November 15, 2022
Description
In this episode, Chris discusses the benefits of using games to develop interpersonal skills among employees and leaders with Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks.
Topics Include:
1. Engagement and retention
2. Maximizing cultural intelligence in the workplace
3. HR Tech – combining team-building, analytics, and upskilling
4. Making vulnerability at work comfortable
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change and Talent Management. I’m your host Chris Nichols. And today we have the CEO and founder of employee engagement and retention company keep wall and Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks prior to the founding of keep wall Lauren spent 14 years working at five fortune 500 companies holding numerous leadership roles. As a black millennial woman in engineering and tech. She is no stranger to being the first or only Lauren is the first black woman to graduate from the University of Kansas’s aerospace engineering department and the first black woman to win the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics international design competition. She’s a recipient of the women and technology Rising Star Award and has an MBA and operations management. But after getting to know Lauren, most importantly, it seems that she is a wife and mother of two and an avid conversationalist are top two values are authenticity and legacy. And she keeps these front of mind at everything she does. I have known you for 25 minutes. And I can say that your bio is quite authentic and totally believable. Lauren, nice to have you on the show.
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Chris. I’m happy to be here.
So as I had mentioned in pre show, I’m very excited to have you on your organization, the company that you have founded is very interesting. And it’s as as your bio points out, you don’t sound like you have much of an HR background. So I’m going to need you to set the stage for me to help our listeners kind of understand your path from being this rocket scientist over here to getting to the point of having an HR tech company. So help us help help me fill in the blanks of how we got from point A to point B, if you don’t mind.
Yes, yes, yes. So you’re not the first person to ask this question. That’s commonly the first question I ever get asked is like rocket science, HR tech, how do those meet. So as you mentioned, in my bio, I worked for five different fortune 500 companies and with how I look how I identify and things when getting into the industry, no one looked like me, I was the youngest, I was the only woman I was the only minority like all these, only these. And you have to find some type of way of relating and being in this space, especially when you’re working on shop floors, when you’re working long hours when you’re trying to just build trust and foundation with the folks that you’re working with. And so for me that was that’s, that’s a key part of what we were talking about in the pre show. It’s like what retain someone at a company is really feeling like they’re valued. Like they’re appreciated all these other things that go into things when you’re looking from a talent acquisition standpoint. And I remembered, I’d be going into interviews and I would ask like, what’s the culture look like? What’s the setup look like? You see that I am a woman, I see. You’re trying to hire more women for certain reasons. But how do the women feel that are currently in this space? And so typically, I didn’t have responses because they’re like, well, there’s no women in this space. We’re trying to get more in. But what I was learning from being at these companies is really, how did I go about building those relationships? And it really went deep into, could I connect with them on something that didn’t seem traditional, wasn’t a conversation that would traditionally come up in the workplace wouldn’t traditionally come up in any of your team building activities, but created that space to really resonate at a deeper level. So I don’t know if you’ve heard of the organizational culture iceberg. And it’s like, this is what you say how your culture of your organization is, and this is underneath the surface, what’s really happening. I really have resonated with that because I care about psychology. I have a great interest in games and especially like board games and games that are like, how have you think so not so much as mindless type of games because I love those two that just like past the time, but something that I have you think and really dive deeper with the people that you’re playing that game with and learning and understanding. So I just did a meshing of like my interest in psychology and humans as a whole, and like the, like how our behaviors are. And then I combined that like with my engineering background, and with my interest in games, and I was like, How do I create this type of solution? That’s really more set on community occasion and understanding folks getting those insights and then being able to build that foundation for relationship. What was interesting about this, though, because we launched this, we created this methodology, and sold, it was a physical game, and sold it to 1000s of people across 27 countries across three different continents, just to see like, does this methodology work? And I always had an interest of digitizing it. But I was forced to do it once COVID happened, because there’s kind of like, okay, people can’t get together, game sales are kind of down because people aren’t congregating with one another. So once we’ve