Episode 487
In this episode of Build a Better Agency Drew McLellan talks with Tessa White, also known as the Job Doctor. Tessa has a rich background with 25 years in HR and a fascinating journey that saw her pivot from corporate life to empower individuals in the workforce, all during the turbulent times of late 2020. What started as a simple endeavor on TikTok quickly transformed into a massive platform with millions of followers and a compelling new book, “The Unspoken Truths for Career Success.”
We explore the evolving dynamics of employer-employee relationships, the importance of effective communication, and how generational perspectives are reshaping the workplace. Tessa offers eye-opening strategies for building loyalty, beyond merely providing great benefits or flexible work conditions.
Whether you’re an agency owner struggling with the concept of loyalty in the modern workforce or looking for innovative ways to connect with your team, this episode is packed with transformative insights. Join us as Tessa White breaks down what employees really crave in their careers and how business owners can adapt to these changing demands. Grab your notepad; you won’t want to miss this!
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- Understanding the disconnect between employers and employees
- How to foster employee loyalty in a changing workforce
- The importance of career pathing from day one
- Rethinking compensation and rewards
- The power of customization in the workplace
- How to build stronger relationships in hybrid and remote environments
- Adapting to the future of work
“The relationship with employers is quite broken.” - Tessa White Share on X
“People want what they want, how they want it.” - Tessa White Share on X
“If you're not having a meaningful conversation every three or four months with your people, you're missing a massive opportunity.” - Tessa White Share on X
“To the degree that you can create a profit sharing or some kind of reward mechanism that mimics ownership, you're going to be ahead of the game.” - Tessa White Share on X
“You have to remove the haves and the have-nots from your company.” - Tessa White Share on X
Ways to contact Tessa:
- The Job Doctor: https://thejobdoctor.com/
Resources:
- Tessa’s book: The Unspoken Truths for Career Success
- Mentoring Membership Portal: https://thejobdoctor.com/rent-my-brain-2/
- BaBA Summit May 19-21, 2025: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/babasummit/
- Book: Sell With Authority
- AMI Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/agencymanagementinstitute
- AMI Preferred Partners: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/ami-preferred-partners/
- Agency Edge Research Series: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/agency-tools/agency-edge-research-series/
- Upcoming workshops: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/advertising-agency-training/workshop-calendar/
- Weekly Newsletter: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/newsletter-sign-up-form/
- Agency Coaching and Consulting: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/advertising-agency-consulting/agency-coaching-consulting/
Drew McLellan:
Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Super glad to be back with you this week. And this is a fascinating topic. You’re going to love this guest. And whether you love this topic or not, this is an important topic for us to talk about and for us to sort of have some understanding around.
You know, I can remember being very, very young man in the business long before I owned my own agency and hearing one of the agency owners that I was working for sort of grumbling under his breath and said, yeah, great business. If it weren’t for the clients and the employees. And I didn’t get it back then, but of course then I own my own agency and I got it. And I know you get it, too. And you know, I don’t know that there’s been a time, a moment in time where, where agency owners have struggled as much to understand the workforce and to really understand how they can connect with and support and attract and retain great talent. I think, I think we’ve got multiple generations in the business. I think the younger employees have a very different attitude about work than we did when we were their age. I think Covid has changed every aspect of being an employer. So all of those things jumbled up together make this a really complicated time to be an employer and to be the great employer that we want to be.
And so I am super excited about our guest today. So she’s a seasoned HR veteran who actually came out of retirement to help us understand what’s happening in the workplace today and to help us navigate how to have better relationships with our employees, how to be the kind of employer that they want and to understand sort of how they view the world of work. And so I think you’re going to find this super fascinating, Honestly, I think you’re going to find it frustrating. I think you’re going to find it sort of teeth, you know, gnashing in moments. Because it’s not. It’s not that our employees actually always show up the way we want them to show up. We want them to be like us and they’re not like us, and they don’t view the world or work like we do or like we did.
And so I think Tessa, our guest Tessa White, is going to help us sort of look through the lens of that younger employee and begin to understand sort of where they’re coming from so that we can meet them in the middle and we can have a good relationship and we can serve our clients well together, and that we can have some longevity in that relationship, which is so important to us and the success of our business. So without further ado, let’s welcome Tessa to the show. Tessa, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Tessa White:
Thank you, Drew. It’s great to be here.
Drew McLellan:
Give the listeners a little bit of sense of. Of your background and how you came to have this area of expertise before we dig in.
Tessa White:
Well, actually, I’ve been in HR for 25 years. Most hated job in corporate America, I think. And there just came a point when all of a sudden, I, I. It was 2020, late 2020, and I thought. I had thought I retired and I was going to fly fish the rest of my life. And all of a sudden, I went in to help people on the other side of the equation. I’ve helped companies for all these years. Now I really want to help the individuals in those companies. And the Job Doctor was born. I just thought that maybe I’d get a couple of followers, maybe not. And, you know, a million followers later, I guess I had something to say that resonated with people.
Drew McLellan:
And you decided to put it in a book.
