What does the future of work have in store for us, and will it make us happy? In this episode, I talk to Dan Sodergren, founder of Your FLOCK, and learn how he has built a business around helping others understand their team and company culture. This is a big conversation that touches many areas from recruitment to retaining staff to hybrid working and what the future may hold.
Episode Links
Episode Transcript
Matthew Todd
Hi. My name is Matthew Todd, and welcome to Inside the ScaleUp. This is the podcast for founders, executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers in the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing. We learn from their journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the successes, the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses.
Hey, and welcome back to the podcast. pleased to have you today. I’m pleased to be joined by Dan Sodergren. From Your FLOCK. Good morning, Dan. Great to have you here.
Dan Sodergren
Thank you very much, Matthew for inviting me, most kind.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, really looking forward to chat this morning finding out more about your your background, Your FLOCK. And I know there’s a few interesting points that we identified in a brief chat before the call that we want to talk about. But let’s kick things off with a bit of an intro from yourself. Tell us a bit about yourself and your company if you can.
Dan Sodergren
Yeah, no problem. I have the joy of I trained corporate companies sometimes in digital transformation and marketing some other things I had the joy of doing, I’ll make sure it’s not the same injury because that lasts for about six minutes and needs a PowerPoint presentation. So I did that.
So yeah, so my name is Dan Sodergren you can find me just searching and so do and there aren’t actually that many others. So just Dan s o d e r g r e n. If you wanna have a look and see that I’m not lying about my injury. So yeah, so I’ve had the joy of doing digital transformation, and and things around company culture for quite a while I was kind of a bit of a prophet in the wilderness, pre COVID. And, and I was telling people that the future, the thing is, I have the joy or otherwise of being called a tech futurist. And I always joke that, you know, a tech futurist, that’s just someone who does stuff before everybody else does. And it doesn’t mean that I’m rich, because if it was, I wouldn’t become a, I wouldn’t be called a tech futurist. I’d be called very rich.
You’re a very rich entrepreneur. So, congratulations. I say yes, thank you. I have several companies. But I have had several companies, I’ve had about 10 Different companies, and they tend to be, you know, before other people did stuff. So I had an augmented reality company 12 years ago, way before, you know, AR and stuff kind of really is the first wave, the first hope wave of AR Matthew, as I’m sure you know.
So yeah, so the BBC picked me up and called me a tech futurist and, and because I’ve been right about lots of stuff, I have the joy of being being asked by companies to come in and teach them about things about the future. And one of those things, because I was talking about it 10 years ago, was about the future of work. And so I have the God again, I’m very lucky that I’ve been asked to a TED talk, which is about to come out about the future work, and I’ve been asked to do on lots of podcasts and lots of different things. And, and that’s what I mainly talk about, now you talk about the future of digital marketing and, and on the BBC stuff, I’m gonna think it’s tech expert, digital marketing expert on tech and digital marketing expert, which is, which is good, you know, it’s good. And my mom’s very, you know, very happy about being able to tell her tennis partners or whatever that you know, Dan’s been on telly again. I think I think it to be fair, if I’m honest, Matthew are a lot of my family pretty bored of me being on telly now. And to be fair, I don’t need to get up that early myself. So, so yeah, I’ve, I now run around the country, obviously, post COVID. I, I get asked to go and do keynotes for different things. And, and what I normally say talk about is about this future of work thing, which is got very, very fashionable very, very quickly, of course, post COVID. And because of COVID, and the pandemic, but all those things that were happening in the past, were already the seeds in the ground. All that COVID done is this sped this up.
So we’ve had 10 years of advancement in a couple of years. But of course, that 10 years of advancement has caught a lot of people off guard. And so you can now be a situation where you companies that weren’t remote first or remote forced. And so you get this I think now fascinating couple of years ahead of us where it’s gonna be really interesting to see. And I don’t mean the God of the fake really interesting, I’d actually be critical, almost Life and Death of some companies, because they they’ll find it amazingly tricky to keep employees engaged whilst they’re doing hybrid work, or even going fully remote because they were remote forced. And they don’t actually have the infrastructure and the capacity really, to go into remote which of course why so many companies are trying to get people back in the offices. We don’t Yes, absolutely. Complete caveat obvious to start off with you. I think it’s something like 35% of people can’t remote work anyway. Or you can even now baby say 50% of people can’t remote work because of the work they do.
