Are people just resources that your organization must exploit? In this day and age, when people are not making widgets, should they be ‘managed’ to improve the value they can help create? Would just leading them by painting a vision be enough? What strategies, approaches, and tactics would work the best for maximizing the people potential?

Contributor

• • Samuel Sudhakar, Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Information Technology Services, California State University, San Bernardino

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Transcript 

Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:

Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. And the topic for today is Should We Manage People? And our guest for today is Samuel Sudhakar, who’s the Chief Information Officer and Vice President for Information Technology Services at the California State University, San Bernardino. Hey, Sam. How are you? 

Samuel Sudhakar [00:00:46]:

Good morning. I’m well.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:47]:

How are you? Very good, sir. Very good. Thank you. Now the reason we wanted to talk about this, subject today is, of course, we have been dealing with this latest technology tsunami, if you will, right, or the digital tsunami where we are dealing with a lot of different technologies, different changing business models. And we are busy with it. It seems like we feel that if we tackle the technology part, things will fall in place. But then as more and more conversations I personally have, and I’m sure you have with your peers, Sam, would you agree that it all boils down to how the people side of it or how well is the people side dealt with? It seems like we are very confident, we are very excited to deal with the people side, sorry, the processes and the technology side, but when it comes to people side, the answers are like, it depends, or we are trying, it’s hard. Why do you think people have this attitude when they also know in their hearts that’s where the real problems lie?

Samuel Sudhakar [00:02:10]:

So I think you nailed it when you said, among people, process and technology. Process and technology are easier to deal with than people. People are individuals who bring unique perspectives and abilities to the organization. So we need to leverage what people can bring to the organization. We live in a complex ecosystem,So there are no longer easy solutions to complex issues that are presented in business, whether it’s higher education or business in general. A one size fits all kind of approach doesn’t work. And if we want to customize mass production, we need people in the equation. Systems need to be managed, people need to be engaged. So engaging our employees, making them a part of the vision and solving the issues that are coming at us is very, very important. While processes and technologies are like widgets that one can pick off the shelf and deliver to a customer, people bring very unique and very special abilities to the table. So in order for us to navigate the complex ecosystem of requirements and needs that are coming at us, we need to leverage people and their unique abilities and their talents and their expertise, and they need to be a part of the solution.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:55]:

So I definitely agree with you the suggestion that’s been made that we should do it. And you and I both know that when rubber hits the road, we don’t do it as much because we introduce these things that we have to engage people, but then when we go and demand from them a certain productivity, a certain output, whether or not they are engaged. Yes, we would make an effort to engage them, but then when not everyone is engaged or they are not engaged to that degree, and our shareholder value and those business result centric focus takes priority, then we suddenly let the people issues take a back seat. Some people get fired. Other people start fearing the job loss, and I don’t want to paint a picture which is gloomy. But then we just try to solve people issues versus we become hell bent on solving the processes and technology issues and celebrate those wins. But when we talk about people issues, we try, and whatever happens, I’m not sure if there is a celebration that happens which motivates the rest, and then that takes the priority. People issues are not taking the priority even though they, in fact, have become more important than ever. Because if we don’t solve them, we can kiss this digital and any future innovation-related dreams goodbye.

Samuel Sudhakar [00:05:43]:

Absolutely. I agree with you. People are the most important part of the equation. Now, there’s a balance between the customer expectation and what people can deliver as a part of their normal working protocol. There’s always this tension between the customer expectation and what people can deliver,And as managers, that’s our job; as leaders, that’s our job to keep that balance in a very harmonious way between the customer’s expectations and what people can deliver. Now, one of the things I would not agree with you is that people become problematic when we demand a lot in productivity, etcetera. There might be a small percentage of people who might be problematic in an organization. In my experience, when we engage people from the ground up and we make them a part of the vision and mission of the organization and empower them to make the decisions that they need to make and tap into and recognize and celebrate their unique abilities and expertise, people come along and I’ve seen that happen over and over again in my organization. Now, people will bend over backwards to help the organization move forward and achieve its mission and goals as long as they feel a part of the vision and mission. As long as they are able to make decisions and are not encumbered, they have the tools to make those decisions, their decisions are celebrated, and when they make a mistake, we don’t penalize them but use that as a learning opportunity to help them move forward and give them professional development opportunities. So there are ways in which we can engage people. At the end of the day, we’re all human beings and our needs and our expectations are almost the same. If we treat people as we would like to be treated by our bosses and our leaders, I think people will come along and start producing and embracing the vision of the organization.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:12]:

See, what you just mentioned is, of course, basically the right things to do when it comes to working with people. But then somewhere the topic of discussion today is, should we manage people? Because if you notice the last time, besides the top leadership, everyone is given a management responsibility or managing, and then when you refer to their responsibility, they say they manage this much workforce or these many resources. Mhmm. And that, essentially, maybe we are just using the term loosely, but then we are looking at like, I have a server, a virtual server on the cloud. I have two people who we call as resources who have Java skills. I’m just kind of making this up, but just trying to make a point here. And when you look at them, you look at them as their capability, and you try to use them to get a job done. That’s well and good when you’re looking at a very isolated tactical thing you want to accomplish. But when you are trying to move at a pace where these people are not just widget makers, and they are not supposed to only be so called following an industrial mode of working that I give you a direction, you work in the certain way, and that’s where you stop. You want their contribution in ideation. You want them to think outside of the box. You want them to go beyond the line of duty to support their team members and safeguard the organization’s vision, do you think managing them as resources would take us there? Because our organizational structure is around management or it’s created on the premise that we have to manage people, and that’s what is the very focus of today’s conversation that should we quote unquote manage people? 

Samuel Sudhakar [00:10:34]:

No. I don’t think we need to be managing people. We need to be leading them. And there’s a big difference between managing and leading,Managing comes into play when we are managing non human resources. When it comes to human resources, they are a part of the human ecosystem. So we need to engage them in, like you were mentioning, joint ideation, joint decision making, joint problem solving and sitting with a customer and jointly coming up with a solution that fits their needs. No longer, in the past whether it came to software or hardware, there used to be things that you can just order and pick off the shelf and deliver to a customer. More and more, the requirements that our customers are putting in front of us, our students, our faculty, our staff, they’re all one off kinds of requests. They’re also complex and they require some kind of a tweaking to the widget that we have on the shelf. So unless the people who are going to be working on the solution are a part of the conversation at the beginning stage, the manager or the leader can no longer formulate the need and give it to a bunch of programmers and say, this is what the customer needs, produce. The programmers, the analysts, the solution providers, the technologists, they all need to be involved in the conversation to say, what is the customer actually trying to accomplish? What is their interest? And are they articulating their interest in the right way? What is the bigger picture behind what the customer is wanting? And when we think in those terms, then we quit trying to fit the customer’s need into a widget that we already have on the shelf; rather we put ourselves in the customer’s shoes and say, what are they trying to accomplish and how can we solve the problem? The idea of mass customization is really accomplished by people being a part of the conversation from the beginning. So people should not be managed, but they should be led. They should be led to be a part of the decision making. They should be led to be a part of the discussion and the conversation in solving the problems.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:00]:

So when you use this term of leading, we’ll take a quick break, but when we come back, let’s use this as a point of conversation when we do come back. When we are looking at you as a leader, you, of course, have shared your views on how you would do what you’re supposed to. But then your reportees, the ones who are your direct reports or maybe a level lower than them, their performance appraisal is dependent on how well did they deliver the business results and how did they manage all the different resources allocated to them, which could be the budget, which could be the infrastructure, which could be the people? Again, resources, seen as people, and when they are supposed to be measured on the outcome, howsoever they get to it, you try to be the hands off leader and allow them to do it. So what you just said today, there is quite a bit of proof out there that the people below one or two levels below the CIO, if you’re talking about IT department, are not truly thinking like a leader. They are truly thinking like a manager who’s supposed to do things the way that is expected without heeding the age old advice that if you take care of people they’ll take care of you, it becomes unilateral, that okay this is how you’re supposed to get it done and that’s happening, that’s rampant, so how do you prevent it? By sitting at the top, but still be able to have your virtual clones in terms of your thinking and mindset be working as your deputies or your reports, so everyone at the lowermost level in your organization is truly led, and you’re not the only one leading. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back and discuss.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:59]:

Welcome back. So, Sam, the point here is you are a leader. You earned that title and that position, and you think like one. Your responses in the first segment very clearly showcase that. The organizational structure, the demands from the business, and the firefighting, all of that leads the people below you, couple of levels below you, who in turn are handling people in some way, end up resorting to becoming managers versus leaders, which is your vision of how every person should be handled. So that degradation of someone being led to someone being managed, which you know no one likes to be managed, is what is in question here. How do we get over it? What would you do in your organization so that at any given time anyone is being dealt with keeping in mind that they have to be led. These people have to be led, not managed.

