On this episode of the People Fundamentals podcast, we’re joined by Laurie Ruettimann, author of “Betting on You” and host of The Punk Rock HR Podcast.
We talk about old-fashioned attitudes toward performance management, how technology can improve performance management processes, and why the employee experience — including yours — is essential when designing better HR processes.
Ruettimann recently conducted research into the state of performance management and how employees experience it. By talking to HR leaders, Ruettimann realized that “the disconnect between what HR professionals think and feel and the employee experience — and even the executive expectations — is pretty strong.”
Tune in to discover what employees really need from performance management processes and technology, and how HR leaders can help fix work for everyone — starting with themselves.
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Overcoming the ‘check-the-box’ attitude
Unfortunately, some organizations still see performance management as a “check-the-box” activity, which is a wasted opportunity, Ruettimann says. Instead of managers helping employees focus on doing better work and making the organization better, “we have managers spending hours every week on the stupidest management tasks.”
In today’s digital-first workplace, HR leaders are investing in workplace systems that are intended to produce data-driven insights. But that’s only part of the solution. When you ask HR professionals about their performance management process, you learn that it’s being used so inconsistently and so irregularly that they can’t trust the data.
If HR leaders can change that reality, they’ll create “so much opportunity to reclaim people’s lives and to have them focus not only just on work and making work better, but making their own lives better,” she says.
Responding to AI and other HR tech trends
Responsible and ethical AI is on everyone’s mind this year. Ruettimann is cautiously optimistic about AI’s potential to help human beings shine.
“I do like this idea of, ‘Why am I doing work that can be done by somebody else?’” she says. “This is the promise of technology: to really free us up to think critically, to have fun, to enjoy what we’re doing, to innovate.”
Finding answers within yourself
Technology can help you solve problems with performance management, but HR leaders also need to look inward. “I think HR leaders, in general, are so overburdened and burned out,” Ruettimann says. “And so, just on a personal level, I always tell these HR leaders, ‘You fix work for other people by fixing it for yourself first.’”
HR sets the standards for organizational behavior — including self-care. If you take care of yourself, employees will realize they have permission to take care of themselves, too.
Take the same approach when designing HR programs around performance management, Ruettimann emphasizes. “So often, HR leaders feel like they float between the executive leadership team and the workforce. They often feel like consultants when they’re not consultants,” she says. “So my message to this community is really to start focusing on your own experience. ‘Me first.’ I’m an employee, too, and if I’m not having a great time here, why would anybody else have a great time here?”
As an HR leader, you’re pulled in a million different directions. Thinking about your experiences and pain points can help you identify where to create the biggest impact. “How can you make work better and get some allies from your workforce right away?” Ruettimann says.
People in this episode
Laurie Ruettimann: LinkedIn, “Betting on You” book, Punk Rock HR Podcast
Full transcript
Laurie Ruettimann
I always tell these HR leaders, “You fix work for other people by fixing it for yourself first.” So if you’re not taking time off, why would other people around you take time off? If you’re not going to the doctor and getting that checkup and you’re feeling burned out, your body battery is low, imagine your team, and beyond that, imagine your customer service reps or your people in the field, right? They learn from you in this position of HR. But so often, HR leaders feel like they float between the executive leadership team and the workforce. They often feel like consultants when they’re not consultants. So my message to this community is really to start focusing on your own experience. Me first. I’m an employee too. And if I’m not having a great time here, why would anybody else have a great time?
Alex Larralde
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Betterworks podcast, People Fundamentals. I’m your host, Alex Larralde, senior director of corporate marketing. Betterworks’ core belief in people fundamentals revolves around enabling everyone in the workforce to strive for excellence, to foster creativity, and to acknowledge each individual’s contributions. Betterworks translates these beliefs into business fundamentals through strategic HR leadership, and in this show, we’re diving even deeper into these principles as we hear from the experts about how you can make them come alive in your organization. We’re interested in transformative workplace culture and how self-leadership and individual accountability can play a role in driving positive change. So that’s why, in this episode, we’re talking to Laurie Ruettimann. If you don’t know Laurie by now, here’s what makes her such an incredible and influential figure in the HR world. She has spent two decades working to reshape employment experiences through her candid narratives, innovative approaches, and an unwavering commitment to improving job satisfaction.
