Building a Better Workplace: Our POV
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make Others Successful, a podcast where we share insights, stories and strategies about how to build a better workplace. I'm joined by both Matt and Mike today. My name is Mitch, by the way. Today, our topic is all about our point of view.
Speaker 1:So something that kind of intertwines through everything that we do, and we haven't actually articulated it until very recently. And so we wanted to review that, talk through kind of our perspective and then give a little bit of history about how we got to be where we are and some context around that. And it goes a little bit into like a history of Bulb Digital, which is on our list to record an episode about. We aren't sure if the listeners will want that kind of episode. The origin story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the origin So if you are interested, leave us a comment or yeah, just let us know. We'd love to share if there's interest in that. But for today, we're going to be talking about kind of our perspective today and how we got to that. So let's start with a little bit of context around what was life like before we had articulated this, and then we'll get to kind of where we landed today.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about why we found it important to have a point of view. Sure. Like a lot of organizations don't necessarily have a defined or identified point of view. In the space that we are in and what we were doing, it was everybody, you know, when you think about marketing and sales and talking to people, saying, Hey, I'm really good at SharePoint, or I'm really good as a custom app developer, or I'm good in this technical thing, you only get to have a conversation so far with someone.
Speaker 1:You're a commodity.
Speaker 2:So one way to talk about it is you're commodity. It's really easy to say, well, I have somebody else who has a certification. They can do just as good as job as you. And there's definitely you're not having the same type of conversation that we like to have. So Mike and I oftentimes view projects and view work differently, and we didn't necessarily always understand that we looked at it differently because Mike and I have been doing stuff for a long, long time together, and so we feed off each other and we have very similar, like, thoughts about some of these things and perspective on these things, and so it's very easy for us to go, that's what everybody thinks, right?
Speaker 2:Right. It came to be when we started our own business and we started to kind of grow and get more people, that it became obvious that that's really not the case, right? Like people were coming to us, yes, because we knew technology and we understand the technology, but also because of the way we think about technology and the way we think about the problems, but communicating that with other people within our organization and with our customers was a challenge, right? And that took two folds, right? Two different perspectives on it.
Speaker 2:From an employee's perspective, I want them to understand what is important to us so they can value the same thing and provide the same experience to our customers. But to our customers, the sales experience needs to be different. If I'm talking to somebody and they're just talking about the technology need or the technology focus, I'm leaving part of who we are out of the conversation. And we want people to understand what it is that we, how we think and what we want, what we're trying to accomplish with customers, so that when they come talk to us, or when we talk to them, we're not trying to convince them of these things. We're not trying to-
Speaker 1:We're speaking the same language.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like we're all on the same page about this thing. I'm not just going to be delivering you from point A to point B, you're, we're on a journey together to have this outcome. And so that's really the why behind why we came up with a POV, right? Like why we try to, by come up, I mean, articulate it is probably the best I way to say
Speaker 1:actually, I was at a conference, it was over a year ago now and I listened to a session, shout out to Philip Morgan about POV and why you should have one and that put something on our backlog. We need to articulate this at some point and it sat for a while and I always felt like there was something here that was like known through osmosis, but we hadn't actually put it down anywhere.
Speaker 3:And that thing is honestly, it's a differentiator. And I think we, like you said, you alluded to it earlier, like we speak the same language and so it's hard to recognize that there's something different about how we deliver technologies based solutions and how others who we've worked with in the past deliver them. And so it was like, what? I need to explain that to somebody? Having that realization and then being able to actually like articulate it, write it down, it's been hugely valuable.
Speaker 1:So let's talk through today, our kind of overarching theme in its current form, it will probably evolve and it has evolved a lot over the years, but today how we look at it as we help align your people and streamline your business. And we've gone through lots of different things like we help you communicate, collaborate, automate, things like that, but we felt like this core, align your people and streamline your business was really important. Is there any context we want to give around that phrase, those phrases before we go into kind of our individual kind of principles? Yeah, so the two, a couple of
Speaker 2:things I would say is it's extremely broad. One of the reasons we struggle with identifying our point of view is that we have a point of view about a lot of things, And we're only in a very early stage of really, like really fully defining and documenting and expressing our point of view in all of the areas that we feel passionate about. And so the first thing you'll notice is that it's very broad. The second is that, as you said, it changes. We struggle with, should that include with technology?