Tessa White:
I did. I did the book thing. In fact, the reason that I started getting followers was because my agent said, you’re nobody. You’re just an HR person. They’re a dime a dozen. I can’t get you a book deal unless you have followers. Go get followers and come back. I said, okay, how hard can it be? So I started talking. My daughter did my first posts on TikTok for me, and my son called from California a couple of days later, and he’s like, mom, this is crazy. My girlfriend said she saw you on TikTok. Is that even possible? And I’m like, oh, I forgot I posted. You know, my daughter helped me post these. Let me go check it out. I had 10,000 followers after three days, and we just were off to the races. So I came back to my agent about four or five months later. I said, okay, I have about, you know, 300,000 followers. Is that enough? And she was like, are you kidding me? What on earth are you doing? And. And so Job doctor was born.
Drew McLellan:
So why do you think it took off like wildfire? Why, why is this such a hot topic and what were people hungry to learn from you?
Tessa White:
Well, I think part of it was timing. I mean, it was October 2020, so pandemic. Everybody was stuck in their house. We all had just resigned ourselves to the fact we weren’t getting back into the workplace anytime soon. So I think timing had a lot to do with it. And it just so happened that I was an older influencer and I was talking about real stuff with real experience behind it. And I think that resonated with people. All of a sudden instead of some, you know, 25 year old recruiter saying I can help you with your career. It’s actually somebody who’s been around the block talking about it and making a lot of sense. And it just, it just, it took off. It was like the idea that wanted to be. Even if I wasn’t sure where I was going with it, it just took off.
Drew McLellan:
Right, so I’m curious because you’ve sort of spent much of your career helping our listeners, the business owners, and now you’re sort of turning the, the tables and you’re spending more of your time and focus on the employees. Where do they get it wrong? Where, where is the disconnect between these two audiences? Well, why isn’t it better?
Tessa White:
It’s so funny. I really, I’m not an advocate for one or the other. I really believe that people, your people can be your partners again. And right now the relationship between people and their companies are really adversarial. Especially as you go down the generations to a younger generation and they’re like, screw you, you’ve screwed us forever. We’re going to screw you back. So, you know, it’s really adversarial. I think where it gets wrapped around the axle is all in communication. I mean, I’ve been in the back rooms where I’m talking to the manager about the problem and then I go talk to the employee about the problem where I see the two of them try to communicate and so much gets wrapped around the axle there. And the other thing that’s interesting is the, the as you go from a Gen X, my age to a millennial to a Gen Z, what you find is that the propensity or the towards actually communicating versus this kind of swipe right, swipe left world, this younger generation isn’t as good at communicating either. They would just as soon leave their employer then have to tell you what’s wrong, you know, say I shouldn’t have to write the script. And so it’s harder to communicate than it’s ever been for people. So they like so they would leave. Plus you see younger generation, the experts say that they are likely to have 25 to 30 jobs in a lifetime and owners should be paying attention to that statistic. Staggering. That is crazy because we’ve gone from my generation an average of eight jobs to an average to 20 to 25. That means we got to figure out how to bend the curve on loyalty with our people and figure out how they’re seeing the world. And a lot of it has its roots in communication.
Drew McLellan:
So I think, I think the loyalty thing for a lot of a lot of agency owners is a struggle. They, you know, they are anywhere from late 30s to, you know, mid-60s and they grew up in an era where you, you had loyalty for your employer, your employer had loyalty for you. And there was this symbiotic relationship. And so I think one of the challenges for agency owners today is they don’t know how, they don’t know how to process the lack of loyalty. And they think they’re doing it all right, that they have great benefits, they’re being flexible with hybrid work and flexible work time. They’re being generous with vacation time and they can’t figure out what else. So here’s what I hear all the time. I don’t know what else to give them. I’m out of the other than other than foot massages on Wednesday. What in the world can I do to earn their loyalty?
Tessa White:
Yeah, it’s a, it’s a great question. Well, there’s a few things that I would do but do you care if I set the stage as to why it’s no.
Drew McLellan:
I would love to set the stage. Yeah.
Tessa White:
It’s difficult because if you go back I’ll try and simplify something that takes a long time to talk about into short. If you go to my generation it was about you had one or two options. Go back a generation before that. One option you work for the same employer till you retire and then you get your pension. But then if you fast forward to Gen Z, this is a generation who a grew up in a time of great distrust. So they grew up many of them were born in the Great Depression that we or the Great 2009. Right. The Great Recession. Then they had covet hit they don’t plus they had in between great periods of prosperity. So they don’t know which way’s up. All they know is they can’t count on anything. So they can’t count on doctors, politics, they can’t count on our government. And so the relationship with employers is quite broken. And so they have adopted a world of I’m a free agent. Instead of one path, I’m a free agent. And if you adopt that, you have to treat and go after how to please them a different way. First thing I would do if I’m an owner, I’m going to start talking about career paths. Day one. Now, a lot of agency owners or business owners don’t do that. They’re like, well, I just hired you. You have to start talking about it.
Drew McLellan:
And the other thing they say is, nobody made a career path for me. These are adults, they need to figure out their own career path. And I’m like, they. They’re asking you to show them the path.
