Employee Disillusionment And What Companies Can Do To Relieve Some Of The Pressures With Kim Rohrer of Oyster

William Tincup: [00:00:00] This is William Tincup, and you are listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast today with Kim on From Oyster. And our topic is, it’s really gonna be about disillusionment, however, it’s a longer title, so let’s get through it, employee Disillusionment and what companies can do to relieve some of the pressures.

But again, at the heart of this is employee disillusionment, which is gonna be fantastic. Haven’t really talked about this. Kim, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself and oyster?

Kim Rohrer: [00:01:00] Yeah, absolutely. Hi I’m Kim Rower. I’m our principal people partner here at Oyster. I say shorthand for that is, think of it like a principal engineer, but for people stuff, and I think oyster is an interesting.

Company to be at right now because we are over 600 employees across 70 countries. We’re globally distributed with no offices. Or you could say we have over 600 offices, it’s everyone works from their own space. And we are a global employment platform. We help companies everywhere, hire people anywhere.

So we are living our own product vision with a mission to, to increase opportunity around the world with. With people being able to be hired everywhere, not just in traditional. Kind of high growth tech markets. I love

William Tincup: that. Yeah. Y’all, y’all just release the new compensation or reward, total recognition?

Kim Rohrer: Yeah. Our total rewards tool. Yeah. We’re one of the hardest things that companies that are globally distributed are dealing with is how do we pay people equitably around the world. There’s been a debate [00:02:00] for the last few years longer than that, but it’s really surfaced in the last few years as more people have gone remote of.

Location based pay versus geographic the agnostic pay. And we don’t purport to have the answer for every company, of course. Every company needs to do what’s right for them, but depending on the compensation philosophy you land on We aim to provide some tools to help you figure out how to best implement that philosophy and how to think about benefits and compensation and perks and kinda the total rewards package for a globally distributed organization.

And that might be that you have some employees in San Francisco and some employees in London. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a hundred percent. Distributed across 70 countries all around the world. Cause right not many companies are that, quite that level of distributed. But that regardless of where in the world your employees are and where you wanna be hiring people, we wanna help you do that in the easiest, lowest lift way possible, but still focuses on supporting [00:03:00] the employees, making lives easier for your HR team and staying compliant, which is.

It’s a very tricky task. A hundred percent. We figure if we have to do it for ourselves, then we can do it for our customers.

William Tincup: I love it when HR tech companies use their own product, I’m always shocked when they don’t. Yeah. But I’m so glad that y’all use Oyster to Yeah. Again, you’re gonna find things as users Yeah.

That will actually inform the product and product managers and stuff like that, so that’s wonderful. Yeah.

Kim Rohrer: And we’re super integrated with our product team and our customer team. Even our sales team, they’re. It’s nice as a person who’s been in this field for a long time, to finally feel like I’m working at a company where like my input matters to the product and the product team understands that and they wanna know how we’re finding the product and what challenges we’re having.

And they’ll host like little AMA sessions with us to be like, what is your, what is hard about your job? Let’s see if we can fix it. And,

William Tincup: and what’s great about it is, Typically on the product side, especially they get so into the product that they think that something’s great. You’ll [00:04:00] develop it and they’ll launch it and they’re won. Like, why didn’t people use it? And so it’s like then, working with real PR or practitioners and they’re like, yeah, exactly. I, that was horrible. I hated that.

Kim Rohrer: Yeah. Same. I can’t tell you the number of HR tech companies I’ve worked with or advised were.

I’m like, have you talked to any actual users? Have you talked to your own internal team? Yeah. I feel very grateful to be at a company that recognizes that they have 30 or so of their I C P internally as a resource that they can consult on. On things. It’s great.

William Tincup: I love it. Okay, so disillusionment.

Disillusionment. Yes. Oh my goodness. This is gonna be great because, okay, so employee dis disillusionment, and how do we relieve some of that, those pressures, the stress, et cetera, that comes from disillusionment. So let’s just talk about disillusionment for a moment. What is that? What have you seen?