Speaker 2:Should that
Speaker 1:On our website, I think it says with Microsoft three sixty five. Correct. So like
Speaker 2:Yep. Like there's, and none of those are necessarily wrong. We're still figuring out what one is the most appropriate for what our business is. But throughout all of them, they all have the same theme, intent, like goal. And so the words may change, but the what the underlying mission and goal is the same, which is we're not about the technology exclusively.
Speaker 2:We're not about just going and saying, we checked the box, you have a new system, great, wonderful. Yeah. We want to see transformation in your business. And that transformation for us is all about having the people in your organization more rowing together through the tools that we enable businesses to use and streamlining how the business is done. So trying to make it so that it's easier to do the things you're already doing and make that less of a burden so you can focus on more things, right?
Speaker 1:Hopefully this is all old news to people who have been listening, or at least the people who have been listening.
Speaker 2:It's in alignment.
Speaker 1:Like, yeah, it aligns with everything that we have been talking about. So as we try to help people align your people and streamline businesses, there's a couple different ways that we break that up and sort of beliefs that we have that I want to go through. The first one is streamlined workplaces make happy workplaces. I'll read our description first to hear Sure. Okay.
Speaker 1:A well organized and efficient workplace is the key to having employees who truly love what they do. When technology seamlessly integrates with your company culture and empowers your people, incredible things happen.
Speaker 2:That text that is really important is the outcomes that you get both in people feeling better and being able to do more are the things we're focused on. People can talk about and hear the word streamline and hear the words, you know, efficiency and they have connotations of, you know, you're just trying to make it so that-
Speaker 1:Eliminate jobs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, eliminate jobs and do, and that's not what we're about. That's not our goal. That's not our purpose. We're looking at it and saying, Hey, there are modern tools out there, which we'll get to the technology piece in the future, but, or in the next, but the technology things out there, there's methods out there, there's ways to think about this that can transform the way you're approaching this, that can enable so much more, right? It's the enable piece and the happy piece that is what we focus on.
Speaker 3:Well, look at the, just the absolute opposite of what you're describing, a scenario where somebody is manually exporting data and doing something with it and then sending it somewhere else and putting it together with other data and they do that three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 08:00 in the morning, right? Chances are that person's probably not real happy at 08:00 in the morning.
Speaker 2:They shouldn't be.
Speaker 3:On a Wednesday, right? And so, you know, that's a very specific thing, but that's one of the goals of the things that we do is to take those types of scenarios and get rid of them to the extent that we can.
Speaker 2:Like if you look at the streamlined workplace, being a happy workplace, another metaphor that I think would be really good to think about is friction. We're trying, friction creates heat, creates wear, creates damage in the system. We're trying to find, identify those areas and remove them. We're not trying to swap out the engine for a super powered turbo. We're trying to find those friction points and make those go away and alleviate those pains.
Speaker 1:If you didn't know, Matt helps lead a robotics team at a local high school. I imagine he is taking principles of friction and physics from that and applying it to
Speaker 2:Because nobody except for robots people know about friction.
Speaker 1:You should see this thing zip around the playing field. It's gotta have low friction somewhere. The next kind of belief is that we want to use technology as the enabler of, we want to use technology not to replace something, but to enable people to do their jobs better. So our description of this is technology should be an enabler, not a barrier to productivity and happiness at work. It should connect people and not isolate them in the realm of IT.
Speaker 1:That's why we're passionate about Microsoft three sixty five.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the tools Microsoft three sixty five has in the platform or in the ecosystem are so much more accessible to people than they were even five years ago. You know, that with the advent of the citizen developer, people who were doing all of those things in Excel now can basically turn that manual process into a completely automated process from start to finish.