made the digital platform, we started doing these virtual game nights. And so folks from everywhere, were coming to these game nights, and of course, people have jobs. So after the game we played, do you have the debrief and discussion about what are you thinking things, and I was getting people contacting me and saying, I need to bring, you need to bring this into the workplace. And I’m like, I, I’m in the workplace, like, they’re not going to do this. Like, we don’t have these type of conversations. We aren’t diving deep, and like really wanting to know each other. And then this whole, that’s when we started having that shift of like, work integrating with your home life and being in the pandemic, and how those bleed over and stuff and being like, I need to really understand this person as a person and how they’re showing up each day. And so once, once I got it, I got contacted by these folks. And they’re like, can you come and do these sessions? They brought me into the workplace. So that was like, I didn’t plan on this being this solution for companies, but companies reached out to me. And then as they reached out to me, they’re like, Do you have a subscription platform for this? No, let’s try and build that. Well, is there any way that we can integrate with like our learning management systems or performance management systems? That’s interesting. Can we create different types of games that focus on these different areas? And so we went from being this like game that was really about, hey, how do I learn about this person from a social perspective, so like their life, love, self reflection, worldviews, family, things like that, to Now, we have 17 games on the platform. They fall in engagement, morale, team development, we have leadership and development games, we have professional development games. And we have diversity, equity, inclusion games. And so it was like, it went from me trying to figure out how do I integrate myself and have that sense of belonging and inclusion in the workplace with others, too. I brought people like strangers together, and they’re like, I was vulnerable. I opened up, I express myself to these people I’d never met. What if I could do that in the workplace? And it’s kind of like, Okay, listen to what customers were asking for. When we started. That’s
amazing. I mean, I’ll be honest, I didn’t know how the heck you were gonna get from point A to point B. And I still am a little bit just bewildered actually, how you, you took what was originally like a social game that you created, if I understand that correctly. Okay. And then eventually, it was able to be taken if you dig deep enough people got the game, and they were like, this works like, we should be doing this in the workplace. And COVID really help it sounded like to to expedite that. Yes.
Correct? Yes. Because, folks, when we had COVID, folks, we’re looking for ways, how can I connect with someone, since we can’t be in the same place? So these virtual game nights over zoom? Was that way to do that? And when we did that, people were like, Well, can you bring this into the workplace, because right now we’re doing these cooking classes are doing this different stuff over zoom. And I want to do that, like, we have team issues that are are happening here, like communication issues, dynamics, issues, things like that. And we feel like this could help. And so we became the solution that was just really revolutionary for that hybrid remote workplace situation where you got a whole bunch of people that were coming in, that started the job and have never met these other people in person, and don’t know how to connect with them as like humans. And then they’re like, what this solution enables you to do that in a short period of time, and then build that foundation that makes it easier for you to ask questions when you need help to seek out advice from folks to have better one on ones with managers and things because now you’re understanding them in a complete entity of who they are, rather than just Oh, I know, their workplace mentality, or I know their Myers Briggs, or their DISC assessment results. And so it’s really like understanding
about the new fad, which is in the enneagram.
Enneagram I like enneagram.
But it’s funny. I’m looking now at my notes for pre show and there was one line that we had a making vulnerability get more comfortable when I told you before the show was like, I don’t know how I’m going to transition from some of the other things to that. But you have made it very seamless to get there. And I love the style of game because I believe that there is so much value in getting to know the people that you work around. And we, yeah, yesterday was the election, right. And so I think there’s some comparisons that we can make here. And using that as a as a topic of the day almost right, because it’s so easy for us to judge others. Because we were basing our entire persona is off of beliefs that we have, have taken upon ourselves to have and to hold. But the reality is, we’ve taken black and white stances of saying it’s got to be this way. And it can’t be that way. Because that way is bad, in my way is good, when in reality, all of life is gray space, right? There’s so much room in the middle to come together and be like, Okay, I get that. And so that that’s what your game is trying to accomplish. So I’d love for you to maybe like, talk through some more of those details. Because I’m not interested, I’m going to be sending this podcast episode to our leader of people and culture, and we are going to be a warm a warm prospect for you.