How does that represent itself or how does it how does it appear to you because. Like when people used to really, at the early stages of engagement, I [00:05:00] always got engagement confused with discretionary effort. Yeah.

Kim Rohrer: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s, for me, like I look at engagement as the measure of.

Not how committed people are to your company in terms of how much they’re willing to go above and beyond outside their job duties. But like how connected they feel to the organization. Do they, it’s it’s your version of a net promoter score. Yep. Do people recommend working there to their friends?

Do people want to stay at your company? Do people look at your company as a place to grow their careers? Are they satisfied with their workload? We’ve, I’ve been working with Culture Amp for a long time. They have a, their own measurement of how they score engagement based on a number of factors.

Engagement has become now almost so commonplace as a measurement that I think we’ve, we’re forgetting what it means. And engagement doesn’t necessarily mean retention at all costs and engagement [00:06:00] doesn’t necessarily mean, putting in long hours and doing work that’s. Outside of your core job, it’s just, it’s a measure of like how people feel about working for your company.

How connected do they feel being there? And what I’ve seen over the last, really the last six to 12 months or so, is, people are tired. Yeah. People who’ve been working through a pandemic for three years and this. In addition to the pandemic, there’s been all the other shit going on in the world, which, oh, yeah.

We talk about a lot in this report. It’s like you have climate change, you have civil unrest, you have wars, you have ec, economic collapses. You have there’s so much shit going on in the world right now, even the like, Even when employees are going above and beyond, it feels like it’s not enough for some companies, right?

And for people to be doing like just their job and being like, Engaged enough to like, [00:07:00] feel connected to their company. That’s not seen as enough. When really that’s the maximum that a lot of people can contribute right

William Tincup: now. That’s the again, their capacity. Like

Kim Rohrer: we gotta set the bar differently.

William Tincup: Uhhuh it’s a recalibration of sorts. Yeah. In a sense of, okay, we’ve all been through this kind of horrible situation. I think we rose to the occasion by and large. Yeah. I think as a society, a lot of companies, Again, some companies did not farewell, some companies flourished, got all that.

But I think as a society by and large, we were hit with, hurricane Katrina in a sense of all of the worst things that could happen happened at once and it happened. Quickly and we responded. But we’ve underestimated how that’s impacted. Everyone. Leaders, right? Like we, this is easy to talk about employees, but you know what?

Leaders are just as burnout. Salespeople, absolutely burnout. Everyone is burnt out. Everyone’s, so that’s

Kim Rohrer: why I hate these. Like all of these [00:08:00] trendy catchphrases around, like it’s quiet, quitting, it’s minimalist Mondays. It’s no, I’m just tired. It’s just people showing up the best they possibly can. A hundred percent.

And like, why are we, I know why it’s for clicks, right? Yeah. Like why do we need a little quippy catchphrase to describe. Something that’s very normal and instead of making it this very scary are your workers quiet, quitting and only working? There’s standard 40 hours a week. What if it was okay to not show up for a full 40 hours a week every single week?

Every single day? Yeah. What if we gave ourselves some grace and gave each other some grace to recognize the immense. Pressures that people are under and have been under for the last several years. Oh, a hundred hundred percent. Recalibrate our expectations for what it means to be engaged and what it means to show up at work.

William Tincup: It’s I’m a napper, so I’ve always been this way. Yeah. Even when I worked in an office, I was one of those people that I would nap 20 minutes. Like I, I can fall asleep anywhere at any time, you could be in a nightclub. It’s a gift. Yeah. Yep. But if I like through the pandemic, because [00:09:00] there was more time I took more naps.

Okay. But now I don’t have as much time. I still take naps. I still schedule naps. Like it’s like I, you know what you need. I know what I need. And I think that the pandemic, it recentered people around what do you need to, right to, to survive. Okay. Comma, thrive. Right and thrive. The algebra has changed for that for you.