Speaker 1:That's probably why we've attached to the Microsoft stack over the years, because like that role that it can play in people's work.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think there's two reasons for that. One is that it's become so much better than it has been, right? There used to be the bad old days of SharePoint that we're all too familiar with, but those days are gone. And then the other reality is, I don't know what percentage of the market or the world is just plugged into Microsoft three sixty five because they're using Outlook or whatever they've got, And everybody's so it's the natural fit, right? There's so many tools that are there now in that ecosystem that it's like, well, why go elsewhere in many respects.
Speaker 2:It's also ecosystem. That's probably one of the biggest things is that unlike a lot of the other tools that are available, they'll handle this or they'll handle that and they'll handle the other thing. And then you can get tools to integrate them all. The ecosystem does do lots of things all in one. Is it perfect?
Speaker 2:No. Does it do everything you ever wanted to? No. But as you said, it's getting better all the time and there is so much power and so much available in what you get.
Speaker 3:Yeah. One of the most fun questions that I like to ask and get answered when we're, especially when we're working with a potential new opportunity or people who are just getting plugged in, it's like, look at all of these tools, what can they do to make your business better? What can they do to help you accomplish your mission? That's such a cool question to be able
Speaker 1:to ask and then actually put into practice. Yeah, we love working with a blank slate and trying to map everything to the business. Let's talk a little bit more about the technology, like we could talk about Microsoft all day long, but the actual role of technology enabling someone to do their job better and calling out this part of the description, which is connecting people, not isolate them in the realm of IT. How have we seen that kind of evolve and why is this something that we want to call out?
Speaker 2:It's a complicated topic, honestly, and there's lots of different ways to look at it. One is the traditional role of IT within organizations as a cost center, as a means to an end, as a required necessary evil, if
Speaker 1:you will. They're usually evil a little bit.
Speaker 2:Hopefully the good kind of evil. Yeah. It's really trying to take and say, well, you shouldn't look at IT and you shouldn't look at technology as a necessary evil or as something that is just a means to an end, but integrated into your culture. Everybody has a phone in their pocket, that's technology. They all have apps, which is technology.
Speaker 2:They all use websites, which is technology. You've got email, which is technology. You've got chat messages now. There's this all of this technology is ingrained into what we do all the time, every day in our personal and professional lives. It's a fact that these things matter.
Speaker 2:And if you are just looking at them, you know, it's it's a little bit the shift away from I buy Windows 95 and I keep it in on my machine disconnected from the Internet and I run it until it dies. And then when it dies, I have somebody fix it so it can run some more, and I never look at getting an upgrade because I'm
Speaker 1:pushing out Call your grandson. I'm sure he'll help you.
Speaker 2:I'm pulling out, know, widgets, and it's still pushing out widgets. So why would I need never need ever need to upgrade?
Speaker 3:Wait a minute. You're still not using Windows 95? Yeah,
Speaker 2:versus, you know, cloud computing where you're getting updates all the time and you're getting refreshes all the time and you're this new thing's coming out and you're it's improving and it's changing and it's there's places for each of these, right? Like if you are in the manufacturing spaces, for example, you know, uptime and reliability and just continuing to do the same thing and reaping reward from your investment is an important aspect of a business. But for the sales guy trying to sell the widgets, probably wanna be using the most advanced marketing and strategy. Like, that's what you want for that type of role. Right?
Speaker 2:So it's not that we're saying you only should be doing cloud based stuff or whatever. For most humans that are interacting on a daily basis using technology, most of the time, you're going to want to figure out how to use that to enable what they're trying to do instead of as a means to an end of costs. You know, how many customers we've done custom engagements, custom software development projects that have transformed businesses, you know, tremendously. Even they they were using technology in the past, but it was so old, so outdated, so like, they just they never invested it, and we transformed them both in a onetime project, but then also in recurring, like, hey, every year you should be up like, you spent lots of money and you lost a lot of money by never changing, like just be sticking the same way forever and ever. Even though your business changed, you just stuck with the same old thing and trying to make it work.