Well, that makes me feel very great. So check mark there. Um, no, everything that you just described and saying, like, the thoughts of this black and white, and then it’s like, but no, the world is very gray. And people feel uncomfortable expressing they think that, well, I need to pick this side or the other or even if you think about the engagement surveys that we currently have, the spectrum of them are strongly agree or strongly disagree. And then you could put like, neutral, but what does neutral really mean, you know? And so that’s also reasoning. I’m an engineer, and I’m like, we need to quantify this, like how
I’m coming there next i’m gonna get to that part of
feeling. So yeah, we can talk about that. But with regards to like, how the game really surfaces in it really focuses on meaning that gray is we are game, it’s a question answer type game. So we have, like, we have points, we have penalties, we have badges for winning, you can get bonus points. So we have all the gaming elements in there. But the root in the heart of the game is this question answer. But our focus is not on right or wrong answers. It’s on what’s your personal perspective and getting other people to understand? What was your path travel that got you to this perspective, and then realizing like, oh, ah, I get why you see things this way, or how I can approach you to maybe open your mind up to different type of ways of thinking. But the main thing with the questions is our questions are ambiguous. So someone will get a question that will say, Well, I’m not this is not a workplace one, but it’s my favorite question that comes to the top of my head and like, what does happiness in love mean to you? And this is one of the, like, personal questions. And people will be like, love. So are you talking about in friendship, love? Are you talking about like, relationship love? Are you talking about like, we’re playing this at work, so like loving my job, and I’m like, you choose which direction and so it’s very much ambiguous. And then the, the keep keep walls stands for keep wandering out loud. So the wandering out loud part is an integral part of the game that really is now diving belief beneath that surface level to peel back the layers of the onion. And so as you start, like, you might have said, what about this? What about that you give an answer. And then someone’s gonna say, Well, you had mentioned, like you answered based on work. But now, you had mentioned something about personal we also want to know, that side of it. Why are the two different wire answers different? How is your work persona, so much different than your home persona, and just getting deeper in that, but then we also if that’s from a personal perspective, but then we’re also having questions like that for your team dynamics. So we have games that are focused on the light, like the development lifecycle of a team’s team. So forming, storming, norming performing, then we have risk and assessments. And it’s the same type of setup. But our main goal with the game because we talk about getting people to be vulnerable and feeling comfortable with that is like, if you think about games, games are universal, right? They bring people together from all types of ages and backgrounds, anyplace in the world. They have games, they’ve played games, like people understand that concept. And what’s really great about games is that they give you some type of structure, because one of the main things that we get when we say hey, we’re going to have these vulnerable conversation Asians that sometimes are uncomfortable or they’re hard to have, especially if you think about the DEI type of conversations to, or you’re talking about like society in the elections, and they’re like polarizing conversations. And our main thing is, we ask questions in a way that don’t put someone on the defense. So there, it’s not setting you up to be combative. It’s not in the game rules, it’s set up to not be a debate. And so you already having that structure of here’s what the game rules are, you know that if you don’t follow them, you’re cheating. And so then you can’t win, you won’t get your points and people will call you out on that. And it’s like, it’s like, when you’re playing uno, and you try to double up and someone’s like, no, that’s not like that’s up, they’re gonna call you out on not following the rules. And so you see these different types of outcomes based on like, Hey, we’re playing a game, I’m putting down my barrier, I’m following the rules of the game. And I’m doing this because the game said so. And then what you find from that is a whole bunch of laughter, a whole bunch of Oh, my gosh, I’m shocked that other people were willing to express that it’s like they were willing to because you were willing to because they know everyone here is going to. And so it really does make those conversations where they’re like, that’s not as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. It’s because you, you’re not worried about the fear of judgment, or the fear of, I’m gonna get in an argument with this person, because rules of the game you can
fascinating trying to figure out how an engineer can tap into their softer side of psychology and connect the dots here. I mean, you are truly a unicorn in that way. I have to imagine the other engineers around you probably were like, Why do you care about how people feel Lauren?
