcomes and speaking to the customer, getting that feedback. So the question to ask ourselves, do we speak directly to the customer? If not, could we? How could we? You don't have to talk to them every day, but maybe every couple of weeks someone from the team could join the customer research team or the product manager and just sit on the call or just be in the meeting to observe and understand and get that compassion and get that empathy for what is the context of the customer we are serving. The next one is compassion. Do you have a culture of clear and open communication? It is through the communication that we build greater understanding of what other people are going through. And also, how can we help? It is that time that we give another human being that we cannot get back. Because time is the most precious resource, something that you give you cannot get back, something that you cannot make more of. Everyone on this planet has a day with 24 hours. So you can choose how you spend the time and you can choose to invest it with another and give it as a gift to another human being in order to be able to understand and help them through something they might be struggling. And that goes both ways. It doesn't necessarily have to be a your peer. It can also be asking for time with your manager and just sharing something. It's like, you know what? We've changed this thing or we've introduced this new method or this process has changed. People are really struggling and I'm not sure if you're aware, but I would like to make you aware because I think there's those two or three things that we can do to make it easier and I would love to pick your brain on it. What do you think? So also create that open communication upwards. The next one is contribution. So how does your organization define value? How does your team define value? And you can go back to the will of an organizational ecosystem. Is the value that we're defining with the employees at the core and everyone else around it? Or is the value for your organization that customizes the middle and the shareholders and no one else? Who else is in your value circle when you actually define the value for what you're working on or what is your company that's striving for? Could that be revisited? Could we look at it in a different way? And here I want to share with you some real life case studies of the companies that have done this. They have put people first and they have benefited from the amazing results. Whether that's a customer satisfaction, whether that's a staff retention increase by 50%, whether that cost going down, client satisfaction increase, revenue profits increase. What all of those case studies have in common, I've got a little link down the bottom. You can go on the website and check it out for yourself. They've got actually lovely videos with those case studies. What all of them have in common is that they've put people first. They really shifted ways of working towards the humans that are more motivated and truly impactful. They reduced the distance between the customer and everyone in the organization and they considered the transformation effort is not a box to ticks, it's not a one of exercise but it's actually a search for more human and more engaging ways of working. All of those are fantastic stories and case studies of this already happening. And yes, it's not called organizations or platform, although I feel like the movement is there. So just to bring this to the close, how about if we reframe change and we reframe our agile adoption process changes, agile transformation efforts as an opportunity to create a new organizational model that can serve us all? How about if we define that vision for our transformation effort and we start defining what kind of organization we want to become? What kind of behaviors we would love to see more of? What would happen when we communicate that openly and everyone start thinking, oh, this is interesting. What will happen when we start measuring some of those things to see like how far off are we from that direction? As my colleague Daniel Norr said in his recent talk about rethinking transformation, when he suggests that transformation is a product and as a product, it has a customer and that customer is an employee. So if we're building an organization and if we're transforming this organization and we look at it as a product for its employees, what kind of behavior or change, what kind of characteristics, what kind of attitudes would we like to have to define that organization? So I want us here today and I'm looking forward to the hangout after this talk to start a conversation because we already have what it takes. We've got the methods, we've got the talent, we've got the people. It's just a matter of intention. We need to stay focused and we need to know what we want to create and why. It's a matter of co-creation. I can do this alone and neither can you. Only together we can make this change happen. Only together we can create an organization not only for the sake of it but for the future generations to come. An organization that will serve them and will solve the planet and the community around them. And it's also a matter of choice. And we need to choose now and we need to choose together. We need to choose which vision of the organization we would love to be living in 20 years from now. And so I invite you to choose with me a vision where organizations are platform for positive change that serves us all. And if this message resonated with you and if you want this journey you would like to bring more of what I was speaking about into your organization then let's connect. Those are my details but we also have a hangout on the back of the stocks. I'm looking forward to speaking to you then. Thank you very much. Thank you Anna. We have another 15 minutes. So participants do you have any questions that you would like to ask? We can utilize this time. Do you want to share any of the I saw you had given some of the case studies Anna. So do you want to share some of the practices that you did as part of those case studies to bring in these changes? Can you share some of those practices? Again those are not my case studies. So just to make a disclaimer those are the case studies of the organizations that are publicly available there. I can share some of the practices I probably didn't have the permission. I haven't asked for the permission from the organizations to disclose them publicly but I can tell you a few things of course. So one of the things is personally for