Tessa White:
You have to show them the path. And even if you’re a small agency and you don’t have a big career path, internally, you better know what your people want to be when they grow up or paint a picture of the skill sets they need that will help them grow. And then say, I may not be able to make you a vice president or a director. We’re too small for that. But what I can do is build this particular skill set that you need. And here’s how it’s going to help you make money in the future. So you can do that. So day one, you better be talking about that. The other thing you have to be able to do is you got to shorten, because you get to shorten the cycle on increases in rewards. And you don’t have to go outside your cost envelope to do that. That’s the first place people goes, I can’t afford it. That’s crazy. Take the same cost envelope and make shorter, dangle the carrot at different places. And to the degree that you can create ownership mentality, you’re going to be ahead of the game. Because people will work for companies that are sharing in the ownership, but they don’t want to work and make the big guy lots of money and all the executives money while they on the backs of them. So to the degree that you can create a profit sharing, that profit sharing, or some kind of reward mechanism that mimics ownership, you’re going to be ahead of the game because then you get people’s heart and soul. They’re like, if I work hard, I get a piece of the action. Teach them how to read a balance sheet, teach them how you’re looking at it, and then give them a piece of the action. But don’t reserve all the rewards for your senior people. That’s also just super counter to what people think and how we ran things as kind of millennials ran things even. But it is time. And you’re starting to see companies increase if there’s equity. For example, your public company used to be just the senior executives.
Drew McLellan:
Yeah.
Tessa White:
You’re starting to see that get pushed down all through the organization nowadays. And. And the changes to that are pretty big and pretty staggering.
Drew McLellan:
Yeah. So one of the things that we preach at AMI is, number one, you need to teach your employees what we call agency math. They need to understand how agencies make money and lose money and. And what their role is in that. And then you need to have a bonus program tied to when we hit our. Our financial goals, our profitability goals. We all share in that. So exactly to what you’re talking about.
Tessa White:
Yes. In fact, I worked with a company that said, you know, we’ve just got these people who are. They’re. They’re producing CAD drawings, and, you know, we’ve got. We’re competing with college campuses, and everybody’s stealing our employees, and they’re getting them for an extra 50 cents an hour. And we’re having this little war over 25 and 50 cents, and we can’t keep anyone. What we did was we said, hey, why don’t you get into the psyche of today’s employee instead of doing that, say, tell you what, the more you produce and the higher quality they are, that don’t have to be redone, the more you can make, and we’ll redo that every single quarter. We’ll look at what you did last quarter and reward you. If you’re somebody that’s just kind of plotting away and only want to do a few, we’ll pay you 15 an hour. But if you’re somebody who’s killing it, we’ll pay you $22 an hour. And what ended up happening to this company, A, they didn’t go out of the cost envelope, the original cost envelope. B, they needed less people than they needed before. And see, the people that didn’t want to produce self selected out.
Drew McLellan:
Right.
Tessa White:
And you ended up with people who, you know, would go one quarter, go, oh, wow, I think I want to work harder next quarter. I think I want to do more. And so, because anytime a person has choice, choice in how much they make, how hard they work, that’s why they want choice in remote versus not remote. You know, they want so much choice. If you can provide choice, you have a greater likelihood of getting their Loyalty. So that’s, it’s just an interesting way to look at things that you should absolutely be looking at. What do they need to do that drives business the most? And it requires businesses to get pretty like hardcore focused on what those things are.
Drew McLellan:
Yeah.
Tessa White:
And then build a system that lets your people get rewards when they do the right things.
Drew McLellan:
So we talked about career pathing, we talked about rewarding in quicker increments, quarterly increments tied to company performance and their contributions to that performance.
Tessa White:
Yes.
Drew McLellan:
What else are today’s employees looking for? That we are missing the boat on customization.
Tessa White:
So if you think about old days, one benefits plan today, fast forward people. You’ll have young people who want pet insurance. You’ve got millennials who might care about 401k, you’ve got, boom, Gen X, my age, that they’re going to care about significant 401k or benefits, health benefits. But everybody wants something different. And you see customization. If you look at Nike, Nike’s the king of customization. And you see what’s happening in the clothing industry, in the shoe industry, with customization. Well, the same thing’s happening in today’s world, in small business, large business, whatever. People want what they want, how they want it. And so I’m not talking about just customizing for benefits, but that’s a good idea. And a good place to start is to have like a choose your, choose your own benefits package with lots of different options that, that speak to those people. But I’m talking about choose your own adventure, period. Choose your own adventure. Do you want to be a contract employee? Do you want to be a full time employee employee? Do you want to be a gig worker? Do you want to be just a skills worker? And you come in and do this one task and you are hired to do that one task. You have to have different options for people to choose from. And to the degree which you can provide optionality for people, the more likely you are to get people that want to stick around because they’re also going to change their mind. Remember, if you’re having 25 to 30 jobs in a lifetime, you, yeah, you’re going to, you’re going to need to offer these people not just, hey, it’s a full time job, 40 hours a week in office, that’s never going to work. In fact, I really think if you fast forward 20 years, we’re going to see optionality. This idea of choose your own adventure, be completely on steroids. And it might in fact solve the employment problem we have where there’s not enough workers to do the stuff that we need. If we actually break the work out into specific skills or task or consider that we could do work differently and hire people to do gig work essentially for us. I think you may find that in the future that’s the, that’s the way people see them. They, they’re like, this is my special sauce. I want to do that and I want to do it for your company and this company and the other company. And we’re seeing versions of that right now. I call it job stacking. That people are taking more than one full time job at the same time, by the way. Crazy, right?
Drew McLellan:
We have, we have a lot of that happening in our industry right now.
Tessa White:
Job stacking is a thing.
Drew McLellan:
Undisclosed job stacking.
