About the speaker

Ian Cook is the VP of People Analytics at Visier, a leading people analytics platform that enables insight to help businesses keep their workforce and business thriving. We invited Ian to join us to discuss The Great Resignation after reading his article on this subject on HBR. 

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that a record 4.5 million people in the US quit their jobs in November 2021. Listen to learn how this workforce shift impacts revenue and what revenue leaders can do to ride the wave of The Great Resignation.

Is the Great Resignation Hurting Revenue?

Barry: I found Ian online after reading one of the articles he wrote for HBR, Who is Driving the Great Resignation? I had to talk to someone about this for our podcast because I think that soft skills and people drive an organization. This is important for our Revenue leaders podcast. It’s not just always about numbers, it’s the people that make those numbers. 

Ian: Thanks, Barry. I’m happy to be here. I would agree if I was a revenue leader, I would be extremely intrigued by the great resignation and wondering like, “Is this going to hurt me? Is this going to hit quota? Is this going to hit our ability to actually deliver to the business?” I think it’s an important question.

Barry: Before we get into the topic of staff retention, can you tell us about your background?

Ian: Yeah, for sure. So my background, I started life in consulting, always fascinated by how people organized to get work done to kind of perform at their best. And that led me into the use of people data to understand how do people perform, how do teams perform, how does a business perform? And using that insight to do it better, to understand where it’s working where it’s not. And so the last 10 years I’ve been part of Visier, building out the way that we help our clients solve that. We work globally at scale on that problem. We’ve got some pretty awesome results from it. It’s been a blast.

Barry: That’s awesome. I love awesome results and I love using data to do things that people haven’t been using data with. So again, we’ll have to touch base on that later in the podcast because it’s super interesting, at least to me and hopefully for our listeners. So let’s start with the most simple question, what is driving the great resignation, Ian?

Why are People Quitting Their Jobs? 

Ian: Yeah. So I mean first of all, let’s deal with the Great Resignation. That was what that thing was first called and in my mind, that’s the perspective of an employer. Now, what did we start to see? We saw people resigning. And resigning isn’t leaving the workforce, it’s resigning and going and working somewhere else, it’s doing a different kind of work. And so in our data where we track, we have about 9 million employee records there. It’s not survey-based, it’s actually sourced directly from the system that is used to keep records. We were looking at these trends, going like, “They look more, they click higher.” Not just in 2020 but in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, which is already a high year. So we were starting to see these elevated patterns, so we dug into it. It was like, “What is going on here?”

So we came across it by understanding these patterns in the data, people were leaving to go and work elsewhere in much, much bigger volumes than before. There is an alternative view, which led me to really frame this as a great reset, which is work is a relationship between an employer and an employee. So the employee’s perspective is like, “I’m not resigning, I’m resetting how I go to work, I’m resetting what work means for me, I’m resetting how I live my life.” And I think that’s the right kind of frame, this isn’t a one-or-the-other, it’s actually about that interchangeability.

The labor market is shifting, people’s choices are shifting. There’s a lot of things to unpack here. So what is driving the great resignation is this moment in time where a whole set of trends have crossed the tipping point. Some of those trends that are well known are certainly in the states, people staying in work for a lot longer. I’ve seen a chart from The Conference Board that shows this steady increase in people over 65 staying in work. That chart has reversed. So that takes a couple of million people out of your work labor force. Then there’s changes to the way people are working. Again, I’ve mostly got stats for the U.S., but other parts of North America and Europe are similar, just not as extreme. But the number of individuals who set themselves up as sole proprietors, I think it’s two or three times the average number. What they’re doing is accessing gig work. Instead of being an employee, they’re saying, “I can make as much money and have a better lifestyle through gig work.”

I’ve done gig work. When I started gig work, I had to knock on doors and say, “Hey, I’m Ian. Trust me, I can do it.” Nowadays you put in your digital assets to a platform, people find you, and you get work. So lots of the pieces have changed in terms of who does what work when and how do you work? So I think what’s driving the great resignation is the pandemic created the conditions for this tipping point and lots of different ways in which people engage with work all came about. And that meant there’s not a lot of people, there’s a lot of work, there’s skills mismatches, and a bunch of stuff to unpack there.

What is Driving the Great Resignation?

Barry: When did you start seeing these trends? What month in 2021 or was it even earlier than 2021?

Ian: It was even earlier. We started to see the trends starting around September, October of 2020. Sort of as it became clear that we could maintain some level of economic activity through the pandemic. As the initial shocks passed, people started to hire back, people started to move. We’re not 100% clear how many people were leaving the workforce in September.