Laurie is driven by a desire to confront outdated workplace norms. In fact, she transitioned away from corporate America to do just that, advocate for change through her writings, speeches, and consultancy work. She’s recognized by CNN as one of the top five career advisors in the United States. Laurie is also the author of Betting on You, and she’s a podcast host bringing life to the very human side of HR and sharing best practices through Punk Rock HR and her new series Corporate Drinker. She’s always entertaining, always interesting, and has a definite point of view. Laurie and I cover a lot of ground in our conversation, which took place during HR Tech 2023 in Las Vegas. We dug deep into our current ventures, including her partnering with Aptitude Research to uncover how HR really feels about their performance management processes. Her goal is to figure out why there’s sometimes a disconnect between HR and employee perceptions and learn why simply investing in HR technology itself isn’t good enough.
Spoiler alert, you need to create a culture that understands and believes in the value of the employee experience. We also had a great chat about what we can all learn from a younger employee base. She says that what Gen Z tends to do quite well is separate their work from their identity, a practice that’s illustrated by one of Laurie’s biggest refrains, “Your work is not your worth.” So why aren’t we all doing this? Isn’t this something that we can all practice to lead better, more fulfilled and balanced lives? Laurie definitely believes so, and she lovingly puts faith in the capabilities of Betterworks for helping employees get there. Thanks, Laurie. Listen in to answers to these questions and more. And there’s also plenty of levity and some intriguing stories like Laurie’s Las Vegas wedding and the security camera footage and how her deep familiarity with the city makes her the best tour guide, especially if you have a fear of snakes. Snakes in Las Vegas?
And on the more serious side, hear her share the most critical advice for those starting out in their careers. I am so excited to have the opportunity to interview Laurie Ruettimann, who’s sitting here with me. She is a podcast host, author, HR consultant, luminary in the industry. So welcome, Laurie.
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, thank you so much. I’m happy to be here. And the Betterworks booth, I have to say, looks gorgeous. So congratulations on a good show.
Alex Larralde
Thank you. How has your week been so far?
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, it’s been good. The buzzword here is GenAI. Everybody’s talking about AI, so I feel if I did a shot every time I heard that, I would be completely hammered. But what I like is that I’ve been coming for a very long time and there’s always a buzzword. And for a long time, we kind of got stuck on chatbots. So I’m glad we’re over the chatbot thing, but I’ve been coming here long enough where I stood on stage in 2010 when HR Tech was in Chicago, and I stood tall and proud and said, “Everybody who wants to be a strategic HR thinker needs to be on Twitter.” And I proceeded to make the case for social media, and now I recognize, I was wrong.
This is all a pox on society. It’s terrible. But I think now that I’m a little bit older, I understand what I was driving at and that’s curiosity. I was encouraging HR leaders to be curious. Do I think technology is a solution to anything? No, I think people are the solution, but technology is a lever. So if we’ve got the tools around us and we have the will to do good, I think anything is possible. It’s just the will question, that’s a real important one.
Alex Larralde
Oh, yeah. As we were chatting, you were telling me about some interesting research you’ve just done and I’m curious, share with our listeners this data.
Laurie Ruettimann:
As part of my weird portfolio career, I’m very curious about the world of work labor and the economy. I’ve partnered with an organization called Aptitude Research, and they’ve made me like an analyst intern, like I’m getting coffee from my friend, Kyle, and my friend, Madeline. But we decided to really go deep on performance management because we were inspired by Betterworks’ amazing research that you did a little over a year ago, really looking at how broken performance management is in many organizations. And while you really went deep on the employee perspective, we thought, “Well, we’ll just talk to some HR people.” So we’ve surveyed over 200 HR leaders, strong practitioners, and the answer is that many of them have invested in the past 18 months in HR technology.