You can’t remote work being a barman, you can’t remote work being a doctor but actually, we’ve actually found you can do a lot of remote work directly. And you can remote work being a lawyer and you can remote work doing lots of things but you know, people always say, Oh, what about airline pilots now? Okay, so yeah, you can’t fly a plane but actually people do fly planes remotely. They’re called drones. So you know, even the things that we think are untouchable, we’re going to find that so many more people can remote work. And the reason why I’m so passionate about it is because remote work and allows us to be so much more diverse and inclusive than it did before. Having an office space, having all this kind of stuff around. Not only that, but it’s so much better for the environment, Matthew, and it’s like, it’s something the equivalent of if half of us did remote work half the time. It’s something that’s like the equivalent of 6 million cars off the road. You know, I’m an old environmentalist.
So I’ve been trying to talk about the environment for for 20 years or so trying to get people to try to do stuff differently. And people wouldn’t like I know, I had to go down to London to do meetings and literally have a meeting for an hour, and then come back from London. Well, now we just do zooms you know, VCs, Devi zoom calls in San Francisco, it used to be you’d have to fly to San Francisco, literally. I’ve done that before for companies or fly to Hong Kong, have a media for two hours. Imagine the the economic but also environmental impact of that. It’s just insane. Yeah. So. So yeah, I’m a great believer, and I have great advocate and champion of remote work. So I but I’ll try not to rant. But that’s why because the green, green green is good.
Matthew Todd
No, definitely. I think it’s really interesting. And I think like you say, it’s an accelerant.
Dan Sodergren
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, COVID. There’s lots of stuff that’s happened. And it’s happened for the wrong reasons, sadly. So I would much prefer that we didn’t have to have a global pandemic, which killed millions of people, for people to realize that they didn’t have to go into office spaces didn’t have to travel down to London to do their job. We’ve already had the tenant, the technology been here forever. Zoom has been around for quite a while. If it wasn’t zoom, it was Go To Webinar while I was doing webinars 15 years ago. I mean, it’s not. There’s not the technology, which is the problem, the problem. Now, you could argue you could argue broadband, because broadband wasn’t as good in people’s houses wasn’t the good, true. But it was still good enough to do this. But we weren’t doing it.
So what I find fascinating as a technology specialist is in this version of the world, it isn’t the technology, which is the leading factor. It’s actually people. It’s how people do stuff. And that’s changed. And this is the thing, Matthew, I think, because the world has changed, because the way people are now doing things. So I’ve got to be careful words, because I don’t mean the whole world. I do mean the Western world. I do mean, the developed countries, and I do mean most probably 20% of the world’s population. So we’ve got to realize how privileged we are when we can say this, but most people listening to this podcast will be under that banner. And so I say it with the caveat knowing that no, I get it. There’s people that work in mines. Absolutely. And there’s and the world we are very lucky to be in a world where we can do zoom calls totally and have broadband have electricity, you know, you have more than $5 a day totally with you. But the big change has happened, this remote work revolution, that will fundamentally change the dynamics of the employee and employer relationship in the Western world. And I say Western again, I could say developed for both words, particularly wrong, let’s say the privileged world. But that’s been a big thing, because the privilege will drive the economy for a lot of the other things as well.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. And so how, then does this kind of passion for, you know, the future of work, remote work, hybrid working? How does that that relate to your floorplan?
Dan Sodergren
Well, yeah, the passion from the project, which happened many years ago, is because Your FLOCK itself is a team dynamics tool. Yeah. Which works particularly well for keeping teams together for longer, which works brilliantly well, for hybrid work and remote working. Yeah, it’s just complete luck. I’ve got to be as a futurist, sometimes you can still hold your hands up and say, Hey, that was just like, Yeah, you know, I had, you know, green, hemp t shirt companies 25 years ago, that was before its time, you know, AR company, but that had an algorithmic company before algorithms really existed. And it just happens that to complete truth of this, me how Wisniewski, who’s my business partner, my co founder, he’s the brains behind Your FLOCK. And he thought of this idea. And it’s very similar to an idea I tried about seven years beforehand.
So actually, I bumped into me at an event. And he told me this and was like, Oh, my God, I tried to make that years ago. And I had a bit of spare cash. So I was like, Look, I can invest in your company, I’m gonna go off and do my corporate talks. I’ll invest in Your FLOCK and invest and time into it. I think at the time it was called Macaulay rather than Your FLOCK. And we’ll see where it goes, you know. And so it was just, it was just really lucky. It was an old business mentor of mine that that said to me, willing to sit you you keep doing things ahead of time. Well, if that’s the case, look back at your old notes, see what you were going to do seven or eight years ago, and then and then invest in a company doing that. And that’s exactly what I did. It was a stone advice. Yeah, really good advice. Thank you. I won’t say the name of the gentleman today for name dropping purposes. But yes, thank you, sir.
Matthew Todd
So yeah. So then for that idea, then, you know, seven years ago and then you know, bringing you Your FLOCK to life now then, how does Your FLOCK help those those teams? And how is it helping those teams stay together?