Speaker 2:Right. Because you felt trapped because you didn't have a way. And even now today, we're doing that even more, as Mike was talking about with citizen developers and enabling customers to even have more input into what's happening and enable more change that happens more readily for those customers.
Speaker 3:So if there's anything you can count on, it's that your competitors are probably already doing it.
Speaker 2:Well, so yeah.
Speaker 3:That's one thing. And then the other thing I'll remind everybody, don't get trapped in the sunk cost prison. Yeah, we've talked
Speaker 1:about Yeah. That one
Speaker 2:And it's not just Excel, like you're speaking.
Speaker 3:No, it's
Speaker 2:not just Excel. It's like that customer I was talking about, they spent years to ten, twenty years on the same platform and it, you know, changed a little bit here a little bit, but largely the same over and over and over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. So technology, I feel like when we talk about this, it can often feel like overwhelming, like you need to be on the latest and greatest. That's not entirely what's being said, it's more about the appropriate part of the gradient that you need to choose to take technology, put it alongside your people and help them do their job.
Speaker 2:I have a have a really good way to talk about this, which is to say, it's not about the technology. If your Windows 95 is working for you and you're making it's doing what your business needs, stick on it. That's great. No problem. But you should be talking about that Windows 95 installation at least like every six months, every year.
Speaker 2:Right. Is it still the right thing? Right. Is there something else?
Speaker 3:Shout out to anybody out there who's still using Windows 95, we'd be happy to help you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:All right. So technology should enable the people. Next we have bringing culture and tech together. We believe that these two things should be very closely related. It's sort of similar to like the streamline work, like all of these are similar in nature, but I think come from a different frame of reference.
Speaker 1:So bringing culture and tech together, we say we understand that technology isn't just about software and hardware, it's about people. Microsoft three sixty five, this our sales page you guys, okay. Microsoft three sixty five does an exceptional job at bridging the gap between technology and culture. It's a tool that empowers your employees and enhances your workplace. So taking the sales ness out of that, let's talk about how close like that tech should be as a part of your culture.
Speaker 1:We've been talking about it as an enabler to your job, but like, how should it be central to a person and like a company and its culture?
Speaker 2:So if you look at technology as an enabler, you naturally have to start to incorporate it in your culture. Yeah. Because if you're going to start talking to your employees about how can we do this better? Like if you're saying, Hey, we're going to talk about like how to improve this, technology is one of the primary ways you might do that.
Speaker 3:When define a culture, you're literally talking about something that's like a central thing that the entirety of your organization is kind of focused on, right? They all understand it, they know what they're maybe aiming for that thing, right? And so culture is very much the way you might do something, right? So you figure out how to use technology to define the way that something gets done, that's cultural in your business, right? And so the more you do that, the more that you're building your culture and supporting it with technology, right?
Speaker 3:And once you do that, the beauty of something like that is you create those standards, you create that culture, you create that way, it becomes embedded in the tools and how you use them, It's less reliant on the people, so it's much easier to add people and say, look, this is our way, right? We have this documentation or we have this tool that we use to do this and here's how, right? And they plug into it. They're not inventing a new way to go about the same old process again, right? That all becomes part of
Speaker 1:your culture, which is honestly a much more rewarding way to be employed as opposed to reading a training manual, you know? Feel like this is one that is easy to look at and say, that's really difficult given like we're talking about these in a certain order, but why has bringing culture and tech together been challenging in like previous years with either clients or just historically? And like, how do we solve that?
Speaker 2:The leadership team does not feel empowered, I'll say it that way. Okay. To set the culture related to that. So one particular customer that we've been involved with allows their employees to choose whatever thing they want. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so then, you know, every single project is different and that's a huge pain point. And they come to us and talk about all our employees hate it because they can never, And they don't know what to struggle with saying absolutely that this is the way forward, right? And some of that's a technology thing. Like they're like, none, like for this one, there's this one thing it doesn't do well, so then I have to do it this way. But I would say, great, document that.