So that’s good. We’re glad to hear that. And it turns out they’re like, “Yeah, it’s not great, but it’s good enough.” It’s good enough. And the answer is it’s not good enough. So the disconnect between what HR professionals think and feel and the employee experience and even the executive expectation is pretty strong. So we’re going to go deep and do some real thoughtful interviews and pull some stories out of this to understand, “Why do you think it’s good enough and don’t you think your employees deserve more?”
Alex Larralde
Yeah. And wouldn’t you think that the true measure of whether performance management software was working would be your business results attainment?
Laurie Ruettimann
Yeah. And funny enough, I think HR professionals really feel that they can get some good insights out of the data, but then when you start to ask them about how they do performance management, they’re doing it so inconsistently and so irregularly that I would not trust the data that I’m pulling out of these cycles. So to think that then you can correlate performance data to business performance is a joke, but for whatever reason, the people who have participated in our survey are overconfident. And you know what? That hearkens back to when I was an HR professional because I really thought I was doing great work and other people didn’t appreciate it. And maybe it’s both, maybe it is, but we’re going to find out more.
Alex Larralde
Yeah, perhaps it is both. It is interesting though that it’s a well-known process to be broken, disliked, full of anxiety, stress, and it’s old and outdated, and the army invented it like a hundred years ago. But I was having a conversation earlier, and we were talking about, similarly, just managerial practices in general. They all were born on the factory floor.
Laurie Ruettimann
Absolutely.
Alex Larralde
… when people were doing really repetitive work. And it does definitely feel like one of those areas where people shrug their shoulders and say-
Laurie Ruettimann
And just move on, yeah.
Alex Larralde
Good enough, box checked. But they’re still struggling to hit those business targets.
Laurie Ruettimann
There is just so much wasted opportunity to really… We’re focused on productivity right now, and there’s so much opportunity to reclaim people’s lives and to have them focus not only just on work and making work better, but making their own lives better. But instead, we have managers spending hours every week on the stupidest management tasks, and then maybe four times a year, maybe 18 times a year, we’re going to ask people to fill out surveys and talk about performance. But there’s no “there” there at the end of the day. And I think for me, I’m just getting a little sick of the old way of doing things, and I believe in a statement that Barack Obama said, “We are the change that we’ve been waiting for.” I’m not waiting for anybody else to fix this anymore. I’d like to get to the center of things, the root cause, and take a stab at it. So that’s the work that I’m doing with Aptitude Research.
Alex Larralde
It’s fascinating. And I really think a lot of the change that we’re going to see will be employee-led. We’ve just done our own research. You mentioned our enablement report. Thank you. We’ll do it again this year. But we did another little research project around AI because we wanted to understand employee sentiment. Are they afraid of it? Are they aware of it? Do they have any idea what their company’s thinking at the leadership level about how to apply it? And we discovered that a lot of people are actually already using it. They’re using it outside of the… Well, not within the tech stack that IT makes available, but they’re going directly to ChatGPT to do things like performance reviews. Now, they’re literally putting employee and company data into Open AI.
Laurie Ruettimann
Into an open systemic model.
Alex Larralde
So I feel like that’s going to force a response sooner than later because people know that there are productivity and efficiency gains and that a lot of these repetitive, boring, time-consuming tasks or things that just are hard to start writing. You’re a writer, you’ve written a book, the blank page is intimidating. So, having a place to start, once people figured it out, they just started doing it.
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, I love where this is going, and I really feel strongly that the world of AI is just opening up to us. So any predictions we make today about machine learning and the applicability of all of this to HR, these are early days. They’re going to laugh at us in another 10 or 15 years. But I do like this idea of, “Why am I doing work that can be done by somebody else?” This is the promise of technology to really free us up to think critically, to have fun, to enjoy what we’re doing, to innovate. And yet our brain power is being used on things like, “Oh, does this person meet expectations?” When we can pull it from systems, we can pull it from data, right? We have actual proof of what is happening instead of just our own biased opinions. So I like where it’s going, I like the potential, but again, I’m also worried about human behavior because sometimes we’re lazy.
Alex Larralde
Yeah, absolutely. And we could certainly go down a rabbit hole on the creative pursuits, but I often say, “We can, but should we?” Right?
Laurie Ruettimann
Correct.