Tessa White:
Undisclosed job stacking. But here’s the funny thing. I did a survey with my list with my followers and I said, is this a, is this like cheating the employer or is this a good thing? And almost to an age group like Millennials and Gen Z are like, no, it just makes sense. I don’t care if my people do that. As long as I know what the job is and they get the job done. I don’t care if they have another job on top of it or two. And I’m like, but doesn’t that feel like you’re stealing employers time? No, no, not at all. But if you go to an older millennial and a Gen X, yeah, they say that’s stealing time because we believe you’re paying for a person’s time. But increasingly a younger generation feels like you are paying for a person’s, you’re paying for a job, not their time. And that shift is occurring very, very rapidly out there.
Drew McLellan:
So I’m channeling all the listeners and I know one of the things they’re thinking is the work we do is so collaborative. It’s not an assembly line where, you know, you put the bolt down and then it passes to me and I put the nut on the bolt and then it passes to somebody else and they quality check it and because you know, it’s, it’s creative work and it’s collaborative work. So if you give everybody all the options and you want to start at 10 and I want to start at 3 and you’re going to be in the office and I’m going to be remote and all of those things. How, how do you do that and create this collaborative, cooperative team effort on the work? How do you do both?
Tessa White:
Well, in an agency setting it would look something like maybe you get to do the work of supporting one client in a particular space versus doing it full time for seven or eight different clients. Maybe it’s that one person is really, really good with social media or one person’s really, really good at making the pitches to the people about the articles that you’re trying to place and they have a, you know, special gift for that. And so it’s article placement. So I think you have to look at, how can we, how can, how can we look at the work that we do and make it valuable for the client while still, you know, being able to give something to someone else? And you start with things like that, like what, what job could be done with 20 hours a week? Maybe you start there. What job, what’s, what’s a skill set?
Drew McLellan:
If, if you have a writer, an artist, a strategist and the person who’s managing the client relationship and they all have to come together to make some decisions about how they’re going to serve the client. How do you, how do you find that middle ground where you can do that sort of collaborative work if everybody’s in a very defined narrow lane and the lanes don’t crisscross?
Tessa White:
Yeah, well, what if you, I mean, I’m just going to spitball for a minute because my daughter’s in this industry, something that would have been perfect to her. She’s a, she’s a classic Gen Z. What would have been perfect to her is, tell you what, give me a team, a good team, a tiger team, four people that, that each do those roles and we all want to work only 20 hours a week. How many clients do we need to support in order to do that and what is our specialty area and create that team that can let that, that work. And I think something like as simple as that would have worked incredibly good for her and by the way, would get you stay at home mothers or fathers who don’t have the ability to do a 40 hour in office, right? And all of a sudden you’re getting access to people that you wouldn’t have had access to before but for companies. I know this idea can be very, very overwhelming and it’s different if it’s a manufacturing versus something like this. But start small. Start with how can I create a part time opportunity? How can I create a more full time opportunity with flexibility? How can I tap into skill sets that I know exist within this world? Relationship management, pitching, you know, how can I separate those and create individual contributors that could be a part of a team, that’s where I would start.
Drew McLellan:
So if I’m an employer, how do I start to have these conversations? How do I. For a lot of our listeners, this is such a foreign concept.
Tessa White:
Yeah.
Drew McLellan:
And, and not only is it a foreign concept, they don’t like it. They do not like it. Right. So how do they begin to have conversations with either their leadership team or the rest of the employees to sort of figure out how to navigate this? Because it also sounds like if I, the, if I, the employer dictate how this is going to work, that’s not going to be well received, that it has to be sort of collaboratively created. So how do I, how do I begin to have those conversations and learn what actually matters to my people? Because it also sounds like what matters to you. Let’s just say you and I are the same age. What matters to you and what matters to me? It used to be, you know, you got a full time job, you showed up at the office, everybody was there by 8:30 or whatever the time was, we did our thing, everybody left by six or whatever that was. But now what we’re saying and what I’m hearing you say is everybody wants something different regardless of age, regardless of experience level. So how do I begin to explore that and think about the possibility of what I could create within my organization?
Tessa White:
We’ll start with the simple. First of all, start with the simple. One thing all of us have in common is I don’t want to be a ghost in a company. I want to be seen and valued for what I have to offer. And I, I want to feel valued. And you’re going to do that by having ownership type rewards for people. So that’s the first place I’d start is how can I create? Even if it’s a simple profit sharing plan that goes throughout the organization, that’s step number one. Step number two, I would talk to representative people from each of the generations just to get a sense for what’s important to them. And I would look at my benefits package because that’s a simple one to do as well. Benefits, for example, I know from doing my own research that Gen Z is going that if you offer the ability for them to bring a pet to work and, or offer pet insurance, there are many people who would say I would take that job all day over a job that pays more money and doesn’t have that. So you got to find out what they need and then make sure that as you’re working with your benefits broker, you have some options there that you can speak to when you’re recruiting because you can’t just recruit with the same old thing either. Hey, we have a Competitive benefits package. 401k program and family friendly benefits. It’s not going to work. So then you have to have targeted ads to the each generation that you’re talking to. But get a sense for what people want and at least expand your benefits. It’s cheap, doesn’t cost a lot of money. Even, even I saw a company $250 or now it wouldn’t work. It’d have to be $500. Wardrobe for pregnant employees who are working 500 bucks. How many people got pregnant in a year? I could count them on one hand. But so that the benefit was next to nothing that they could recruit the heck out of the fact that they cared and do that. So sometimes the simple benefits can make a big change in who you’re attracting to the company. So that was. That would be the second thing. The hardest one always is how much optionality do we allow for and how do we create a workplace where we’re getting the people want part time full time gig work skill sets. But start with those first two things and that should help you be and bend the curve on loyalty and then make sure you train your managers. We never train our managers. A manager’s job is not to get the work done as much as it is to build employees. And if they can build the skill sets of their people it is the fastest way for increased productivity and greater loyalty. So you’ve got to train your managers on how can I talk to people about the skill sets that they want and about how they want to grow in life whether it’s inside this company or outside that company. And there are and then you’ve got to put some money behind training people because that that will make a huge difference.