Samuel Sudhakar [00:18:08]:

Sure. I mean, organizational structures often are barriers to innovating and providing and exceeding the needs and expectations of the customers,So we should never let organizational structures come in the way of innovation. For example, there’s an article that Educause recently published that’s called Managing Complexity. And I’ll read you a sentence from one of their principles of managing complexity. It says open and social organizations must be reflected in managerial level tasks that enable ongoing input from all individuals, but still respect the responsibility of leaders to make decisions and be accountable for the performance of their departments and institutions. So open and social organizations, what they will do is I’m not suggesting that we get rid of the organizational structure; they are there for a reason, but we should never let the managerial organizational structure come in the way of an open and social organization, which allows individuals within the organization at whatever level they are to interact with each other and form solutions, not necessarily at the direction of the leadership, but empowering them to innovate and come up with solutions and bring it up to the leadership team for their information or for recommendation. So while we are sitting at the leadership level, we need to empower the decision making to go lower than our level. We need to allow people to make decisions. We need to allow people to make mistakes and give them the right tools to make the decisions and don’t put barriers in terms of these departments can’t work with these departments. Let the people who are actually doing the work, regardless of which department they belong to, work together and solve the problems. Many times we stand in the way of innovation. So when we empower people and we equip them with the right tools, we get out of the way and make innovation happen. And you will see some major problems being solved and major accomplishments and innovations being brought forth when you take that approach. And that’s the approach I take in my organization. I empower my leaders and get out of the way. 

Sanjog Aul [00:20:56]:

So that’s fantastic that you have attempted to do it and I’m sure you reaped the benefits. But the fact remains that most organizations don’t or cannot. I’m sure everyone has good intentions. So the discussion here is, we have to figure out how to make this all happen in other organizations, why they are chained down by the organizational structure, and if we know the why, then the next step is how do we break those chains. So share with us like, suppose you came into this organization or you saw some issues which were holding your direct reports from acting like leaders and leading their crew. What did you do on the ground to turn this around? Did you just bring them into a room and coach them? Or was there something that you did to fix the culture? Or if you have some examples of your report who has indeed turned another report, what did they do to turn this around? Because those examples, those anecdotes are what’s gonna tell how do we break this chain which is holding us back from maximizing the people potential.

Samuel Sudhakar [00:22:25]:

Sure. I mean, the leader has to practice what he or she preaches, and we lead by example. So I can’t say break down organizational structures and look at the customer’s point of view without leading by example. So when a complex problem is presented to me, I bring people at all levels into the decision making process. I don’t just meet with the leadership team to see how we can solve the issue or how we can provide a solution for a particular innovation that a faculty or a staff member is looking for. So I bring people from every level of the organization within and outside the organization to talk about and brainstorm about solutions. My leadership team follows that example and they do the same thing. Organizations are complex ecosystems,So I recently heard about this project in Maine where the officials discovered that the cod population was decreasing. I don’t know if you’ve heard the story or not. So what they did, they looked at the cod population in the oceans and they discovered that the cod population is decreasing because the seals were actually consuming them. So a simple solution to the problem was let’s decrease the population of seals. And what they discovered was when they decreased the population of seals, the cod population went down. What they didn’t realize was that there was this complex ecosystem of predators and prey that enveloped this whole ecosystem of fishes and sea living mammals. So you can’t just make one tweak and say the problem is gonna be solved. You’ve got to consider the ecosystem as a whole in trying to come up with a solution for a problem. So that means you involve people within your organization, outside of your organization, and it all boils down to from the time that you hire people. For example, in my organization, when we go out to hire people, we just don’t have interviewing teams of just people within ITS. We invite people from all over the campus community to sit in on the interview process to hire the right candidate to work for Information Technology Services because we want to hear from their perspective because we’re solving problems for others. We’re not an isolated organization. We are in support of the entire institution and the academic mission of the institution. So it starts from hiring process to every decision that you make; strategic planning process and forming strategic goals for the organization needs to involve stakeholders from every part of the organization. That way we break down the barriers and the silos that exist within this complex ecosystem and we are aware of the other issues that might arise when you try to solve a particular problem.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:41]:

So like you use other form of accounting to understand which type of asset delivered what type of value or what type of investment delivered what type of value, Would you think it’ll be too much of a reach for us to start looking at our people related investments to deliver a certain type of value? So we do look at the expense side of it, but we have a fuzzy estimation on what that people’s side delivered when we made some changes in the way we ran the projects, the way we staffed the projects, the way we onboarded or exited or repurposed the people, this was the impact on the bottom line and the top line. Is this discussion occurring at all at your level or with the CFO or whosoever so that something gets measured when we are dealing with people so that any strategy that you put is not a feel good strategy? And if the results come or not, it becomes like we predicted weather. If it didn’t work out the way we thought, well, what we get away with is say we tried.mAre we going that literal? Because you are spending quite a bit on human resources, if that’s what I want to call it.Since I’m against the term of resource for it to be used for people. But is there some quantification utilized or some ROI metric utilized when you are dealing with people related investments and, also benchmark the outcomes?