me when I engage with the organizations or when I engage with the teams right very often it comes in as can we change the process they having a problem with the process right or they not having a stand up for sprints right. So it really comes always from that place of agile output effort methodology process I see you noting right and yes it is important but the conversations I always meet through is that helping people to understand why is it not working and focusing on what is that is stopping people from not following the process or maybe not necessarily that is like what's wrong with the process right. We know very well that it's only once we start shifting and very common friend phrase and hearts and minds of the individuals the true change comes right because the process and this is interesting the process will not save if there's something goes wrong if we have a problem the process will not save the day the people will is the people who will get together pull together so one of the practices always is about connecting the individuals around the problem doing some kind of blameless post mortals or just having conversations that are handled and kind of facilitated in a very inclusive and non-blaming way to help people to have compassion and have understanding for the situation and the context because it's very easy to point a finger after the fact but back then when the situation was happening we did not have all the information we have now we maybe didn't have time to speak to people maybe they were precious outside of outside of our team that we were just not aware of and the thing they find most frequently is that employees or people on the team rarely have a visibility of what's going on higher up in the organization and what that leads to that leads to jumping into a conclusion of they just told us we have to they don't know what they're doing they change their mind again but without that communication we don't build compassion for the leaders and being a leader is a very hard job right because very often you've got to make trade-offs so trying to coach the leaders to bring that visibility into the team encourage them to be transparent encourage them to be vulnerable we had one situation one of the clients when there was actually a survey exactly what I was describing we identified the behaviors we wanted to drive in the organization we shared the surveys with all 200 employees and we got the results back and the some of the comments on the bottom was like that wasn't truly anonymous right and you were like oh because you asked me which team I'm from you asked me for my job description right and it was it was incredible because with some help the leaders were actually able to say transparently you've asked us and also in a timely manner so literally within two weeks the results were analyzed and we played back to say we've asked you and this is what you said we realized it wasn't anonymous we apologize we kind of laid back on the old habits and how about we do it again truly in anonymous way and the results were different but it built the trust with the people the leaders were able to stand out and say our bad let's do it again let's do it now so we redesigned the form made it truly anonymous and people started truly telling us what they feel and how they think and and it really helped because it then guided the efforts into the direction of things that they are struggling with as well as what the leadership requires one of them I thought there was a question yeah there is one question thanks Anna it was a good experience I think we see the similar situations in some of the companies that we work do you want me to read the question there is a question from Sharad please go ahead your thoughts on how to convince the leadership that focusing on employees is more important than focusing on customers and shareholders Sharad thank you so much that is great question and I'm going to share so I shared this talk a version of it and at the conference in Denmark in June and one of the gentlemen on the back of the conference has messaged me and says can I have a copy of your slides because we do have some issues with management I think they can help so I think the number one and they actually help I think two months later he messaged to say your slides has really helped to address a problem that management has created and actually helped them to recover so one thing I would say the numbers so the numbers talks for themselves so the numbers I shared on the slide I'm happy to share I think the slides are available already anyway is making it transparent and making them aware that not focusing on people costs a lot of money and rehiring into the roles when people leave costs a lot of money but when we actually focus on people and focus on employees experience we start apologize for the noise we start generating more benefits not only for them but also for the company so that's one thing another thing is in the case studies that I have shared from the corporate rebels the case studies from the different companies there is a one case study they encourage you to have a look at or if you can find it just connect with me and I'm happy to share it and there is literally a story of the company that has done exactly what you say the employee first customer second and share or the last and they talk through the journey of how they did it and also what the results that led to so that might also help to start giving them ideas that it is happening in other places it is something to consider and it is something to consider and it is something that's beneficial one other thing is and then I'm going to give you a third thing just pop into my mind don't wait for leadership either so if you're in a position that you have a team or that you are a manager please also try to think and bring those conversations to your team because there is a lot that we as a human beings working with other human beings can do differently in order to create better focus on the employee experience simple things like saying thank you after someone helped you or asking for help or saying will you sit with me and those kind of moments when we collaborate when we have discussions when we talk about things can be created at the team level and they make a massive difference to employee experience I hope that helps then thank you Anna for sharing your experience it was really different interesting and practical tips were shared with which we will try to implement thank you so much everyone enjoy the rest of the conference