Alex Larralde
There’s a lot of things that we’ll be able to do, but whether or not it makes any sense or it’s applicable-
Laurie Ruettimann
Or appropriate.
Alex Larralde
… or the right thing to do for people and humans is another question altogether.
Laurie Ruettimann
Absolutely.
Alex Larralde
But what else are you seeing in terms of trends? So you’ve been here now a few days, you’ve talked to a lot of people. What do you think HR leaders are focused on right now? Where are their heads at?
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, I think HR leaders in general are still overburdened and burned out. So just on a personal level, I always tell these HR leaders, “You fix work for other people by fixing it for yourself first.” If you’re not taking time off, why would other people around you take time off? If you’re not going to the doctor and getting that checkup and you’re feeling burned out and your body battery is low, imagine your team and beyond that, imagine your customer service reps or your people in the field. They learn from you in this position of HR. But so often, HR leaders feel like they float between the executive leadership team and the workforce. They often feel like consultants when they’re not consultants. So my message to this community is really to start focusing on your own experience. Me first. I’m an employee too, and if I’m not having a great time here, why would anybody else have a great time here? So-
Alex Larralde
Yeah. Very true.
Laurie Ruettimann
… that trend is a huge trend for me. But there are these stupid little things that are still broken. I’m walking around talking to TA professionals here and TA vendors, and they’re still talking about ghosting.
Alex Larralde
Oh, wow.
Laurie Ruettimann
But it’s still happening, right?
Alex Larralde
It is.
Laurie Ruettimann
Both employers and employees. So that’s an issue that I’ve heard a lot here at this conference, like, “How do we fix ghosting?” It’s like, “Well, how do you fix human behavior?” These are big questions to wrestle with here.
Alex Larralde
Right. Super interesting.
Laurie Ruettimann
It is. But also, the question around benefits and how do we properly allocate benefits and benefits usage? That’s another thing that people are talking about here. So, as health insurance and healthcare continue to grow, how do we make sure we’re getting the right plans for our workforce, but also plans that are cost-effective and will be utilized? Those are the things that I’m hearing here.
Alex Larralde
And that just is a really interesting example of the breadth of things that HR professionals have to think about. So they’re walking the floor and they’re thinking about everything from the hiring process to the benefit process to performance management. How do you advise people to prioritize these things?
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, so often nobody asks me for advice on how to prioritize things because they’re just swamped. When you work as a leader in human resources, you really are putting out a million fires all at a time, right?
Alex Larralde
Yeah, absolutely.
Laurie Ruettimann
So it’s not an issue of priorities because truly, you prioritize based on what the board wants you to prioritize on or your leadership or your shareholders or whomever. But I think what I ask people to think about is what can give you the most bang for your buck right away on the human level? How can you make work better and get some allies from your workforce right away? Because if you can solve that one problem that’s affecting quite a few people, for so long, and we still aren’t, we’re not nailing family leave. Why wouldn’t you tackle that? That’s a huge problem. And it’s such an amazing thing that if you can get the policy right in your organization, you put some wind underneath people, then you can go tackle other things.
Alex Larralde
Absolutely.
Laurie Ruettimann
So I like to figure out what’s really driving some of the most discontented issues in the workforce and go there.
Alex Larralde
Absolutely. I can speak to that experience myself, having two children, and at my last company, a company I loved working for and still love, but when I started, prior to their IPO, they had no parental leave policy and I had to really contemplate whether I was going to stay.
Laurie Ruettimann
Wow.
Alex Larralde
Because I had already been through the unpaid leave and wasn’t…
Laurie Ruettimann
Who wants that?
Alex Larralde
… interested in going down that road again. But it is a really interesting question. What’s happening that you don’t know is driving people out the door that you could easily solve?
Laurie Ruettimann
Just go tackle that. I think that’s really important.
Alex Larralde
Just go tackle that. Absolutely.
Laurie Ruettimann
It’s not like that’s an easy win and an easy thing to do very often, instituting progressive childcare policy and reimbursements for that, all very difficult complex problems, but you do one of those a quarter, you’re gaining fans. And HR needs fans more than ever. We’re fans of the workforce. We need them to be fans of us.