Samuel Sudhakar [00:27:37]:

So, you know, we get into trouble when we start treating people like machines. As I have mentioned in your previous show, machines provide outputs, people provide outcomes. And the outcomes people provide are different from different people. It depends on what skills and what expertise they bring to the organization. It’s very complex to measure the outputs of human beings because some of the outcomes that human beings provide are intangible. So the minute we start measuring people’s productivity and start benchmarking their productivity, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t hold them accountable for what we are asking them to do, but we just cannot treat them as widgets or systems or processes that we expect certain outcomes from and measure it and evaluate them based on the outputs that they provide. Human beings are complex. Every human being is unique and individual. And in order for us to bring mass customization into play, we need their feedback and their input. So we need to come up with different ways of measuring the outcomes of individuals. Different things motivate different individuals. There are intrinsic motivations. There are extrinsic motivations. There are some employees who will produce a lot of outcomes in an 8-hour period and for some employees it might take a 12-hour period. Regardless, their contributions are unique and their contributions are needed for the success of the organization. So there’s a song that says every kind of people make the world turn round and round. So human beings are unique. They are not like assembly line cars that come off and they all expect to perform the same way. We’re all made differently. And so we need to leverage that. We need to take advantage of the uniqueness and the expertise that each person brings. So I think there needs to be a mindset change when we deal with human resources. You mentioned human resources are the most expensive resource in the organization.And therefore, you can see a lot of automation that’s taking place. I think in the next segment you’re going to talk about AI and machine learning and all that kind of stuff. But we can never get away from the contributions that human beings are going to continue to make to the organization and to the society. 

Sanjog Aul [00:30:26]:

Let’s take a quick break listeners and let’s talk about how we are planning to optimize our investments in human capital and then when we do that what could be the best balancing act we can have or what’s the best balance we can strike so that people, they themselves feel valued at the same time we get the most value out of the related investment. How do we do it? What technologies we can use with or without? And as Sam mentioned, how do these AI and robotic process automation are going to play in this? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:06]:

Welcome back. So, Sam, looking at AI and this robotic process automation, these are the new trends where we are trying to automate a lot of things which otherwise could have been done by humans. But then on one hand, the idea is you save money by reducing the head count. The second thing is, which is a more positive spin to it, is you allow the breathing room for humans to do something more creative, more value centric. So when we are looking at this, are we taking into account what the humans want? As a worker who comes into the workforce, the person been working in a certain way and has built skills over the years and now you found a way to automate so that person is expected to retool. So all that from a just sterile, removing emotion from the equation, this would make sense,business sense. What does it do to the psyche of the people who remain and you expect them to retool themselves or the people who leave and go somewhere thinking that all my years worth of investing in myself to develop myself has gone down the drain. Right. What are you so, we’ve to kind of get it; don’t let this get out of hand because there is a profit motivation.

Samuel Sudhakar [00:34:44]:

Right. So, you know, we’ve been moving from the industrial era to the information age for decades now.So when we started moving assembly line jobs overseas and we started sending people to work to school to learn more about technology and information systems because that’s where the jobs of the future were, we started moving into a new era, and people started to reinvent themselves. And many times there was always fear that machines are going to take over and machines have taken over, but human beings have still found meaningful employment opportunities. Today, the unemployment rate is much lower than it was even 10 years ago when a lot of information jobs were coming in and assembly line jobs were going away. So when it comes to AI and machine learning and automation, it’s the same kind of thing that’s happening now in the retail environment, for example, and in the warehouse and industrial environment. There are certain mundane tasks that are repeatable and reproducible tasks that are being taken over by machines and AI and kiosks in McDonald’s and whatnot. But human beings are very talented and they bring unique skills to the organization and their skills and knowledge need to be leveraged in solving complex problems than providing repeatable mundane answers and solutions. A widget that’s handed off from the shelf to a customer can be done by a robot, but every customer who comes now to us presents a complex solution that cannot be solved by a widget on the shelf. So the expectations of the students who are coming to us and the faculty and staff who are coming to us is evolving. It’s exponentially becoming complex. For example, students in a classroom, every student in the classroom learns differently. Every professor who teaches, teaches differently. And no longer is there one modality and one way of learning and one book that’s for one particular subject, etcetera. So we are becoming a very complex system of leveraging resources from all over the world to teach our students and leveraging resources to customize the student learning experience by adaptive learning and immersive learning technologies, the AR, VR, augmented and virtual reality systems, all these are making things very complex, but at the same time very accessible and personable to the consumers, who are our students. So there’s always a need for that unique touch from the human beings to customize the experience to solve a complex problem while all these mundane kinds of things can be taken care of by robots and artificial intelligence systems. So it’s never going to replace a human being, but human beings are asked to do more complex and more intelligent things that they are capable of doing. And when we look at the workforce, we need to be mindful of that and make sure that we are constantly providing opportunities for our own employees to retool themselves into these new technologies. For example, cloud is a great example,When we started moving servers to the cloud, people thought, oh my God, what happens to the server administrators and the people who do the patches and whatnot? Now they’re becoming cloud architects. They’re finding solutions on the cloud for issues that our clients have. And we are able to bring solutions to the customer at a faster scale and more customized scale by these same people who are managing servers. They are now cloud architects providing more unique and more special solutions which are scalable and complex to our customers. So we have to think about it in a different frame of mind when we deal with human resources. Human resources can be retooled and they’re capable of doing the kinds of complex things that we’re asking them to do as long as we provide them the tools and the opportunity for them to do so.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:34]:

So well, the point well taken that you give them the opportunity to retool themselves and then they will retool. The ones who don’t, they don’t stay. So when I’m looking at the people side here and as part of this discussion, we are looking at HR to talk about workforce development and employee welfare and the fact that people are the basis of an organization to come into existence. So when we are looking at it that way, besides the fact that there is a retooling required when for them to sustain their job and pay their bills, they will retool. What do you do as a leader, say, in your department in technology so that we learn about these people’s overall growth related desires and aspirations and create avenues to make them a reality versus always corporate has a need. This is what you know. This is what you don’t know. We will give you training. Come and work with us. Oh, sorry. This is what we are this is how we are shifting direction. So we have you have a choice. You can look elsewhere, or we will help you, or we will train you to meet the corporate guideline. If an individual, a human, is constantly dealing with that, means they would feel as if they are being utilized and exploited for a corporate reason and their own ambitions and their career aspirations, they are taking a second seat. Are you leaving that to HR or to those generic programs, or is there something which is embedded in the DNA of how you lead and how your department is managed that this automatically gets taken care of?

Samuel Sudhakar [00:41:46]:

So HR plays a unique and important role. And obviously, they cannot do all the things that you mentioned. I think gone are the days when we sit down or sit our employees down and say we’re moving in a different direction, we’re going to retool you, we’re going to help you achieve new skills so that you can help us with this new direction that we are going in. That decision making has to be a part of the whole organization. So for example, when I came here back in 2013, cloud was relatively new for the organization. When I started talking about the cloud and getting rid of the data center, etcetera, there was a lot of trepidation among our employees who have been traditionally managing data centers and servers, etcetera. So framing the conversation is so important rather than issuing an edict of this is the direction we’re going to go, we need to sit the employees down and have this ongoing relationship with the employees so there are no surprises in where the organization is moving. Make the employees part of the decision making process. Make the employees part of your thinking process of where we need to go in order to satisfy and exceed the expectations of our customers. People are no longer isolated from where the industry is going or where the higher education spectrum is heading. In the olden days, people who work in a factory one day found out that their company was being acquired or their jobs are being moved overseas. That’s no longer the case. Our employees are well informed now. They read about things. They see things that are happening around them. We need to frame the conversation and continue to have this relationship with the employees to let them in on your thinking of where we should be heading and ask for their opinion and ask for their input on are we thinking along the right lines? Is this what is going to provide better services to our students, faculty, and staff? Rather than saying, well, I think this is what we need to be doing, we need to involve them in that conversation. And so they are not surprised when we decide as an organization that we’re going to move in a particular direction and they need to retool themselves. By the time we have that conversation, they should already be attuned to the fact that we are moving in this direction and they were part of that conversation. 