We know in some instances, women were severely disadvantaged and therefore, they were actually leaving the workforce to go and take care of people. But that difference is sustained. What we know through 2021 is that women were leaving the workforce or resigning at a higher rate, but they were resigning to go elsewhere. Finding employers that were providing flexibility, finding employers where they could balance the demands on their personal lives, and the demands of work.

I think one of the first things as well, Barry is maybe I’ll just break down kind of how we looked at it.

Barry: Perfect. I would love that.

Ian: The first thing you would expect is, well, and again this was presented to us when we started to make the stories. Well, of course, there’s a higher resignation rate, there’s a whole bunch of young people in their 20s, they change jobs every three years. They didn’t change jobs last year, they’re just catching up. So of course, there’s a higher resignation rate. It’s the percentage that we’re going to leave, so we get more the next year. That was in the data. Absolutely. We saw the age band, the 25 to 30, one to two years tenure. That did kick back up, there was catch-up.

But that wasn’t all of it. We also looked at people with tenure in the five to 10, 10 to 15 years (mid-career employees). So they’ve been in their business a long time. Usually, you’re quite stable at work when you’ve been working for that long. I’m just crossing my ninth year anniversary with Visier, I’m really embedded in the culture. So in that population, again, they were 35 plus. That population saw an actually bigger increase in their rates. And so that isn’t necessarily delayed career mobility of the young folk, that is different career options.

And so things we’ve seen for experienced professionals are changing employers because they can go and work on something different, or people stepping out, as I said, to do gig work. And this is where it’s then interesting to look at the data on the event sets, which is what we have. And then listen to the social media, which is like, “I give up everything to go work on a farm in Wyoming,” kind of stories. Because you see those, you go like, “Everybody’s going to farms in Wyoming.” It’s like, “No, Wyoming probably couldn’t cope with that.” But a certain portion is going, and that portion is a material, and that portion could have an effect on your business.

The Long-Term Trend in Labor Participation is Down

Barry: Absolutely. And then obviously if they’re leaving, then that supply and demand makes it more intense for the employer in a tight labor market.

Ian: More intense. And I think there’s a caution here from the employee side, because sometimes employees go, “Oh, it’s an employee’s world. Employers are desperate. I will be able to demand anything.” And so they come in with a certain set of entitlement privileges. I would caution against that. Employers are still going to be looking for committed serious employees. So I would just caution a little against that, whilst you have power don’t abuse it, it never works on either side. But the initial wave… Again, what’s held this back is lots of people were saying, “Well, everybody’s just waiting to come back to work, it’ll be fine. All of these support finances that have kept people out of work will tail off and people will start to struggle and then they’ll be back to work.” But we’re not seeing that. The long-term trend in labor participation is trending down.

I read an article by the economist just on the weekend that said, “Labor economists are having trouble forecasting labor participation,” which made me laugh because we’ve been saying, “People are making different choices about work.” So the assumption that the number of people working goes back to what it was is flat out wrong.

There may be less people, they may work in different ways, you may need to access them in different ways. We don’t exactly know what those ways are, but we do know that they’re different. And so just many more kinds of these light indicators saying, “Don’t expect just to go out and hire.” You may not find the person, you may not find them where you want them, they may not have the skills you need. That notion of you’re playing in a different labor pool. And the sooner you wake up to that, the better prepared you’re going to be.

Barry: That makes a lot of sense. Before moving on again, I wanted to also take another pause and umderstand who are we talking about. It seems that we’re talking about software.

Ian: It’s everybody, our data set is structured by industry. And so again, a lot of the story in the press is around retail. We have a retail warehousing transportation group. They have the highest rates, but again, historically they’re hourly paid off and they have a high proportion of hourly-paid people. They’ve historically had the highest rates, so they’ve seen a kick up. But we have finance sector clients, they’ve seen an uptick. We have tech sector clients, they’ve seen an uptick. Healthcare as well is also, it’s a very tough space to be.

Again, I always show appreciation for what that sector has done to keep so many of us safe through the last two years. They have borne the brunt of a really tough space. The only space we haven’t seen in our data set would be manufacturing. It has stayed fairly steady in terms of rates, but well, we don’t have a massive manufacturing set so that may be that we’re dealing with more advanced manufacturers than other places.

But it’s not just technology, many different sectors are seeing this elevation. And that’s why we think it’s not a blip based on a certain sector being hot. Because that’s happened a lot with technology in the past, certain coding skills become famous, everybody runs to that. We’re seeing it across the board so we think it is more of a reset in how employees and employers navigate doing work together.