If and that’s okay. Yeah if you were a workaholic before, that’s cool. You’re workaholic after. That’s cool. But Right. By and large, most people have relooked. They’ve reevaluated their life and their

Kim Rohrer: priorities. Exactly. Exactly. And there the disillusionment comes from having that kind of individual awakening and realizing.

That’s not gonna be possible for me at the company that I’m at, or how can I make that possible for me at the company that I’m at? If they look at. Here’s what I need. What I need is a flexible schedule because my kids’ daycare hours are still not back to what they normally [00:10:00] were before the pandemic.

And I need to be able to leave at an earlier time to pick up my kid. And I need to be able to have the flexibility to change my schedule around if you’re, I use that example cuz it’s one of the most common ones that I hear about. It is in fact in my own household. If your employer is not going to allow that, because for them, like there are very specific hours that they want you to maintain and there’s not like a clear reason for that except, butts and seats visibility.

You are going to become disillusioned and disconnected from that work environment because you realize wow, my company doesn’t see me as a person. No. My company sees me as. A body in a chair that needs to be sitting in this chair for a certain amount of time. It doesn’t matter to the quality of my work.

Doesn’t matter. Whether I get all of my work done, what my output is, it matters. That’s if they can see me.

William Tincup: That’s what drives me around about the return to office is I honestly believe that all of it is just about real estate. Yeah. Oh yeah. And command and control.

Kim Rohrer: They’ve got big real estate bills on their, that’s right.

On their[00:11:00] on their budget sheets. That’s right. And he’s

William Tincup: gotta validate it and command a control. That comes out of the like it came outta World War ii, it came out of manufacturing. It’s just this idea, I have to see you work in order to believe that you are working, which we disproved during three years of working remotely.

Like we’ve shown that we could be productive. Why are we doing this bit? But I think the emotional toll is something that you’re kind you’re keying in for me is like the expectation of others. And the fear of perceived failure. Like this thing that we carry along with ourselves as employees.

It’s again, 40 hours, we’ll use that as just an arbitrary thing. I can’t do that at a hundred percent. I can do it, but there’s gonna be, there’s gonna be the, there’s, I’m not gonna be at a hundred percent. That’s just is what it is now, that expectation of others. It’s no, I expect you to work 50 hours a week.

At a hundred percent. So I can’t meet your expectation. And so I think people are [00:12:00] walking around with a bunch of emotional baggage of they just don’t feel like they’re doing great in their jobs. Constantly. Constantly. And it’s like, what do, there is no way to win. No, it’s not.

It’s it’s not a winnable game. Exactly. So what do we do solutions wise? What do we do to help them understand it’s okay? A and B? So the employee side, but also the manager side Yeah. Of resetting their expectations as to what is a great work week or what is a great relationship with an employee, et cetera.

Kim Rohrer: I love that framing of what is a great work week, because I think that’s something that we don’t really define in a lot of roles. I think there are some roles where there’s there’s a quota that you have to meet or there’s a number of tickets you have to respond to where you work out your goals for the year and the quarter and the month and the day, and like on average we need to achieve this many.

This much in sales at this month, or this many tickets resolved at this speed, or whatever the job may be. But there’s not a [00:13:00] lot of flexibility in that. And I think for leaders to be able to define what does a great week look like and what does a good enough week look like? Yeah. And knowing that every week is not gonna be a great week, and that’s okay.

Yeah. And like as long as, over the course of the year you’re averaging. X, Y, Z or meeting your numbers, like you can have some weeks that are good enough. You can have some weeks that are bad. You can have some weeks that are great, and it all evens out because our lives are not consistent.

And so how can we expect our performance to be consistent day by day, week by week? We’re not robots like people get sick, people’s families get sick. People just have off days like you have to allow for the spectrum of human experience in your. Planning.

William Tincup: But in 19 or 2019 pre pandemic, we, that was us too.

Kim Rohrer: Yeah. I’m not saying it was good before. I’m not saying we had it right before the pandemic. Okay, good. This is what drives me. So this is what drives me. That’s about this return, we gotta return to normal, we gotta return to pre pandemic. [00:14:00] Oh yeah. Like it was so crazy he wasn’t working before. No, it was totally.