Sanjog Aul [00:44:39]:

Let’s take a quick break. Listeners, we’ll be right back. And let’s look at how do we listen to our people. There are certain things which they will say, other things they will show in action, sometimes they will not react. All three are opportunities to listen and learn so that we get better at managing all different aspects of our business, but leading people at the same time. What would that look like? What would that mechanism look like? Let’s explore. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:11]:

Welcome back. So when you are listening to someone as an individual, you get that feedback and it’s a 1-on-1. But now as you mentioned, it’s a complex organization. Many people are talking to many people. Your managers are talking to the deputies, you’re talking to your deputies, etcetera. But all of that conversation, number one, there should be an effective listening approach. We should be intentional about actively listening to figure out what people’s concerns, desires, hopes, etcetera are, and then be able to decipher what all that means, and then be able to take action, and it’s a continuous process, but if you are not intentional about it, it will sound like noise, or you will not do anything about it even though there is a lot of talk. Have you been able to, Sam, in your organization, create a mechanism to be able to listen and then use that to bring the most value for all entities involved?

Samuel Sudhakar [00:48:26]:

Absolutely. So, you know, I did a presentation earlier this year for my leadership team that the title of the presentation was Innovations that Matter Powered by People. Now I believe that innovation is powered by people. Technology and tools assist in innovation, but they are powered by people. And who are these people in our organization? In higher education, it’s the people that work in my organization, in IT, our faculty, our staff, our students, our community. They are the people who power this innovation. So people are the most important part of the innovation equation. Now there are several things that we have done to empower people so they can power the innovation that needs to happen in the organization. So number one, last year I went on a listening tour to about 70 of our faculty members on our campus. It was 30 minutes to a 45-minute conversation with about 70 faculty members about what their interests are, what they would like the IT organization to do, how can we serve them better, and I harvested tons of valuable information through my conversation. When you talk to faculty from different disciplines and interdisciplinary departments their needs are unique; the things that they are trying to accomplish in their classrooms and their research is pretty fascinating. So I came away with a whole bunch of things that IT could be doing better to serve the campus community. So then we instituted a tool called OfficeVibe. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that tool. It’s an employee engagement tool that allows employees to provide anonymous feedback to the leadership team about things that are going on in the organization. OfficeVibe sends out maybe 5 to 10 questions every week to employees that they can anonymously answer. Questions ranging from how is your relationship with your supervisor? What are the things that the organization can provide to help you do your job better? Does your organization care about your wellness? And what is the organization doing about it? All kinds of questions from a broad variety of topics. The feedback that we’ve been getting from employees through the OfficeVibe tool has been invaluable. Every week in my leadership team, we sit down and look at the comments, and we come up with common themes that the employees express. We intentionally try to address those issues that the employees are bringing forward. There might be compliments from employees, but at the same time there might be criticisms. And since it is anonymous, employees are very free about expressing their frustrations and their recommendations. So we take that very seriously and as a leadership team, we’re intentionally engaging our employees. Now OfficeVibe does not substitute the 1-on-1 relationship that we need to have with our employees. I encourage every manager to talk to their employees 1 time a month. Now we are a larger organization. This year, I’ve engaged in my own employee engagement in terms of meeting with each employee within the ITS organization. We have 108 employees. I’m meeting with each employee for 30 minutes and I’m asking them basically 4 questions. So far I’ve met with 38 employees and this has been a very valuable experience. The 4 questions I ask them are these. Number 1, how’s your work environment? Number 2, how’s your workload? Number 3, what can ITS do better to serve our campus community? Number 4, what are your career aspirations? I spend about 30 minutes with each employee in discussing these questions and sometimes these meetings run for 1.5 hours depending on what employees have to say. It has been a very, very valuable exercise because it tells me that, number one, the employees are very open about expressing what we can do better and expressing what their work situation and workload looks like. But when you ask them the question about their career aspirations, that’s when their eyes brighten up and say, these are my hopes and aspirations and dreams. And it gives me a better idea of how we should be approaching professional development, how we should be approaching employees recruiting, etcetera. So these are some of the things that have really worked well in my organization, and it’s an ongoing process. It never stops. We need to continue to engage our employees in these conversations. We have 30 seconds. Recruiting, etcetera. So these are some of the things that have really worked well in my organization, and it’s an ongoing process. It never stops. We need to continue to engage our employees in these conversations.

Sanjog Aul [00:53:35]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you, Sam. Thanks so much for joining us and helping us understand how organizations can do things to help people become the best they can be and also meet their own corporate objectives. Thanks so much.

Samuel Sudhakar [00:53:51]:

You’re welcome.

Sanjog Aul [00:53:53]:

And listeners, hope you enjoyed this. Please like us on Facebook, search for CIO Talk Network, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn community. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week. Take care and God bless.