Market Trends Affect Hiring Rates

Barry: Now, that’s really interesting. Let me ask a follow-up question though. The past two months, the stock market has gone, specifically in tech and I apologize for our manufacturing listeners, but specifically in tech, the stock has dipped across the board. I know because you can just look at your Robin Hood or your Vanguard, et cetera. And would that change anything? Because once the public markets are lower, then the private markets will be lower, then they’ll be raising less money, then there’ll be less cash to allow employees to abuse the system a little bit, and allow people to hire more people.

Ian: Yes. Absolutely. So I mean, a lot of people have asked me the same question or a similar question. And the wage increase inflation spiral is the one thing that could change this whole dynamic, which tips us into a worse economic climate, in which case demand for people goes down, in which case the labor market could rebalance. But that’s not a supply-side change, that’s a demand-side change driven by fine economics.

I think there’s always an interplay between the two but demand could easily go down. If demand goes down, then supplies rebalances. It still comes down to a lot of people having spent two years living and working differently. Many of the most experienced, many of the ones that you need in your business to help you make money are going to hold on to as much of that, “This is how I like to work,” as they can.

And so it’s not just, “Will I have enough people?” The key for me is will I have the people I need, and what do I need to do to make sure I have a relationship with them? But it’s not just a straight transaction on capacity.

Finding the Right Talent for the Right Position

Ian: And this is a hiring process thing I’d love to emphasize. A lot of times people are looked at as a finance element. There is a seat, it costs x. What we don’t look at is well, if Jane is in the seat, we get three times the output. Then when Joe was in the seat, we got half the output. Any person who’s doing a good job of running the bath says, “Well, if one seat costs x and I can get three x or one x, well, I want three x.”

And so I think people lose sight of the need for the right kind of talent in the right place. Not everywhere, you can’t build your organization on A-players, that doesn’t work. But the right kind of talent in the right place is still going to be ridiculously competitive, and is still something that will differentiate your business from others, and is still something you need to be working on now because you can’t make it overnight. It takes years to grow that kind of capacity.

So whilst I don’t have a crystal ball. If I could forecast a recession, I would be doing something else. But there is the potential for the demand side for people to slow down and that will cause a readjustment. But I think the enduring trend is people opting into work in different ways. And we’ll see how it plays out, time will tell.

Employees and Employers are Resetting Expectations

Barry: The important piece is that there’s that shift, that reset. Is that what you called it? The reset.

Ian: I’ve seen other people call it a reset because I think it’s a resetting of the expectations employees are bringing to their work relationship with their employer and reciprocation on the side of the employer. One of the big pieces that we see is just around the digital mindset. When there’s winners and losers and there’s an abundance of jobs, people can go places where they’re able to do good work, they’re able to do meaningful work, they’re able to do that in circumstances that match their needs. Be it from a farm in Wyoming, be it from a condo in downtown Vancouver. And so more of those people have made those adjustments that will endure in the market.

So they’ve reset the way they engage with work. If companies continue just doing things the way they’ve done, you’ll only keep the people that it suited really closely. And if those aren’t the people you need, then you’re going to have a mismatch. So that quantity and quality have to be considered together. I think a reset is a good way to understand that there are two sides of this dynamic.

Barry: Super interesting. So let’s talk about how to access those ways to keep your employee because it seems like it’s much more than just recruiting a specific way. This is retainment, which maybe employers took for granted at some point, maybe they didn’t. Maybe you can guide me on if there needs to be a shift on the employers from all this change.

Ian: I think the way that we’ve been seeing the change is from what I’d call command and control to some level of co-creation. What I don’t support is the press kind of going like, “The employee has got all the cards, the employee is in control. Employers have to do what employees demand or else they’re going to lose.” I think that’s an oversimplified view.

So that’s where we go to this notion of co-creation, where instead of an executive sitting in their office going like, “Thou shalt,” it’s more a case of like, “Here’s the target team. Here’s the way we want to go forward. Here’s why it’s compelling. Here’s what’s interesting about it. What do you think is the best way to chase it?” We’ve done some research recently that we’re going to put out a bit around hybrid versus non-hybrid. But it’s employee choice versus worker mandated versus how do we do this?