Well, the thing is, because I was that person in the workplace that I’m like, I and I care about how people feel because I felt some type of way in the workplace. So if we’re thinking about it right now, in these last three years, people have been like, silently wondering about so much, right? They’re wondering about their current job status, because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the world. They’re worried about their security, because they’re like, What about my health? What about my safety, from this perspective, so much is going on with this pandemic? They care about, like their future career growth? Where am I like, can I grow in this way? Do I want to take a step out and like, start something on my own or whatever, and they’re wondering all these things. And then they’re not having the opportunity to express what their needs are, where they want to be, how they want to grow in their career, and things like that, in a way that they’re like, I won’t be judged, or my manager won’t shut me down to say, Well, let’s think about it for this performance review, and really express it. And then ultimately, they wander out the door, right? So they’re wonder they’re wandering in silence, and they’re wandering out the door, or they’re going on social media. And then we get trends like Silent quitting, and things like that. And people are like, wait, what’s going on it now managers are accusing you of if you’re silent, quitting, and you’re like.
No, so it’s these types of things. I’ve had actually I’ve talked to end users all the time. And they’ll be like, yeah, yeah, manager who was like, I think you’re silent, quitting, and like, you’re just not engaged anymore. And this and they’re like, do you understand the full definition of what silent quitting means at this point, and like, I’m just going to give you my 40 hours that you’re owed and not going over and beyond. But there was this whole discussion, but not being able to have those real conversations to understand the perspective of a leader versus a individual contributor. And so that’s really where we’ve honed in on under, like, harnessing the power of that within gameplay. But for me, as an engineer, I always cared about feelings, because I was always feeling some type of way. I was always wondering about something like, Well, I wonder if you’re wondering too and then people would open up to me because I would already be vulnerable, I would offer up information first, and then they would reciprocate. And then like, that’s typically what happens when someone else opens up, you feel more comfortable to also be open. And if you create a space where it’s, you know, everyone’s about to do that. And it’s not just a few of you, and people can use something against you potentially, then you’re more.
So how do we how do companies take your platform and start to be because CFO gets involved at some point, Lauren? So how do we take this what sounds like a great product, a great learning and development tool, great employee engagement tool, but how do we how do we put an ROI to it right? Talk to me about that. That’s that’s what’s really going to come down to
So we always get this. Like, we don’t always get this question because we answer it when we like from the get go. But that was part of this I, we talked about because I said, with engineer, I want to quantify things. We’re collecting data like, I’m not a softened squid, I’m very much very analytical, very logical, show me numbers, show me proof. Like, don’t just tell me this, show me it. And so with us, we were focused on, we said, Okay, we know that we’re getting engagement. And so what does engagement mean? But also retention insights? And what do we do with those insights that we’re getting? So when we say engagement, retention insights, we collect metrics in five key areas. So we collect metrics for engagement, but for engagement, we’re not saying how often is someone using the keepwol+ platform? Are they completing their training? Are they this? No, we take the definition of what each end user defines engagement to be. And then we say, how is your team stacking up against your definition of engagement? And are we falling on the scale of one to 10? Where are we falling in? Is it getting better as you’re playing games and being able to express these are my expectations, this is where I want to see things go. So that’s one. So engagement. The other one is team dynamics. And when we talk about team dynamics, we’re talking about the day to day communication, as well as the and then your overall work environment with the people that you work with day in and day out. And so a lot of solutions are organization wide solutions. So top down solutions, and we at heart are a grassroots. So we’re focused on that functional team level. And then you can compile data at the organization level at a business unit level. So team dynamics, innovation, and so not like our ideas being encouraged, are they being stifled is professional development being encouraged or not. So we collect metrics and that we collect metrics for innovation. Oh, I think I said that innovation and and cultural intelligence. So perspectives past travel, different demographics, you come back, your backgrounds from and then job satisfaction. And Job satisfaction is likelihood of remaining at the organization. And also comfortability moving around the organization. And so we’ve assigned everything we collect is on a scale of one to 10 rating. We have heartbeat assessments that are taken before games are played, every game you play, you take a pulse assessment, and we measure in an asset, we provide statements that map back to those five key areas again, and then on a quarterly basis, we do another heartbeat assessment that measures those to see measurements from quarter to quarter over quarter. So you’re getting post checks for every time a games played, which our customers play on a monthly cadence, some on a bi weekly cadence, and then you’re also getting the quarterly checks as well. And so we’ve increased engagement by 49%, up to 49%. And we’ve increased the likelihood of retention by up to 30%. And this is with not just saying, oh, yeah, I’d like to stay in my company more, where are you are for how likely you are to exit out this door? Like, are you at an 8 I’m almost walking out, but also why? And so with giving those things, you know, how close and how many, what percentage, so you don’t know who because all that’s anonymous, so you know, how close and what percentage of folks, and then you also know the reasonings. Why so you can mitigate against those or you can prepare for it, if it’s something you can’t mitigate against, or it’s something you can’t change, at least now, you know, prepare for some folks to walk out the door and do it in a way that keeps the culture of the current team still solid.