The pandemic. Just, we used to say this at 10 Labs, a company that I. Founded around supporting caregivers at work. We used to talk about how the pandemic just laid bare all of the struggles that we were having already. It just made it so that we couldn’t hide them as well. We couldn’t mask our struggles.

That’s right. Because there was no way to do that. We were all in, like in the deeply entrenched. Fear and a new world and everyone was in it together and we were all peeking into each other’s houses and meeting each other’s families and struggling with mysterious illnesses and all of this shit was happening.

There was no hiding. There was no pretending it was okay. That doesn’t mean it was okay before, it just means we had an easier time pretending before because we could leave all of that stuff behind and There’s the the trope of you stand outside the office door and shake off whatever you had and you like put on your smile and burst through the door, like ready for work.

It’s that wasn’t good. It wasn’t like a good way of living. It just was the way we were living. And so [00:15:00] now we have an opportunity to reinvent our relationship to work, whether you’re going into an office or not, there’s an opportunity for companies and employees to have more candid conversations about what does it look like to show up for work every day.

What does that mean? Like why do, and why is it that way? At our company, I think I, I saw this. I was on LinkedIn a couple months ago about someone talking about professional work attire for Zoom meetings, and it’s just like I had to read it a couple times. I was like, what is that?

William Tincup: You mean you, you mean?

Okay.

Kim Rohrer: Yeah. I was like, I don’t understand. And, but reading it, it was very eye-opening for me as a person who has not had to wear Oh yeah. A uniform or a suit or anything ever in my career that there were companies that are expecting people to show up for work calls in like a full soup sitting at their kitchen table.

Oh, that’s insane. Is what is the reason, like if you can justify it, if you can explain like why that’s important to your company and your culture and your business, then fine, that’s who you are. Like [00:16:00] you do you, but if it’s just arbitrary because That’s the way people dress for work. Then maybe it’s time to rethink some of these practices and that.

That’s what I think companies need to do, not just individual employees or individual line managers, but like company leadership from the top down needs to identify what is important to us for business success and the longevity of our company, and our ability to be a business and what is important to us culturally because of how we wanna run that business and the type of employer we wanna be, and using those.

Kind of core principles to define how you support people and what types of benefits you provide and how you expect people to show up on Zoom or not, or how you schedule meetings or how you work asynchronously. All of these things. I can espouse what I think are best practices and principles based on previous companies I’ve worked for, but it’s so individual to the company that you really have to start with.

What do we need? For the business to su sus to sustain itself, [00:17:00] and what kind of company do we wanna be? And if you start there, then you can make informed, consistent decisions about the rest of the employee experience. So

William Tincup: where do we start in terms of relieving some of these pressures? Is it with the managers or is it like reconfiguring training?

Let’s just do, so use, use our words, let’s, we’re gonna train and retrain the managers for and get their expectations. Or is it, we focus on the employees and get them to understand what’s okay? And like we’re. Again, in a perfect world you do both at the same time, right? Yeah.

Kim Rohrer: I was gonna say, really I think focusing on that kind of mid-level of management is really important because it’s one thing for leaders to say we believe in taking time off and.

Take care of your mental health and be with your family and all these things. And it’s really easy for the employee level to look at that and say yeah, of course you can do that. You’re the CEO or you’re the, you’re a vp, of course you own schedule, right? Like you can [00:18:00] make your own schedule.

You’re the SVP of whatever, right? And then it’s really easy also to tell employees like, Hey, take your time off. Do your thing like work life balance. But if employees aren’t getting the reassurance from their manager, who’s usually like the first or second line manager, they’re not gonna feel empowered to do it.

And if they’re only seeing the example from the very top, they’re not gonna feel empowered to do it. Go. We need that kind of middle level of management to be taking vacation, to be speaking openly about mental health, to be Being candid about the blocks that they have in their day. Put those childcare pickups on your calendar.