Speaker 2:This is the standard. Here's the areas where you can do different. But that takes work. That takes effort.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:for them, has been a struggle. You know, they, in that particular customer particular, moved in a way that kind of started to address some of those things in that way, but it's definitely a struggle. It's a struggle to, from a leadership perspective, be brave enough to say, we are gonna find one way. We're we're this is how we're gonna do it. Even if it doesn't meet all of your needs, if even if it's not perfectly the way it is.
Speaker 3:The stakes are different depending on the customer and the thing, But what I think you're saying is the price you pay for not choosing a way when it really matters is something like chaos and anxiety induced by chaos.
Speaker 2:Employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, you know, all of those things get impacted by that stuff. The other side of it would be employees who have a difficult time seeing the end. We encourage organizations to choose technology that can fit their culture. If you have a culture already, fit it in, make it work. Right.
Speaker 2:In cases where there's no, the culture is wrong, like you shouldn't have this culture, like we were
Speaker 3:Or just talking undefined. Undefined, You
Speaker 2:need to kind of make that transition. And with some people, it's hard to see the value that you're going to get out of the other end and trust that there's going to be value.
Speaker 1:I feel like this is another instance of this investment is not a pain killer. It's not an immediate feeling. No. There are some immediate feelings, but they're very much more on the lagging indicator side.
Speaker 2:This is the difference between technology as an enabler, which is the belief that technology does enable it, and a cultural shift that says, we believe that technology is an enabler, and so we are going to do things differently, trusting that it will be different. Yeah. And intranet is a, like, it's a common one for us to go back to, but like, you could take it to email, you could take it to Teams, you could take it to custom, you know, automations and work business work process. Right? Like, all of these things, it may take effort to automate this, like the Excel the Excel thing.
Speaker 2:It may maybe you don't know anything about doing any of the automation. It might take you three weeks to make something work for that. Right? But if you never have to, on Wednesday morning for an hour and a half, deal with an Excel file, the benefits, they return real quick.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What you what you just said was strategic mindset all day long.
Speaker 2:Which is the culture that we're
Speaker 3:talking now you're making me want to write the apps and automation guidebook.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is a good spot to plug our guidebook here that we just read about internal communication. Find more in the episode description. Last note before we move on, I feel like one of the things that that divides the culture and the tech too, just like tactically is tech is usually a separate department. Like they're literally separate.
Speaker 1:And so you need to bounce back and forth. They're not integrated and you have to put in support requests often and it just doesn't feel like there's an alignment and feel like people are working together. Okay, so that's good for bringing culture and tech together. Our fourth one is leveraging the familiar. So we say, we appreciate the value of familiarity.
Speaker 1:Microsoft is not only powerful, but also convenient because many organizations already have subscriptions to it. We believe in harnessing this familiarity to create a workplace where your employees can thrive. We've talked about this a little bit already, that Microsoft, a lot of people have Microsoft, but let's talk about how it kind of reduces that hurdle of people being willing to jump into trying something for the first time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, the familiarity that you have with a tool is better for everyone, IT, the end user, like all of the above. We, this isn't exclusive to just Microsoft. If you're a shop and you do Google and that's your stack, we would encourage you to stick within the stack, unless you have a really good reason to switch. Right. Right?
Speaker 2:We would say the same thing with Microsoft. The difference for us is that the vast majority of companies have at least Microsoft email. Like we've, we've went into lots of companies that have Microsoft email, and then they use Google Drive or they use something else, that is, and they just don't know what they don't know. And in those cases, we would say, stop doing that unless you really have a good reason for it and start just using what you already have. You'll get better integrations.
Speaker 2:You'll get better like overall, the experience will be better. Now we don't use Teams internally to communicate. Right?
Speaker 1:I pains him to say that.
Speaker 2:Others in the company aren't don't get pained when I say that. There's reasons. People do different stuff. That's okay. But as long as you're doing it with your eyes wide open, understanding what you're doing, that's okay.
Speaker 2:Right? We're not saying you have to do only one thing. The point of this is there is value in the familiar. There is tremendous value in the familiar beyond what you probably recognize, and you should lean that way to start.