And I think it’s a really good example of what we mean by co-creation. A lot of where we’re seeing success, excuse me, is the opportunity being delegated down to the business units to say, “Work out the right way of working to get as much done as you can.” And if that’s you two days in the office, three days at home, well, put those two days together because going home, office, home, office, home is really disruptive. Where if you start the week in the office and then you work the rest from home, you’ve kind of got blocks. But let’s not set policy at the center and have everybody try and follow and try to make one policy that works for everybody. Let’s set policy as, do the work where you get maximum benefit.

Half of, well, not half of my business, quarter of my business writes code. When we were all in the office, we had to mandate no meeting days because otherwise our code wasn’t getting written. Now folks are working from home, we’re getting better quality code because they work undisrupted. What we’re missing is the innovation and the connection that comes from being in a team. So as we go back with the development team to being hybrid, it will be intentional building of cameral sharing of knowledge and, “Hey, what do you think about it,” through that work as well as like, “You know what, go code at home because we love it and you love it, it makes us both more effective. And that’s that conversation as opposed to dreaming up that we can possibly make it right somehow from the top.

Barry: And I guess that’s interesting because that’s probably good for anything, like OKR also could be a co-creation, really a lot of business goals can be. You’re just bringing that this has to happen if you want to progress further with your people.

Ian: I believe so, again there’s always a caveat, it kind of depends on the sector you’re in. But I have a founding story that pushed me into the people side of data. I work in the generating industry and I was told a story by one of the managers. I was a young man at the time.

The person who drove the coal shifter around in the yard came to one manager one day and said, “I have an idea, I think it’ll save us money.” The manager said, “Go away. What do you know? You’re just the man who drives the truck.” He went away and drove the truck. A new manager comes in, the person comes back to him like, “I got this idea for how I think we could do this better.” He goes, “Oh, sure. Let’s try it.” So they put it in place, they tried it, they saved the business $2 million.

And it always stuck with me that the person doing the work knows it best if they’re committed, energized, and have a reason to be, they are likely the ones that know the answer to solving your problems. And so that whole methodology of running a business, anytime I’ve touched it, it’s way better than the person at the top knows everything, the person down below just does. That was how we built organizations when we had machines in this kind of manufacturing year.

Rarely do we just have machines, we often have machines and a whole bunch of intelligence. So accessing and enabling people to use their intelligence. Most of us want to do it, not everybody, but making your system to manage the 10% that don’t as opposed to making your system to elevate the 90% that do. I don’t think that’s the right way around.

How to Improve Employee Retention

Barry: I love that story, so thanks for sharing that. Okay, so we focused on one thing, the co-creation, what are other ways to improve employee retention rate and job satisfaction? What are other employee retention strategies to combat employee dissatisfaction?

Ian: Yeah. This goes back to kind of the core advice in the Harvard Business Review article. And again, it’s something that we do with our clients and it’s actually to focus on retention. Often the people’s side of the business is managed in silos. So a position’s empty, quick talent acquisition, try to fill it. I talk to lots of talent acquisition leaders right now. They’re almost as burnt out and crazy as the healthcare people, because there are no people there, they’re burning the midnight oil in a difficult market. So actually trying to retain folks.

And so that’s about identifying who are those people? And sometimes it may be about money, I can’t say it’s not money but money is a very sufficient element, it’s not always a winner. And so it’s engaging within the conversation of like, “How’s work going, do you see yourself being here? If not, why not? What would it take?” And sometimes very simple changes can actually make work meaningful. Again, we have a bunch of experienced developers, who’ve worked with the business for a while putting them onto proof of concept projects or projects that actually shape things that we may want to put in the product but we don’t know yet because we’ve got to do a whole bunch of research cycles. Using a piece of their time to do that, engaging in those conversations and saying things like, “What’s the balance in work that keeps you interested and satisfied and aligns with what the business needs?”

And it’s just keeping that, you can’t have that conversation with everybody, so our AI algorithm determines who’s at high risk based on random forest model that allows you to say, who should be prioritized for a conversation, how do we have that conversation skillfully, how do we then put things in place that helps that person stay. In a win-win way, we’re not manipulating, we’re not making them stay against their wishes. That doesn’t work with people, we’re understanding their wishes so that our wishes and their wishes align and therefore, they stay. Again, we’ve got these examples from clients that use our technology.

That way I think a lot of people are missing out on their retention story when they look at the great resignation. They often see it as quick to throw money out of talent acquisition, because that’s how we’re going to recover. Reality, you better shut the door before the horse is vaulted rather than just trying to find more horses. So I think a big piece of this is being talked about less, is that it is possible to build good retention strategies and they should just be always on. It’s not something to do as a reaction, just a difficult time, so that’s often too late. You actually have to have that as a kind of core habit in the business.