So the way that I hear a lot of this is very much of this, like the softer side of like interpersonal relationships, so less. I, the way that I’ve heard is it’s a little less like specific to like my job in marketing or my job in sales and kind of being able to provide feedback on what that looks like. But you have kind of talked about, like upskilling, and leadership development and things of that nature. So how do you tie in some of I guess, the harder skill type items and tying that back to the games? Is there a way to do that? Or what are we looking at?
Yes. So you just mentioned that. So how we said the games are set up to be ambiguous. So all of our games are agnostic to industry and also agnostic to job function. But there’s questions that are asked for you to respond to what’s happening in your job function. So if you’re talking to a marketing team, all your answers for those games being played are going to be based around what is happening in your marketing department, doing your specific jobs, what needs to be improved, what processes you need to be put in place, things like that. So you’re still going to have those conversations to talking to About what elements are missing, or gaps or development areas are needed there. And so with that being said, You’ll, with our upskilling, in our reflection assessment, you’re putting in group goals. So things that you think your team as a whole need to improve upon. But then you’re also putting in those personal development goals. And those could be leadership goals, it could be your hard job skills in something that you want to get better in, or it could ultimately be like, I want to my person like my interpersonal skills. And so then what we do is we use machine learning or AI technology, to then take what’s put in those goals and provide you with right fit educational content in your preferred learning style. And so we help you feel we number one, we help you self recognize what’s the area of improvement I have through gameplay, you then get to document that in your reflection assessment. And then we provide you educational content, but we provide you with only two pieces so that you’re not overwhelmed by too much content, and you never get like you never see more than two pieces of content at one given time. And what’s really great about this, because one of the complaints, or one of the common problems that we hear from a lot of our customers is that, hey, we have these upskilling platforms that we have licenses to and you know, our LMS and things like that. And we’re not seeing employees utilize it beyond just the mandated training that’s required. And we’re like, well, we go talk to the employees employees say, when do I have time? What do I do the training in I don’t know what I need to be trained in like, and then, okay, now I feel like I know what I need to be trained in, or I’m open to doing training, and I go on there. And there’s hundreds, if not 1000s of courses to choose from which one do I choose? And so with us with our process, we’re like, we’ve solved the problem of time, because now it’s not let me just do this training for sake of training. But I recognize I have a gap and I want to improve in it. And then we solve the gap of well, so we saw the time we’ve solved the what do I need to improve on and then we’ve solved that searching part. You don’t have to search training comes to you. And it’s for why do I know
what I need to improve on? Where does that part? come in, again,
from the from gameplay. So when you do the research and assessment, then it’s like, what are person like? What, what do you want to personally develop? And they
got it? All right. It’s just this is really cool. I’m excited that I got to have you on the podcast today, I think this is a really cool addition. One thing I would say here is that I honestly have no idea how much your platform cost or what that looks like, I don’t want to get into that today. But more. I guess at a higher level, Lauren, it sounds like you’ve worked with some large companies, but say I’m an HR department in one or I’m in a small company, or maybe my CEO doesn’t believe in, you know, purchasing, you know, tools and software to help us improve our employee engagement. What can I do as an individual contributor or a leader or manager in my company to like, improve employee engagement or to maybe help other people put more stock in in improving the workplace culture? What are some basic tips that you would have for individual because you sound like you, you went through this yourself back in your career. So I’d love to hear from you what you what your advice would be.