Alex Larralde
Absolutely. And what do you see happening in the C-suite these days? So we talk a lot about strategic HR, empowering HR leaders. Is that coming to fruition? Are we still struggling there from your point of view?
Laurie Ruettimann
I don’t know that we’re struggling there. I think CEOs have a perspective of their own, but I think CEOs are more distracted than ever. I just heard a statistic that 77% of CEOs are having trouble balancing tech and life. They always feel like they’re on. And I know I feel that way, and I’m just a CEO of a very tiny little company of my own. So imagine being a CEO of a publicly traded company. You’re always on your phone, you’re always on your iPad. So if you’re constantly being pinged, how can you even really form an educated opinion about an HR leader because you’re so distracted? So I think that distraction needs to be tackled, and that’s one of the most important issues, I think, is facing a CEO these days. They’re just…
Alex Larralde
Absolutely.
Laurie Ruettimann
… spread too thin and the phone and the iPad doesn’t help.
Alex Larralde
Oh, absolutely. And I think we all are guilty of sometimes forgetting that good decision making requires thinking.
Laurie Ruettimann
And it requires sleep and focus.
Alex Larralde
Nutrition.
Laurie Ruettimann
Yeah, nutrition.
Alex Larralde
Exactly.
Laurie Ruettimann
All these things that nobody ever does for themselves. And the more we take on progressive responsibility in our organization, the more we just abdicate that this part of our life that’s healthy, is going to go away for the paycheck. And with more and more technology, you would think it would be the opposite. It should help us live better lives and that doesn’t always happen. So I know Betterworks is really on a mission to make the performance management process at least not be so onerous for people-
Alex Larralde
Absolutely.
Laurie Ruettimann
… to provide continuous feedback, to make these relationships richer and better. And I think that’s a trend I would like to see pick up more in the HR tech industry.
Alex Larralde
Yeah, for sure. We’re really focused on helping managers and alleviating that workload because as a manager myself, I can speak to, of course, the increased complexity moving from an individual contributor role, suddenly now you’ve got responsibilities you didn’t have and you have paperwork and processes that you didn’t have before. Things like mat leave. I’ve got an employee that’s going on parental leave at the end of the month and planning for that and getting everything in place that we need to ensure for business continuity. It’s a ton of work in addition to my day job, right?
Laurie Ruettimann
Absolutely. And we wonder why there’s a shortage of people raising their hand and saying, “I want to be a manager.” For 10 grand more, you could have all of these problems and sleep less. It’s like, “I’m going to be poorer, but I’m going to have more time.” I think that’s the calculation that young millennials and Gen Z-ers are doing. Whereas me as a Gen X-er, was like, “Yeah, of course I’m going to be a manager. That’s what my dad did and his dad before that.” Right?
Alex Larralde
Exactly.
Laurie Ruettimann
So that was the way we thought we would build wealth. But it turns out that wealth is something more than just a paycheck.
Alex Larralde
That’s so true.
Laurie Ruettimann
Wealth is relationships with your partner, your children. Wealth is being able to go and have fun on a Tuesday night and not think about work. So I like the way this younger generation is really rethinking what currency means to them. And I think it does put pressure on technology companies like Betterworks to really step up and make life easier for the manager and for the leader.
Alex Larralde
Absolutely. What other lessons could we learn, do you think, from Gen Z?
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I don’t know. They’re so young, right? There’s definitely a disconnectedness, a detachment even, from work and their identity. They know work is where they go to earn to then have great, rich, interesting lives outside of work. I’m incredibly inspired by that. I think your work is not your worth, but a lot of people don’t believe me. A lot of people say, “I’m a project manager,” or, “I’m a senior director,” or, “I’m this, I’m that.” And I believe that you’re a human. And the more interesting things you have in your life, the more good stuff you can take and bring to work and influence and improve people’s lives at work. So, I challenge people all the time and I say, “Your work is not your worth,” and they laugh at me.