Put those maps on your calendar. Talk to your team about how you’re ending early because your brain has just stopped working that day. And you need to zone out for a bit. Like managers need to stop with the like, martyred M of I’m a manager, so I need to be everything and be strong for my team.

And like managers need to be human too. Yeah. And if employees see their managers being human, they will feel more comfortable being human. [00:19:00]

William Tincup: And it gets to vulnerability, exactly like feeling vulnerable is creating space to be vulnerable. Exactly. Creating space for a manager to like it. It’s not only okay to take a vacation, you’re actually hurting folks.

Not

Kim Rohrer: taking a vacation. It is expected that you take a vacation. I, in my very early startup days, I had a team of founders who just just didn’t take vacations. It wasn’t their thing. They didn’t, they liked to work. They were founders. They worked all the time. And it got to a point where I had to make them take fake vacations because the visibility of them never taking vacation was impacting the team.

I say I need you to not work for the next week, pick a week and I need you to not work. But I can’t. I’ve got this board meeting, I’ve got this. This okay, I’m changing my mind to the rule is you can’t do any work that is visible to anyone on the team, right? You can just lock yourself in your house and work on your board deck or whatever you need to do, but.

To the rest of the team, they need to think that you’re taking time off. That was like the compromises came to, because I couldn’t get them to [00:20:00] actually take time off at that point. And I had a VP of engineering later in my career who he was like, I don’t know how to get my team to take more time off cuz it’s just not my thing.

I like to take one vacation every several years and save up all my PTO and take like a three or four week vacation every few years. But that doesn’t mean that’s what I expect my team to do, right? I want them to take more time off, but like, how do I make them feel okay with it without me having to lead by that example?

And I, I told him like, tell them what you just told me. Yeah. However you wanna use your time off is up to you. If you’re a person that wants to do three day weekends every month, or you’re a person that wants to save it all up and do one big month long trip around the world, like that’s up to you. But just because.

You don’t see me taking regular short-term vacations doesn’t mean that I don’t want you to do it. And it’s, again, it’s about being vulnerable and being human with each other and being really clear about your expectations.

William Tincup: This mirrors my, my love hate relationship with the unlimited p t o strategy.

Yes [00:21:00] because I have so much to say about it, I un I, early in my career, I was a huge believer in fact winning best places to work awards and all that type stuff. Uhhuh As I started to really understand it it’s a con that, that it, the, you un because it’s unlimited, you think people will just, they’ll use it.

But because the mentality of managers is that, We’re gonna work, we’re gonna, we have clients, we have stuff. There is no if you come in, especially back then, if you come in and say, Hey, I’m gonna go to the museum for, tomorrow, I’m just gonna hang out, look at art. Something was wrong with you.

That was crazy. Yeah. And it’s like it’s, we have unlimited pto. Like I should be able to,

Kim Rohrer: I don’t even have to tell you what I’m doing, the culture. It’s, to me it’s it’s not about the policy, it’s about the culture. You could have unlimited PTO or you could have. 10 days of P T O.

And it doesn’t matter if the policy is, it’s not okay to take it. And I think, some people think if I have my 10 days, I know that those are mine to take whenever wanna take it. But you [00:22:00] still get people who don’t use it cuz they’re like I have these days, but I feel like I can’t really use them.

I think the only way to make unlimited policies work. Is to have a culture of taking time off. And in that sense, like it doesn’t matter how many days allow, you allow, it’s your culture around time off. It’s how you celebrate people’s time off. In the same way you celebrate people’s work achievements.

I’ve seen

William Tincup: one company do this really well, where what they did is they created a hashtag with their company name and then pT pto. And so on Instagram. Basically. People would just take pictures of their socks, that’s great. Or whatever. If they were going somewhere, they’d do that.

Or if they’re just taking, a day off and watching tv. Totally. They’d take a picture of the tv. Yeah. And it became a bit like, it was a funny, like totally. You know what I, there’s a, here’s seven bottles of wine. I’m gonna take a picture of that. It was really funny, like people would like, get in, go.