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I mean, from an individual perspective, I think the most thing is the the biggest thing that you can do is go and try and have those less, you know, deeper beyond surface level conversations with folks just to start with because then you’re building that foundation. But in all honesty, if I’m being real, if we’re talking about what engagement looks like what it culture looks like, it’s not something that one person can fix, because they don’t have that ability to they only have control over their own selves, right? And how they approach a situation. And if they’re putting in all that effort themselves, they could become a bit of like, become down a bit if they’re not seeing that others are doing the same. Right. And so I think it starts with that number one is having a mindset of when you approach people people have the best intentions But I think, especially in the world that we’re living in right now, we’ve kind of geared towards being a little more pessimistic with people’s intentions than being on the optimistic side. And so I think, if we’re, if we’re starting somewhere, I think it’s changing our mindset of how we’re approaching situations and not coming into something thinking, Oh, this is the worst of the worst. But thinking that I know we’re trying really hard to to improve in these areas. This is where I’m seeing some gaps. And these are some of the ideas where I think that we can make a difference, but like, acknowledging that, I think, like I have, I’m believing that you, you also see this and you have good intention, and that you’re trying. But I also have some ideas too. So at least giving a nod to that rather than the world’s ending, everything’s falling, our culture is terrible. And then people are like, then then people get defensive, right? And they’re like, No, this seems good. This is I’m a
big believer that most people want to see progress. Most people want to see change for the good, right? I think good is ambiguous, as well as the term right, because what is good to me might be different than what good means to you. And so the only way that we make true progress is just by talking to people, right. And by giving each other grace and having conversations about whether it’s work or interpersonal conflict, if you can’t talk about it, you’re always going to have a wall up, it’s going to create friction, that only festers and gets worse with time. So I’m a real big believer in just being real and authentic with people. I think authenticity is such a game changer for any, especially young leaders. And I think we, I think a lot of people experience and I even talked about in pre show, like faking it until you make it right. A lot of people I think, early in their career, put up a facade of like, who, who somebody thinks that I’m supposed to be right. And I and I found that when I was just honest with my leaders, or asked for honest feedback and took my feedback or, you know, went and sought out more information. It always seemed to work well for me. And that’s just my own personal, like experiences. But I’ve just found that authenticity goes a lot further than trying to put up a weak facade of of who you hope to be. So
that’s a huge point. It’s a good point. And it’s a big thing. And I think as people enter the workforce, I think gen gen Z has been a lot better than millennials. I’m a millennial, as coming in, and like showcasing like, this is how I how I am authentically, but I do still think that being new into the workplace, you’re still trying, you’re you’re testing the waters, you’re seeing, like, how do people react here, how don’t they and not having that foundation of like having that foundation of trust is what makes asking that like feedback and getting that critical feedback from folks easier. Because once you know them, like or feel like you know them at some sort of level, then what they say, as the feedback, you know, is constructive. Rather than thinking, Oh, I should be defensive towards this or something like knowing that it’s coming from a good place for them. And so I think, always building that foundation first date makes all of those other things become easier.
I really enjoyed having you on today. It’s been great understanding more about your company, but I think that I might have to hit you back up and have you back on and we can get kind of into the nitty gritty of, of a personality types, and probably can talk about generational types. It sounds like you’re quite in tune with, with what it is to be a millennial, and just some of the things that you’ve talked about. You mentioned Gen Z. And sometimes I look at like, it’s strangely like, I feel like I must be getting old because I’m starting to judge that generation younger than me, right. But like, they feel different in the way that they they interact with, with people. And I’m sure that Gen X and Boomers felt the same way about millennials but I can I can truly tell that millennials care a lot more about it seems to me that we as millennials care a lot more about image and like projecting yourself whereas gen z, yeah, they don’t seem to care.