Drew McLellan:
So again I’m hearing their voices in my head they’re like okay, so I have to be more flexible. I have to give more options. I have to get let people work how many ever hours that makes them happy. I have to train them. And you’re telling me they’re not going to stay because they’re going to have 25 or 30 jobs in their lifetime. So I’m investing all this money in these people. But it’s not like I’m going to get the loyalty for 10 years or 15 years like I gave my employer before I was a boss. Right?
Tessa White:
Sure.
Drew McLellan:
So if they’re not going to stick around anyway, why would I do that?
Tessa White:
Well the reason I would do it is so that I can get, instead of two years out of somebody, I can get four years out of somebody. That’s why I would do it. Because if they neglect it entirely and say that what I’m talking about is a bunch of hooey, they will go through employees and wonder why it is so hard to hire good people nowadays. Yeah, but if they listen to even a fraction of what I’m saying and they actually, you know, start talking to their people. Day one. What do you want to do? What do you want to be? How can I help you get there? Join in the rewards of this company. When you help us succeed, you’re not just a cog in the wheel, you’re a part of the solution. They will get more years out of those people. That’s why you do it. Because if they do nothing, they’re going to be on a hamster’s wheel of people leaving.
Drew McLellan:
Well, you know, for agencies that’s such a critical thing because especially the people who are client facing. Nothing makes a client more nervous than a lot of turnaround and turnover in an organization. Because clients invest in a relationship and then the person who knows them knows their company walks out the door and they have to do it all over again.
Tessa White:
That’s right. Take away the flexibility if you want. I mean, that’s the hardest one. That’s the hardest one. So if every, anybody listening to me is saying this just sounds too freaking hard and expensive, take that one off the table and just talk about how do we let everybody join in the rewards and how do I make people feel like they’re seeing day one? And that does not cost a lot and it doesn’t require a lot of change. And it will make a difference. I don’t know how much, but it will make a difference. Just look at the numbers. If you do studies to see these companies that are popping up, that are helping companies create stock ownership plans for a broader base of people, you will see the numbers speak for themselves. On what it does with employee loyalty.
Drew McLellan:
What do employees wish the employers knew or understood? What do you. If, if I’m a 25 year old employee and I’m looking at a, My boss, The agency owner is 50.
Tessa White:
Yeah.
Drew McLellan:
Do I wish he or she knew or understood that? I don’t think they get.
Tessa White:
I, I think if I had to say most of the bad behavior that I see from a younger generation, call it the, you know, they have the Sunday scaries, they have the quiet quitting, the. Right, there’s names for all of these things. It, it goes back to quiet quitting is not about, is not about somebody wanting to be lazy. Quiet quitting is about somebody saying, I want to be, I want to be paid for the work that I do and seen for the work that I do. What I don’t want you to do is fire two people and make me take on all the extra work for those people and treat me, you know, not give me a raise and not treat me well. A lot of it comes back to just human decency. And so when you lay off people and don’t give any severance, for example, the stories will follow for the other employees. You are not building trust with your other employees who didn’t get severed. So treating people decent, making sure that there’s severance, that there’s notice, that there’s transparency in what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and, and helping people understand their part in it and then rewarding them for their part is probably, you know, the crux of it all. For, for a younger person, it’s just don’t treat me like crap and treat me like somebody that isn’t important to you. Don’t treat me like this cognitive. Well, treat me like a real person. Yeah, and you’ll. And I would have a rule myself, by the way, in a company, I should never make more money as the senior top person than a certain multiple of the most bottom person. So that thinking which will sound to a lot of older owners like, that’s just so you know that that’s what’s wrong with America is everybody wants to be made the same. And you know that’s, that’s never going to work that way. But you’ve got to remove the haves and the have nots from your company. You cannot have the haves and the have nots like it, like it has been for the last few decades. It’s got to be more equal, fairer to people. That’s why you’re seeing so many people try and create unions, you know, in areas that have not historically had unions.
Drew McLellan:
Yeah. We need to take a break. But when we come back, I’m curious what the conversation looks like with my 15 year employee who has been loyal, done good work, keeps getting better. And what you’re saying is there should be less disparity between their salary and a 25 year old’s salary. How do I have the conversation with the employees that have sort of already earned their stripes, have already spent a decade or more learning their craft, are better, frankly, are better at the work than the younger employees. So let’s take a break, and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about how do we have that conversation inside the organization in a way that everyone feels is fair? Because it sounds like a lot of this is around everyone feeling like things are equitable or fair. So let’s take a break, and then we’ll come back and talk about it.