Speaker 3:Well, I think the other way to say it might be to replace the word familiar with something like closeness, because oftentimes it's not like, oh, I know that thing, but it's more like, oh, well this thing is just here and it's easy to get to, right? I don't have to, like in many organizations who don't have strong governance, like many of those things are just there for you to start using and playing with like Power Automate and those types of things. And so you just give it a try, right? There's no real cost associated to it necessarily. Whereas if you wanted to like try something with an outside tool, you got to like go to the powers that be or do whatever you got to do and register another account.
Speaker 3:This one, you just go up to your waffle, right? It's there, try it, right? So it's closeness.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's closeness and also this particular toolset, the Microsoft toolset has been built generally speaking, pretty well in regards to things work similarly across the space.
Speaker 3:Yep. There's a common UI, there's a common
Speaker 2:Like Microsoft did a huge work to, like, we're gonna use Fluent UI across the board. All gonna
Speaker 1:be Spend a lot of time coming.
Speaker 2:You know, all of those things help with it. Yeah. And those are unique to this particular environment. Thank you, Others have similar like And they're all connected. And they're all
Speaker 3:like it's just easy, right?
Speaker 2:So it's closeness, but then also
Speaker 3:Easy ease of use, like common
Speaker 1:commonality. The thing that I'm thinking about as we're talking about this is the word familiar means it's been around and you're used to it and that typically takes time. And so just talking about the urgency of you, you want something to be familiar and so the sooner that you start down that path, the better. I know that the other angle is like, yeah, something is close and it's nearby, but we're familiar with, we're comfortable with Slack because it's familiar to us. We started using it, it became ingrained with what we do and we've really leaned into, you know, putting standards around it and bringing it in together with our culture.
Speaker 1:And so that familiarity benefits us a lot. All right, the last one that we have to talk about today is number five, empowering your workforce. So our mission is to empower your workforce through technology. We believe in creating a workplace where every employee feels connected, valued and inspired with Microsoft three sixty five as our ally. I use ChatGPT for some of this and this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I need to revise this a little bit. We can make this vision a reality. Hey, I don't have a copywriter on hand right now. I was are the copywriter. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mean, you used ChatGPT. I thought you were using like your own skills.
Speaker 3:Next time you prompt ChatGPT, ask it to operate as if it was a copywriter. See if
Speaker 1:it gets any better, which now CoPilot is available.
Speaker 3:It is, us.
Speaker 1:You guys, it's coming. Matt will feel relief and I'll be able to
Speaker 2:Still do what you want do.
Speaker 1:Use AI without bad taste in anyone's mouth. So let's get back to empowering your workforce. Like, we talked about how it enables people to do more, but can we talk about like the individual in their position, like how it makes them feel when all these things work together?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's really a culmination of lots of things. To empower your workforce, we don't mean necessarily, or honestly, particularly to go to someone and say, you get to do whatever you want. Just go try some stuff out and do whatever you want and see how it works. If you change your culture to prioritize and understand that technology can empower your business, if you leverage the things that your users are familiar with and enable people to leverage the things that they're familiar with, you will be empowering your workforce, right? These things build up on top of one another.
Speaker 2:And that last thing is we want, because leadership and the culture that's built at an organization clearly articulates where you're going, clearly articulates what the business values as a way to get there or is an appropriate way to get there, enables your employees to say, okay, I know the tools I can use. I know where we're trying to go. Let's come up with a plan. Right? And it is all of those things together.
Speaker 3:Yep. And I think a big part of that where we help some organizations is in things like governance, right? So you don't necessarily always just want to put all the tools in all the hands, right? You want to be thoughtful about that and strategic about that and, you know, wrap it in the appropriate rules, right? So that you mitigate any risk associated, right?
Speaker 3:But that's part of that thing. And the beauty of doing something like that and being thoughtful about that is then you can feel comfortable about releasing those people and just letting them try to accomplish the goal that they've got set before them.