Alex Larralde
You know what really drove that home for me? I was laid off one time in my career by a company that’s here, but yes. I had a complete identity crisis. I’d been working since I was 15. I had a young child at home, and I just felt if I wasn’t the director of marketing, what was I? It was so strange because, of course, I was many other things. I was a wife and a daughter and a mother and a sister, and those things are way more important to the people that I am those things to than I am to my boss at the end of the day. But that perspective was really hard to gain without that experience. But it shifted everything for me.
Laurie Ruettimann
Good. But you’re also more than a wife, a mother, a sister, an auntie. You may be an art lover or a music fan, or you may be interested in water skiing. And I think so often these corporations give us such a small identity, and then the little space we have left goes to our family. But that’s not enough.
Alex Larralde
That’s a great point.
Laurie Ruettimann
We need to have hobbies. We need to have interests. I challenged myself at the beginning of 2023 to take one class a month to learn something new, something I wouldn’t be good at, right? And I’ve done all kinds of things this year, like a hand lettering class, I’ve done flower design, I’m going to take a gin-making class with my husband.
Alex Larralde
Gin. Wow.
Laurie Ruettimann
Yeah. Well, like gin cocktail making. But I’m not going to make the gin.
Alex Larralde
Oh, you’re not.
Laurie Ruettimann
I’m not going to become a distiller. I’m not. I’m not going to get that big, huge copper machine. But we have done all kinds of stuff, and I’ve done it on my own. I’ve done it with girlfriends. I took a charcuterie board一making class. I am really trying to figure out what brings me joy and what makes me happy. And I think it’s learning because when you’re learning, you’re growing, and when you’re growing, you’re thriving. And that’s what life is all about.
Alex Larralde
Absolutely. So has anything really jumped out as a new hobby that you think you’ll carry on?
Laurie Ruettimann
No. I like flower arranging, but it takes some time and it takes some patience. And I’m also hypercritical of myself, so I have to learn to let go of that. But it’s so hard in flower arranging because you see this beautiful ornamentation and decoration and this beautiful bouquet and then yours looks like.
Alex Larralde
So I actually attempted to make my own flower decorations for my wedding back in 2013, just at my 10-year anniversary. But we live in Oregon, so we’ve got amazing flower farms, and they would sell these flowers really inexpensively at the farmer’s market. We did end up going to a flower farm, but I tried. I remember one afternoon, I was basically in tears, floral tape all over the kitchen, just like, “Who can do this?” It was hard.
Laurie Ruettimann
Talented artists can do that. Absolutely. I thought that you did that for your wedding, or at least tried to do that for your wedding. It’s such a nice touch. We’re here in Vegas right now, and I was sharing with people that I was married in Las Vegas.
Alex Larralde
Yes. Tell me about this.
Laurie Ruettimann
In 2002, a long time ago. So I’m about to celebrate my 21st wedding anniversary.
Alex Larralde
Happy anniversary.
Laurie Ruettimann
Back then, it was before iPhones. It was before social media. Theknot.com existed, but that was about it. And we got married at the Little Church of the West, which is right across the street here from Mandalay Bay. And my wedding video is security camera footage that they charged me 50 bucks for. It’s on VHS and we’ve never converted it.
Alex Larralde
Oh, my gosh.
Laurie Ruettimann
It was just so awesome though…
Alex Larralde
It sounds awesome.
Laurie Ruettimann
… because we had 22 people who came to town. It was really fun. But now that I’m in Vegas six times a year, it’s not so special.
Alex Larralde
So needless to say, you’re not coming back to celebrate your anniversary this year.
Laurie Ruettimann
No. We’re going to go hiking in Western North Carolina to celebrate our anniversary. But it’s fun to tell that story because so many people, again, when they’re brides or even grooms, right, they over-index on their identity of getting married and being a partner. And it almost robs you of the joy of just being married. It’s just fun to get married. It’s fun to commit your life to someone. So I’m glad we took the pressure off and did it in Vegas.
Alex Larralde
I love that. I actually am one of those weird people that loves the energy of Vegas.
Laurie Ruettimann
Sure. I have to tell you, I complain about it, but I’m like, “Oh yeah, this place is crazy.”
Alex Larralde
It’s crazy and fun and there’s always something going on.