BREAK
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Drew McLellan:
All right, we are back with Tessa White, and her new book is called the Unspoken Truths for Career Success, brought to you by Harper Collins. And right before the break, I was asking how if, if everybody wants the salaries to be more equitable and there to be less disparity between salaries and all of that, what’s that conversation look like to your more senior people who in theory believe that they’ve earned the right to get more vacation time or more salary or more a bigger part of the share of the profits or anything like that. How. Talk about sort of, how do you, how do you have that conversation?
Tessa White:
I am really glad you asked that question because the goal is not to make your, your people with more experience penalized. Your goal is not to have your Senior Executive Team Make 10x what everybody else makes. That’s what I’m saying.
Drew McLellan:
And in agencies, that doesn’t happen.
Tessa White:
Right? Yeah, that’s, that’s what we’re trying to avoid, is that what we do want to have is we want to have something for people to work towards. Right. Or else nobody’s ever going to work harder.
Drew McLellan:
Right.
Tessa White:
It’s transparency. And you’ve seen like 29 states now. It could be more than that. Now I lose track, have rules around pay, transparency. How much does this role pay? Companies are losing their mind over it. But it’s really important to have transparency to show your people this is where this role pays and this is what this Role can pay, you can do it in ranges. That’s fine. Here’s the skills you’re going to need to get there.
Drew McLellan:
Yeah.
Tessa White:
And you need to train your managers to be able to have those conversations because that’s where it goes awry. And a lot of companies are like, I don’t know, seems weird to me. I don’t know actually what you need to do to go from here to there.
Drew McLellan:
So this gets back to the career pathing that you were talking about in the beginning of our conversation, which is, okay, you’re. You’re a Junior Woodchuck today and that. And the salary band for the Junior Woodchuck is X to Y. Now, if you want to be a woodchuck, here are the soft skills and the hard skills you have to. You have to master to be elevated to a woodchuck. And here’s the salary band for a woodchuck. And then if you want to be a senior Woodchuck, well, here are the soft skills and hard skills and here’s a salary band. Right.
Tessa White:
Yeah. You want to be more transparent so they can see the path. And then the other piece to that. Now this is. This is a shortcoming on a younger generation. They all think they’re ready to be the senior Woodchuck.
Drew McLellan:
Right.
Tessa White:
So you’re going to have to open up communication. The best company I’ve ever seen do this was ironically a PR agency. And what they did was they create. It was a small group, so there’s only like 30 employees in the whole company. But they would assign somebody to every employee that was not their manager, but somebody that was their advocate. That’s what they were called, their advocate. That advocate would, every three months meet with people that they clients plus people internally and say, what are the. What is this person doing really well? What are they not doing so well? And then they would come back to the person first and foremost and say, hey, here’s what I’m hearing. Do you think this is a fair assessment? It’s not fair assessment. Let’s talk about this. So the person, before it went to a manager or anybody else who could hold it against them, they ought to have this robust conversation. And then they would ask the person, what do you think you need in order to improve in this area or that area? It was very, very collaborative. Then the feedback went to the manager with the plan that they’d both talked about. That type of communication, not that that works for everybody, but that level of communication and transparency is really useful and feels less problematic and less like it’s a threat to a younger person because you have an advocate and it’s not your manager who holds your whole future in their hands.
Drew McLellan:
That’s right.
Tessa White:
And so that type of mentoring I call it, the more frequently you talk to your people about both the good and the bad that’s happening, the less it’s going to feel like it’s going to be a punitive conversation or that it’s a punitive thing. The less that you talk and the more you just hold to that annual conversation, the more punitive it feels and the more punitive people think it will be. And the goal is to move the other end of the spectrum. And so it feels more like mentoring. And that’s a really important aspect to today’s worker that. That I think most companies, big companies, are getting after in a pretty good way. They even hire and have companies that hire independent mentors, not counselors like a mental health counselor, but a career counselor that their people can talk to to help them.
Drew McLellan:
Interesting. So I think one of the challenges in today’s workplace with the hybrid work or remote, completely remote work, is a lot of the bumping into each other in the hallways. Getting to know each other on a personal level feels so prescriptive now. So, you know, if you and I were working in an office together, we would sort of naturally learn about each other’s families and we would overhear conversations and all of that. How given that we don’t, in many, many cases, we don’t have that luxury anymore that we are. We are meeting with people on zoom. I have a lot of agency owners say, I have had an employee for two years. I’ve never met him.
Tessa White:
Yeah.
Drew McLellan:
In person. So how do. How did today’s employees want to create relationship with their coworkers and with their boss and ultimately with the business owner. What is it? How do they want that relationship to be?
Tessa White:
I wish I could tell you that there was one answer to this, but there isn’t.
Drew McLellan:
I figured it wouldn’t be right.
Tessa White:
No, it’s ended up happening with COVID is it’s accelerated the differences that we have in the way we do work. Like, I had to figure out how to work with my colleagues in an in person way. That was the generation I grew up in. I’m an introvert. I prefer not doing that.
Drew McLellan:
Right.
Tessa White:
And so when Covid came along, I’m like, this is fantastic. I don’t. I can do my work without needing to be in front of people all the time.
Drew McLellan:
Right. I don’t have to do that. That People thing.
Tessa White:
Yeah, I hate that people thing. Here I am in hr, but I hated that people thing, right? And. And it has only created greater distance between us and the differences that we have in the way that we work, which is why some people are like, I’ll never go back from remote. I only want to do this. And so that’s where the choice becomes more important. Important for an employer if they are willing to do it. What I’ve seen is best practice is offering remote and in person, but having mandatory once a month, come and meet in the office at least once a month or sometimes once every two weeks to have the benefit of the personal interaction and the play, the interplay that you get.