I think they care a little bit, but I think they’re recognizing that Well, I have I was gonna say, I have a Gen Z person on my team. And I learn from her every day but I think that’s the thing like I’m very open. I’m like, I want to understand because we’re building this type of product that we that has created that space for folks to really show up who they are, and who’s going to lead that path to doing that, and show that it’s cool to do that is this new generation coming into the workforce. And so when talking to my teammate, really like getting their insights, and also their thought and perspective for for it is a big deal. And I think when I came in as a millennial new to the workplace, it was always wait your turn, like, you have to bide your time. There’s a hierarchy to this. And so there were so many like, it didn’t matter how great you are, or how much skill you bring it was, do you have the years of experience, and I think we’ve seen a lot of that shift in this new workforce and things. And especially for me, when I’m bringing folks on to the team, I’m like, I don’t care if you’ve been somewhere for 10 years. And this was kind of what we were talking about, too. It’s like you’re a different perspective that you bring you came from the entertainment world and sports world, it’s like you have a whole different perspective and outlook on this. That’s the same as what I want in my startup and from an innovation perspective, because if we want to see the status quo change, we can’t have the same way of thinking and expect that we’re going to come up with the solution. And so I think we need to open our minds to that in the workplace to with the different generations. And same thing, even with older generations. It’s like, hey, bringing, like with this more innovative idea, I still want the generations before me to come back on here. Because that perspective, they’re still in the workplace now from that
aren’t leaving the workplace anytime soon. It seems like we’ve been begging and believe for like, 15 years now they won’t leave. So
I said this, oh, my gosh, I said this to my peers. I had a friend’s mom sent me their resume. And she’s like, Do you have any jobs for this? And I was looking at the resume. I was like, actually, I think you’d be really great fit for this position. But I my response to her when she sent it, it was like, I swear, you and my parents will not retire. Like really? She’s like, I want to come out of retirement and do that. And I’m like, why I want to retire? Like I’m not understand I
get it. No, what I have, like, I like to read and go try to form my own opinions about things. But it does seem like we Millennials probably have a lot more in common with boomers than it seems. And it and I think maybe it has to, it kind of comes down to who you’re raised by. But it seems like Gen X and, and Gen Z have a lot in common as well, and how they when when they were young and transitioning how they kind of saw the world. And just so I think it’s going to be interesting as we continue to go through our lives and see, whatever comes after Gen Z, they’re going to be more like us and a millennial. Yeah, you know, so
we’re talking about kids, my daughter, I don’t know if she’s gonna like, I think she’s, I think our generation of kids are called Gen alpha, first of all, so I think that’s the, that’s nomenclature for them. But she’s both like, I just feel like that generation is going to be even bolder than Gen Z because she is at six just speaks her mind strong and convictions. And I don’t know if that’s because she’s raised by
being what is millennial parenting? What does that effect going to be? Right? Like, I think about like, millennials were raised in a generation of like, kind of the beginning of like, everybody gets like a participation trophy type thing, right? And to be honest, I think millennials are a little bit more resistant to that mindset as parents themselves in some ways. And so it, it will be interesting to see how you know, what, what problems we’ve created with our children.
Yeah, I’m not speaking of participation. So when I was growing up, we didn’t get I didn’t get participation awards, and I don’t like that. Like, I went, No, winning, which often goes into the game plan. Like there’s competitiveness in that which puts more drive and effort into getting someone to try and do something. So that’s also one thing I like about gaming is that it’s competitive in nature, too. I just think it just pushes you to limit like to more extreme limits.
non competitive. People like to win every once in a while.
Yes, in everyone’s competitive, no one should say they’re not competitive because no one likes to lose, right. cannot show me someone I like
it. I may be indifferent about winning, but I don’t want to lose. Right. Right. I definitely I definitely understand that. So Lauren, this is all sounds amazing. You obviously have an infection personnel. already, how can people find you? Where can they where they work and they interact with your expertise online? How can they learn more about your company?
Yeah, so you can find me and you can interact with me. My website is Lauren Fitzpatrick shanks.com. So it’s my whole name, all put together.com. You can learn more about people at keep cool.com and then I’m on social media. So LinkedIn, my name, Twitter, my email. Yeah, email Lauren@keepwol.com.
Well, it’s been great having you on. Thanks again. We’ll probably love to have you back on on the talent tide. Again, with this Lauren I look forward to hopefully meeting you in person that at some point in the future. Thank you all for joining. You can listen to us and watch us on YouTube. You can listen to Apple, Spotify and any place that you get your podcasts Be sure to rate us and give us a review. And we look forward to seeing you all again next time. And have a great day. Thank you from the talent tide podcast.