Laurie Ruettimann
Something to watch. Absolutely. I was walking down the strip with another HR analyst by the name of Sarah White, and we’re here so often that we know where the weird stuff is. And I’m like, “Sarah, up in front of us is going to be a guy with two snakes that you could take a photo of.” And she’s afraid of snakes. I’m like, “I’m going to need you to cross the street right now before you freak out. We don’t need to see these snakes.” So you always see something bizarre and weird, and if you’re here enough, you can plan for it. So yeah.
Alex Larralde
Absolutely. Kind of like my adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon. There’s certainly always something weird going on there.
Laurie Ruettimann
Oh, for sure.
Alex Larralde
Part of our identity, part of our ethos there. Well, what advice would you give to somebody starting out their career right now?
Laurie Ruettimann
Oh, my goodness. I would say that anybody starting out their career right now is going to have seven different careers. Statistically, they may start in human resources and end up in procurement or project management or own a small business. So, learn to develop relationships because relationships are the currency of business.
Alex Larralde
Yes.
Laurie Ruettimann
If you don’t know how to listen to someone, how to compromise and reach that healthy compromise or productive solution, if you don’t know how to have someone’s back, if you can’t think strategically about how this person is a good human, even in this difficult moment, you’re not going to survive in any job, let alone any career. So really, relationship building, I think, is the most important thing. And someone told me very early in my career, “We don’t expect you to do anything the first year except develop relationships.” And I’m like, “That’s stupid. I don’t believe that.” And I wish I would’ve spent more time developing relationships because that’s what opens you up to do the cool stuff later on.
Alex Larralde
Absolutely. So favorite show that you’ve been to?
Laurie Ruettimann
Well, I started going back to live music as soon as I could after COVID. As a speaker, as someone who keynotes, as someone who performs, I learn a lot from musicians on stage, when they make mistakes, what do they do? All that kind of good stuff. How do they enjoy themselves up there? How do they interact with the audience? So my favorite indie band is Spoo…
Alex Larralde
I love Spoon.
Laurie Ruettimann
… that I’ve seen a million times. And I just went to see them a couple of weeks ago in DC and it was really fun. And it’s a bunch of middle-aged people bopping around. So it was great. It was my crowd. But the best concert I’ve seen post-COVID was Rage Against the Machine in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I live, at a stadium that was sold out with 80,000 people. And it was loud and it was booming, and it was almost like tribal in a great way. And again, the way that the band interacts in a large venue with the audience was really inspiring. And it just reminds me that whenever you perform, whenever you speak, it’s not about you, it’s about the people in the audience. And if you can remember that and deliver on the promise to both inform and entertain, you’re doing right.
Alex Larralde
Well, thank you so much, Laurie. I really appreciate it. I love just getting to meet everybody that I’ve worked with, other capacities in person this week and talk to you. It’s been really fun.
Laurie Ruettimann
I’m really pleased to be here. And listen, anytime you need a friend to just come hang out at the booth. I’m your girl.
Alex Larralde
Perfect. I told you this conversation was going to be a fun one. I loved when Laurie pointed out that we’re still in the early days of how AI and machine learning will be affecting the world of HR. And it made me reflect on what we’ll be seeing in the coming years. And like she says, the more that we can automate some of these crucial tasks in equitable ways, the more time we’ll have to focus on deepening employee satisfaction and finding our own often elusive work-life balances. Great HR tech allows managers to foster better relationships between employers and employees, something that we strive for here at Betterworks. As Laurie brilliantly said, “HR leaders can fix work by fixing themselves first.” Take some time to think about how you can utilize modern tech at your organization to alleviate burnout, develop better communication between leadership and the workforce, and model these behaviors for your team.
By setting these examples and implementing good tactics, you’ll find that everyone gets ahead together. So whether you’re new in your career and are developing the kinds of crucial relationships for the first time, like Laurie discussed, or you’re decades into your role and are staring down retirement, the end goals are the same, better performance management equals better health, better work experiences, and an overall more robust life. Be sure to stay tuned for our next episode of the People Fundamentals podcast. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google to find out what’s in store. And if you like what you hear, share us with your friends and colleagues. We’ll see you again soon.