Drew McLellan:
Right.
Tessa White:
You get this great interplay when you’re in a room and trying to solve problems together that you will never, ever get if you’re just responding via email. And the companies that are saying, yeah, we can’t not have that come on in for that seem to be doing fairly well and seem to be, you know, at least threading the needle a little bit better than other companies.
Drew McLellan:
And I don’t disagree with that at all. I, you know, one of the things we’ve been saying to, to our clients is a lot of you are saving a ton of money because you’re not paying rent on a building anymore. You need to spend some of that money bringing all your people from all over the country or wherever they live together a couple times a year so that they get that FaceTime. Because sometimes it’s. Not everybody can come in every two weeks because they’re not geographically close. Like, they have to get on a plane, they have to stay in a hotel, they have to get a sitter for their kids. Like, it’s complicated today. What about the day to day relationship? Not, not the. I, I don’t disagree with you at all. I, I don’t think there’s any substitute for that. FaceTime. But in terms of just having an ongoing relationship with their peers, with their direct supervisor, with the business owner, what do they. What do they. What does that look like today?
Tessa White:
It looks, it looks different for every person in every company. I wish. It’s a hard one. How do I find.
Drew McLellan:
How do I find out? Mm. Right again. We have quiet quitting. We have people who are, like you said, they’d rather quit than have a conversation about, this is not working for me. They would rather just bail because there’s lots of opportunities out there. So how do I, as a business owner encourage those conversations? How do I, how do I seek to Learn and understand better what my employees really want so I can figure out if I can give it to them or not?
Tessa White:
Well, you’re onto something by saying, how do I, as the owner or the manager, do this? Because what you model as a senior team or owner is what’s going to happen throughout the organization. And whether you like it or not, you’re setting the tone for how we talk and how we behave together. The first thing that I would do is I would be having meaningful conversations with each person, doesn’t matter what their generation or what age they are, and say, tell me about your job. I want to take full advantage of all the things you know how to do well. Am I fully utilizing the capabilities that you have to offer? Are we leaving something on the table that you see distinctly from your unique perspective? Is there something I’m missing or a way that I could tap into the gifts and skills that you have? If you’re not having that conversation every three, four months with your people, you’re missing a massive opportunity because that’s when you set the stage that you matter. Remember, number one is I have to matter, not be cog in the wheel. And it’s actually how you get the hearts and souls of your people is when they don’t feel like a ghost in your organization and they do feel like you’re hearing what they have to say. I’d run through a brick wall for somebody that sees me, somebody that I think cares about me.
Drew McLellan:
Yeah.
Tessa White:
And so that’s where I would start is just having those conversations because that gives the rest of the company permission to then maybe call somebody that they work with in another department to say, tell me more about you. How did you end up here? You know, tell me about your background. I want to know more about you. But you have to model what you want to see in your organization. You don’t just expect it’s going to magically occur.
Drew McLellan:
You know, I think back to early in my career, before I owned my own business and when. And I’ve only worked in advertising agencies. And one of the things one of my first employers did was. And we were. Of course, everybody was in the office and all of that, but they invested a huge amount of money in creating opportunities for us to socialize outside of work. So softball teams and bowling teams and all these things. And what I often observed was, even if somebody really did not like their boss, they stuck around because they like their co workers.
Tessa White:
Yeah.
Drew McLellan:
And their co workers were there. But today, is that still a factor? And do people still want that even though you’re in Philadelphia and I’m in California and we’re not going to go out for beers together like the, you know, we used to back in the day. How do, how do companies today foster that kind of connectivity?
Tessa White:
Many people will repel against it and say they don’t want it. And yet the companies that do better provide opportunities for connection. And so one thing to consider, I had a, I worked with a company who offered their, their top salespeople. Instead of just taking them on the sales trip, they actually, the beginning of the sales trip was a service project. They went and built houses in Mexico in a community that had nothing, built side by side houses. What was interesting about that is that turnover went from like about 170%. These are door knockers, 100% commission people. And the, the turnover went to like just drop like a rock to double digit, low double digits after they started serving side by side. So serving side by side is a way to do it. Having a common cause, something that they care about together. But you can also have connection. If you have remote employees, you can, you can create connection. It’s a little bit false, but you can do something as kitschy as, you know, sending a food box and having you guys have a cooking night where you’re at least mimicking being together and cooking the same meal and laughing about what yours turns out like. But you really need to have opportunities to connect. Even in a world where people say I don’t want to connect, we know that connection actually will help people stay in a company longer.
Drew McLellan:
So as we, as we wind down this conversation, which has been fascinating, this feels daunting, I think, to a lot of business owners. And yet it’s only going to change more and more. So what, what do you think? Three, five years down the road, what will work look like?
Tessa White:
Well, I think three to five years down the road, I think we’re going to see a lot more defined contractor gig work within what would traditionally be a come work for me full time company. Yeah, I think we will see more of that.
Drew McLellan:
Yeah, we’re in our industry, we’re seeing that now. So it used to be that everybody was like, absolutely not. I’m going to have all the talent under my roof and we’re going to do it all ourselves. And we pride ourselves on saying, look, we keep it all in house. And today there’s very, very few agencies that don’t have good deep contractor relationships.