Barry: There’s a similar story I’ve been telling recently as a marketer, on subscription management. Don’t only focus on new business, focus on your subscription business, focus on the people already on.

Ian: Yeah, and don’t focus on your subscription two weeks before it’s closed. Like, “Hey, I know I haven’t talked to you for 11 and a half months, but you’re going to renew, aren’t you?”

Barry: Exactly. Not to bring people back to the money, not to get into that, but it’s a similar story in that sense.

Ian: It’s a very similar story. When you have a subscription business, you have a relationship. You have a relationship with an employee, it’s not a transaction. If you treat it as a transaction, as in I show up two weeks before just to claim my cash. If you treat it as a transaction, you’re going to end up in a less than optimal state. So I actually think it’s a great parallel Barry because it is. The difference between an employee and a robot is the robot has to be there, the employee doesn’t. So you have to have a relationship.

Digital Enablement Technologies for Better Employee Experience

Barry: I love that. So let’s talk about some other things like corporate culture. I think when COVID first started, people started talking about having one-on-ones. Now it’s been two years and people maybe are doing less one-on-one and less talking about, “How are you doing?” And more like, “Here’s the work.” We have to go back to the roots of having those one-on-one conversations. What are other ways companies can differentiate themselves from other companies? This is specifically with retainment, what are ways that they can keep their employees happy?

Ian: Yeah. There’s a big theme right now, which is it’s under the massive umbrella of employee experience. But I like to chunk it down to think about the tools that your employees get to use and think about that relative to how they manage their personal lives. Lots of organizations have been slow to adapt to what I would call digital enablement technologies, things that make work go easily. And so talking to some of our sales folks, they really appreciate what they’ve come to because in many ways we’ve made it really, really easy for them to serve a prospect, get information, get insight, get the kinds of assets that help that person. In the past they’d have had to beg around, talk to a bunch of people, assemble that, stick in an email, kind of fired it off.

Because when people have had an experience where it’s hard for me to do the things I have to do regularly. I know they work, but it’s not facilitated. It’s not designed as a process, nobody’s really understood what it makes, how it takes me to do work. And they know that ordering food on your own phone, super quick, super easy. Ordering shoes on your phone, super quick, super easy. So my personal life, I have this really fluid experience of being able to do work, buy things.

If I don’t have that same kind of fluid experience within work, I’m like, “This employer doesn’t really care about my work experience, doesn’t really care about making me effective.” And I talk to my buddies and they go, “Oh wow. Yeah, no, it’s not like that, you’re super cool.” Then that starts to lure people away and say, “Yeah, there are others, there’s more modern, there’s more kind of up with the times organizations that are there. I’m going to win if I go work for one of them.”

And so I think that understanding the employee journey that there have been lots of parallels drawn between the work that was done to understand the customer journey sort of through the 2010s to the 2020s is actually about understanding the employee journey, that all the different touchpoints. So that’s not just an HR problem, that’s a business concern or business area of focus to understand all the different touchpoints for the employee. Putting in technology that just puts wind under their wings, elevates their chance to win. Because most of us love winning.

Barry: Absolutely. I definitely do. So just to reiterate, one of the ways to help retain employees is to make sure to have the right technologies in place, so people are doing less manual work or less work that doesn’t make them passionate about the job.

Ian: Yeah. I think the classic is expenses. I’ve been working for about 30 years so I know what it used to take me to enter an expense form where it was on paper, it was all handwritten, you had a photocopy of the receipts. Now it’s a little bit more digital, but just think about all of those transactional things that can detract from making work easy. We’re automating a lot of that. There’s a lot of people building technologies that allow for that. And so it’s looking at that. Sometimes it’s even just asking employees like, “What one thing, if you did it faster would make the most difference to your outputs, would make the most difference to your productivity?” And then you can’t do it all at once, but chasing those kinds of benefits, it’s like, “Oh, they listened, they took action, this is easier. Fantastic. I want to work with these people.”

Barry: I love that. It’s just so simple when you say it. It just doesn’t happen.

Ian: Well, most people think retention is about buying donuts and I’m like, “Not really.” That has a very short time window.

Barry: Does pizza have a longer window? 

Ian: I think that depends on your industry, but yeah, maybe.