This is funny. I love that.

Kim Rohrer: I might steal that idea. We have something like that [00:23:00] internally. We have our Oyster gram. Yeah. Photo sharing channel. We have a travel channel where people share various places that they’ve gone or think that they’re doing. What’s

William Tincup: your, when your internal thing, have you done the your pets of oyster?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We’ve got, that’s a fun bit. We’ve

Kim Rohrer: got a, we’ve got a pets channel and a kids’ channel. Oh yeah. We have social channels for just about any affinity you can think of. Oh, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Which is great. But the thing that I love is that when people come back from their travels, we have this norm of sharing pictures from your pto.

And. And I even, I occasionally will take a PT O day That’s just like a personal wellbeing, mental health day. Yeah. Because as as a fellow parent, when you have kids, there are no vacations, only trips. And if I actually want a vacation day, I have to take it on a day when my kids are in school.

And that doesn’t mean that’s any less valid as a PTO choice, but it’s like I don’t wanna only use my PTO to like, Stay home with a sick kid or take my kids to the in-laws or to my parents’ house or like I want just tell you, sometimes use my pto. [00:24:00] For me, I like to go get lunch or go get a massage or sit on the couch and read a book all day.

And so I share those too because I think it’s all valuable and we take care of ourselves and our mental health in a lot of different ways and just normalizing that diversity of experience. For people, I think also helps, to bring it back to our topic. And you’re like, it helps with the disillusionment, right?

If you feel like you can take care of yourself in the way that is most impactful for your life, then you are gonna feel better about showing up for work. If you feel like you have to hide yourself or only take care of yourself in the very specific, strict ways that your company has said it’s okay to take care of yourself, you’re gonna feel less engaged.

You’re gonna feel, that sense of disillusionment with your work life.

William Tincup: Yeah, I think it’s, as you said, talking about it, openly with people like, hey, dissolution is a thing, and we’re all going through it. So everyone is going, the board is going through it. Our clients are going through everyone’s

Kim Rohrer: going through the same, everyone is dealing with the same.

That’s

William Tincup: okay. Yeah. And [00:25:00] again, kinda creating that space for It’s okay. And in discourse and helping, getting, helping people with their journey of disillusionment rather than acting like it’s somehow wrong. To be dis disillusioned is wrong. It’s no, it’s not wrong. It’s just a natural re response to, it’s the part of life.

Yeah. It’s,

Kim Rohrer: it’s a natural response to trauma. Uhhuh. That’s exactly, there’s a collective global trauma that ev that we’ve been through in the last several years that’s just been compounding. Yep. And every new thing. I think especially the the more you have a global awareness, the more you, you have that compounded trauma, the more you know about your coworker in Pakistan who’s dealing with natural disasters.

Or your coworker in the US who just lost their health insurance. Yep. Because they got you know how to right some health thing and they’re no longer insurable. There’s lots of different reasons that people are. Are experiencing compounded trauma, and you have to recognize that.

William Tincup: And again, trauma’s not a bad [00:26:00] word. Trauma is just a natural occurrence. We all go through it. We go through it differently, but like the taboo of okay, just. Grab your buy the bootstraps, right?

Kim Rohrer: Push it aside and show it

William Tincup: for work. When I was in in middle school, the coaches would say, just walk it off.

Exactly. I’m pretty sure I broke my ankle. Walk it off. Just walk it off. That’s not great price. This is not great advice.

Kim Rohrer: No, I was a dancer growing up. It was like, just put some Ben Gay on there. Rack your ankle. Get back out there. It’s like that’s again, it’s it’s not that the way we were doing things before was good and that we should return to those old days.

What we’ve, yeah. And that we know better. We can do better. Let’s. That’s funny. My angelou this shit. And yeah,

William Tincup: now that we know something from these learnings, we can do better done. Kim, I could talk to you forever, but I know you got a job thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Kim Rohrer: Absolutely. This was super fun.

William Tincup: And thanks for everyone [00:27:00] listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Until next time.