Tessa White:
Yeah. So I think that’s going to happen. That will luckily, ironically bring a whole bunch of new people to the workplace who have had those roles out of reach before, the stay at home parent, the disabled person, that it should open doors. And so there should be other people that could be really good in these companies. The other thing that I think we’re going to see in three to five years from now, I think you’re going to see a massive shift in the kind of benefits we offer. A short term and long term disability. Nobody even knows what that is. In a younger generation, they could care less about the dollars you spend on it. They don’t know what it is. But I think you will see employers responding to the things that will bend the curve on loyalty. Such as, I saw that a company was like, people can’t afford to get to work. And they said, we will help you as long as you work for us, we’ll help you make your car payment. Like we’ll partner with a car dealership or a company. We will get lower prices for you. You still own the payment. But if you work for us, I’m going to, I’m going to offset it by 200 bucks a month, 300 bucks a month. And all of a sudden it’s really hard for that young person to leave that company because they couldn’t make their car payment. You have to remember that a younger generation doesn’t even have $200 in their pocket on average. So do they care about 4 year vesting? Hell no. That’s not even on their radar screen. They’re not going to be at the company then. So you need to, I think you’re going to see benefits like that that begin to speak to the pain of a younger generation who is trying to live paycheck to paycheck. And that will help a lot.
Drew McLellan:
Could be fascinating.
Tessa White:
Very. My second book, I’m writing right now and I’m studying in depth all of the different generations, what shaped the thinking and what we can predict is going to be happening in the future based on no understanding that. And it’s really, really fun work.
Drew McLellan:
Yeah. Yeah. You’ll have to come back when you’re, when you’re done with that one because that sounds, that sounds amazing. Tessa, this has been great. If people want to, clearly you’re on TikTok, follow you on TikTok or other places. If they want to keep learning from you, obviously they can get your book anywhere books are sold. But if they want to follow you on social or things like that, what’s the best way for them to sort of what’s home base for you? Where they can find you.
Tessa White:
They can find me about anywhere they pull up job, Dr. Tessa. I’m going to be on Instagram, TikTok. They’ll find me on YouTube. They’re going to find me everywhere. And then. But if they really want help. We just opened a career membership for people, a private membership, and for very realistic price, twice a month, I’m. Excuse me. Twice a week, I mentor people and I do live Q&As. And then we bring in thought leaders that help us define how’s the future, what’s the future going to look like? What do we need to do? How do you. How do you do this? And that is something that we’re just opened up about three weeks ago and getting great response on. So people can also find any links in my social media, you’ll find in my link, in my bio, you’ll find out how to join that.
Drew McLellan:
That’s awesome.
Tessa White:
It’s called Career X.
Drew McLellan:
This has been really just eye opening and kind of invigorating and horrifying all at the same time, so.
Tessa White:
It totally is.
Drew McLellan:
Yeah.
Tessa White:
And I could talk another two hours on this. I’m so glad I got to get into it a little bit. It’s just really an interesting topic.
Drew McLellan:
It is. And it’s so vital. I mean, we have to figure this out.
Tessa White:
We.
Drew McLellan:
We, at least for agencies, we can’t do this work without team members. We can’t do it all by ourselves. And so we have to. We have to be able to crack the nut. So I’m super grateful that you were with us today. Thanks for sharing your expertise.
Tessa White:
Thank you, Drew.
Drew McLellan:
But okay, guys, well, if this didn’t. If this episode did not get you thinking, I give up. Because my head is spinning at all of the things we have to think about and, you know, the optimization and everybody wants something different. And how do we do that in a cost effective way, in a fair way, in an equitable way, how do we create and cultivate relationships with people, recognizing that a lot of them aren’t going to stay with us forever. We’ve known that for a long time, but I think it’s becoming more and more clear every day. So lots to chew on in this episode. Lots for you to think about. Take back to your leadership team. And I think for me, anyway, maybe the number one thing is you cannot get this right if you cannot have conversations with your team members. You’ve got to be able to talk to them and listen to what matters to them and stay open to the fact that it is probably not what matters to you or not, how you behaved at 25 or 30. And you know every day one of you will say to me, I would have never fill in the blank. I know, I know you wouldn’t have. But guess what? They are and they will. And we don’t get to change that. We have to just adapt to it and figure out how to make it work for our business and for our team. And for you as a business owner, you got to figure that out. So lots to lots to think about. And as we march into the new year, sort of start to play with to see if you can crack the nut. And for each of you, it’s going to be a little different. So it’ll be also fun for all of us to talk about it together, about what’s working, what’s not working in the Facebook group and other places. So hopefully this was as fascinating for you as it was for me. Want to make sure we thank our friends at White Label IQ before we let you go. As you know, they are the presenting sponsor of the podcast, so we’re super grateful for their support. They do White Label design, dev and PPC for agencies all over the world. They are born out of an agency so they understand how to help you make money, how to take care of your clients, how to communicate well with you. They’re lovely people known for 20 years, so check them out@White Label IQ.com Am I and last but never least, thank you for being here. I get to do this every week because you hang out with me and I am grateful. So I’ll be back next week. Hopefully you will too. In the meantime, have a great week. I’ll talk to you soon.
Drew McLellan:
Come back next week for another episode designed to help you build a stronger, more stable and sustainable agency. Check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages and other professional development [email protected] it.