Barry: I’m thinking about this right now, so correct me if I misconstrued it, but it’s almost like a reset by the employer, not just from COVID, but just from the digitization of the world. I read recently that Amazon did $10 billion in B2B, so forget the B2C that we buy from as individuals, but $10 billion worth in one year just bought from businesses on Amazon business. So people are just used to the Amazon Business and now they’re doing it for their employees. So I feel like that also has shifted the way people view technology and things like that.

Ian: Absolutely. Because one of the other shifts that is clear in the data is the underlying demographic of the majority working population. Again, I only have U.S. stats, I apologize. But the boomer generation that came into work, when if you got a job you were grateful and you stayed and committed to the employer, that has been on the decline for a while, just purely on age. But the growing digital population is now the majority of the leadership as well as the employee, people doing the work. So the expectations have reset. It was an underlying trend, it pivoted during the pandemic. It is now time to take action because otherwise the people’s expectations are radically different. And so, yeah, that’s absolutely important.

Healthy Work-Life Balance 

Barry: And I’ll ask one more question about this and then I want to focus more on Visier because it’s so interesting. Work-life balance. You touched a bit about that before in the sense of hybrid, but work-life balance isn’t just about remote or not remote, it’s about maybe more or flexible hours. Is that something that you see is being discussed or people are focusing more on, especially with the wellness movement these days?

Ian: I think what’s being focused on is less about 9:00 to 5:00. So I would say it’s the removal of the things that broke flexibility versus anything else. Because I think a lot of people who have worked from home the way we have found they’re more productive, have found they’re more able to balance work commitments and home life commitments, and just like it. And it works for the employer and it works for the employee, so that there’s no reason to sort of take it away. We need to add on some of the things that maybe build up what’s missing that in-person collaboration, the innovation that comes from that. But we have lots of banking clients whose predominant model prior to the pandemic was like, “Oh, we can’t possibly have all these people work at home, we haven’t got the technology, we haven’t got the oversight. We haven’t got the whatever.” It’s been happening for two years. It’s been great. It’s worked for the people, it’s worked for the business. Why would we undo that?

So it’s been a massive experiment. So I think there was a little bit of an assumption of where it would unwind. I think what is actually being talked about more is like, “Well this is working.” What’s missing as opposed to let’s go backwards. And again, I think that a healthier conversation is like, “Knowing what we know now, how do we go forward and complete the picture versus just assuming we’re all going back to cubicles 9:00 to 5:00?

AI for Employee Retention

Barry: Yeah. No, absolutely. So let’s talk about Visier. And again, just for our listeners, Ian didn’t ask me to talk about Visier, I just thought it was a super cool technology so I have to learn more. Your technology… And again, we only have two more minutes. This has been an amazing discussion/conversation. But your technology can determine when people are going to churn without looking at their LinkedIn data. How does that work? That’s so cool.

Ian: Yeah, it is pretty cool, Barry. Let me explain real quick. Business intelligence, you take data, you shape it in some kind of analytic model, you put a chart on top so you can answer business questions. Visier basically does all of that, so for our enterprise clients we’ll take data from multiple different people, systems, payroll, core HR, survey data, whatever. We have a prebuilt analytic model so we know what’s in the data and then we distribute that out.

Classically, we’ll be going out to four or 500 managers within the business, so it’s not people data just for HR, it’s people data to empower the business. As part of that, we have a machine learning component that just teaches itself off history, trains itself off what’s good, what’s bad based on history, and then generates a probability and ranks people based on that probability of their likelihood of exit.

And again, we stay well away from the creepy side of AI. It’s like, “This person’s going to leave, quick, take their computer.” It’s not that stuff, it’s, “Here is a rank list of people with a likelihood of leaving based on other patterns. You might want to go and have a conversation with them.” It’s all about trying to improve the relationship as opposed to control it. And again, we’ve got some great results from clients where specifically keeping salespeople, it has a direct impact on revenue ramp, quota attainment. There is a clear line between continuance of population and revenue in.

So we’ve seen this substantive payback from being able to understand the employee from that level, tie it back to revenue, and run your retention programs. We do a bunch of other stuff in talent acquisition, diversity planning, and cost planning but the core of it is we build answers out of your people data, we do it very fast. We automate a bunch of it so that you can spend your time running your business basically.

Barry: I love that. So you can actually spend time running your business but then you can focus on your employees and you can focus on being happy, things like that. Well, Ian, I’m really happy I came across your article on HBR. I’m looking forward to staying in touch and continuing to learn from you. I’ll definitely follow Visier’s content because you mentioned that you guys are continuing to publish data on hybrids and retention. So our listeners should also do that. Thanks again for joining us.