Speaker 1:It's rewarding for those people too. Like, I'm thinking one lady that we have in our membership community has been building an app for a long time and it started from scratch and she had to upscale and it will become a big, like part of their business and she was given ownership of, hey, I need you to figure this out. When she realized she needed help with that, she was given authority to seek help, which was happened to be us and we helped work with her on building this thing. And so she just reported to us, I think it was earlier today, Hey, I'm just about done with this thing. I'm just doing cleanup.
Speaker 1:And I felt this like sense of excitement that she got to play a role in, I imagine really impacting their business and streamlining that process. So I think there's a ton of benefits that comes, like a business leader is naturally going to think, okay, how's this going to benefit my business and serve the greater purpose? But when you trace it all the way back down to the individual, I think there is like a real feeling that it gives the actual people of a little bit of ownership and power to influence and use their skills to serve a bigger thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And what little bit I know of her, I feel pretty strongly that she probably feels connected, valued and inspired.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I wanted to touch on the governance piece that Mike mentioned in that people often think of governance as not empowering, like the opposite of what this particular topic that we're talking about right now is. And I would say it's not actually.
Speaker 1:I don't know, you lock a lot of things down on me.
Speaker 2:I do not. This is not true.
Speaker 3:It unlocks governance. It unlocks freedom, it really does, Right?
Speaker 2:Well, it sets the boundaries.
Speaker 3:Because unlimited freedom is not what you're looking for. You're looking everyone needs rules. Like kids, when playing a game, you need rules to the game. Otherwise, the game's not fun. Correct.
Speaker 3:Right? And so that's all it is. These are the rules for the game and then go do everything
Speaker 1:And you can do
Speaker 2:it's not for us, when we talk about governance, it's not just about configuring the governance. Right. It's about communicating the governance and communicating why the governance is there, right? And then listening when people go, Oh, I have this thing that I'm doing and it doesn't meet your governance thing, but I understand why you're doing it, but this is kind of outside of that. What can we do?
Speaker 2:Right. And then you can have a real, like human to human conversation about how do we solve that problem and make it okay. Yep. Is it worth it? Is it like, you can instead of the common conversation which goes, IT just locks everything down and I can't do anything, and, like, they won't let me do anything and it's suffocating and doesn't let me do my job.
Speaker 2:The IT department is a communication and leadership, because ultimately it's leadership that's making these choices, is having a communication about what they're doing. They're also communicating what they're trying to accomplish, and the employee can go, hey, there's a conflict here. Let's raise that up. Like, what do what do I do? Like, you told me to do this.
Speaker 2:This is the thing that I have to do this, and I can't
Speaker 1:do it. Like, what what do I do? Yeah.
Speaker 2:And now you have real meaningful things that someone can actually talk about instead of just talking about the very intangible, I can't do my job. Like, what does that mean? What is the specific thing that's the problem? Without the goals, without the explanation of the why, without like all of these things, you can't have that conversation.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. And I was just going to look up, we did do a previous episode about like improving adoption and episode 23, adopting technology. We talk about governance quite a bit in I that think it kind of goes back to that, you know, bringing culture and tech together. Like as soon as you view IT as the overlords that just lock everything down and
Speaker 2:the become the idol. Stop you from doing everything.
Speaker 1:It's kind of real. I'm not going to say it's all fake. Oh my goodness. But, Hey, hey, hey, you try to put
Speaker 3:people in cages too, you know.
Speaker 1:I have been known. Anyway, I would just say, just double down on what Matt's saying is there is a balance there that can really serve the people and still be secure for those in IT. Okay. I think that wraps up holistic perspective on our point of view, how we look at, you know, when we're engaging with a client and it's really our perspective on the workplace and how we think things should go. Would love to know if any of this resonated with you, but for now we're going to sign off and thanks guys for the conversation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1:And we'll see you next time.
Speaker 2:See you next time.
Speaker 1:Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app so you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes. This podcast is hosted by the team members of Bulk Digital, and special thanks to Eric Veeneman for our music tracks and producing this episode. If you have any questions for us, head to makeotherssuccessful.com, and you can get in touch with us there. You'll also find a lot of blogs and videos and content that will help you modernize your workplace and get the most out of Office three sixty five.
Speaker 1:Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.