Dan Sodergren
Well, yeah, it’s based on lots of research that was done in reservation in Stanford, and then brought over beheld, did his thesis in this and it was then finished at one of our first investors with Manchester University, Charlie child, and we’re word and basically what happens is, you do Your FLOCK survey, the Your FLOCK survey then shows you what values you have, there’s nine different values, and it creates a little values map for you personally. But if you then do the same, but with all your team members, you then get a team map. And that team map then shows you where people align and where they don’t. And that alignment of values. This is not culture fit. This is really important. culture fit is a bad thing. values fit is a good thing. But culture fit is actually quite multiculturalism, it’s not a good thing. Now, if you need if you know this area, well, you’ll know things like Belbin, which is about different team roles and other things, all those, there’s Myers Briggs, or this desk, and it’s all the different things you can do and Cosmo quizzes and all the rest of it. But the thing with Your FLOCK is it because it goes for your values, which are deeper than the rest of it, you want to have a team that had that share similar values. And these values are things like teamwork, autonomy, customer focus, detail driven these kinds of things. They’re not kind of green values. They’re not the kind of you know, they’re not the brand values. Yeah, but deeper than that they’re not brand values.
And we always get asked that you’re like, Oh, can we change them to our brand values? And the answer is no, because the brand values things that are stipulated, which are on top of all this. And to be fair, most time brand values are not here to anyway by their behaviors. But this is a deeper thing is it’s around values, if you can find a team that share similar values, then they stay together for longer. And you can you can literally see, because we the reason why I invested in Your FLOCK is because a friend of mines firm used it in their business. And if they’ve listened to Your FLOCK advice, it would have saved them about 100,000 pounds, because they employed the wrong person at the wrong time with the wrong team. And they literally the machine said, we believe that person will leave, that person did leave, and they left within six months. And it cost them 100,000 pounds to replace them and a whole host of other problems. So I was like, Look, I’m all in, I don’t know how it works, it seems to be magical. At the time, I didn’t understand the algorithm didn’t understand the rest, because I’m not a tech and not on the human design side. But that’s why I invested.
So you know, I liked the product so much that I invested in it. And Your FLOCK now helps a variety different we specialize where we began, actually we specialize in law firms and in professional services, especially legal teams of about 10 to about 100 people. And it works particularly well with with those contracts. And the reason why it works particularly well with with lawyers, because lawyers are finding this transition into hybrid work or into remote work very tricky themselves as a community. But also they have a very high churn rate, employee turnover rates almost naturally. And what Your FLOCK does will flop it around, we just got the data back from another client. So we can now say it’s about 27%. We reduce employee churn by about 27%, which might not sound very exciting, but it is thank you, thank you for it. Yeah, it is. It’s exciting. Yeah, it’s amazing. Like more than a quarter, which means that it literally saved you 10 1000s of pounds. But actually, when you look at recruitment costs and all the other things, we actually saves you hundreds of 1000s of pounds, and Your FLOCK doesn’t cost 100 1000s pounds dollars. So we’re very lucky because it’s software service, because we use machine learning and do some other type of things. And because we got investment from the government and some some other great people, we’ve got a great board and some great advisors that have created the learning develop modules behind it, we can offer it at a very, very, very low cost compared to what you’d surely traditionally do with a consultancy and some other things.
So it’s, it’s, it’s almost pennies in the pound. So yeah, that’s why, and that’s it. But for me, it’s not about and again, I’ve got to be careful with words, because our investors will be listening. It is about the money course it is. But it’s actually for me, it’s not about the money. It’s actually about how do you help more people be happier at work. And that’s my kind of mission is, how can I help a million people be happier at work because I think if you if you help people be happier at work, then the world itself becomes a better place. Because happiness without being too happy about it. Happiness and being engaged at work is our kind of secret sauce for productivity. And there’s so many studies now that prove the more happy you are at work, the more productive you are. And it ranges from, you know, people saying it’s like 20, adds 20% to your bottom line to two much much higher. And they’re great companies like the happiness index and loads of other folks that are doing great work in this space that can print it all with the data and the other stuff but but for us really for me it’s it’s slightly more spiritual, but it’s like the deeper reason I want to if we could make the world a happier place, I think we can make the world a better place.
Matthew Todd
Yea, no, I think thats a great mission and set of values behind that and as you say, with the, you know, the kind of the fallout from the pandemic so far You know, it is forcing hybrid working as the new norm. And I think, you know, something along the lines of what you’ve described is definitely needed.
And one thing I’d like your your kind of opinion on that I’ve heard a lot of companies kind of struggling with, with trying to manage this hybrid scenario, you know, should we let people go fully remote should we mandate when they come into the office is they’ve noticed a change in, you know, what they would describe as company culture, in that, you know, for some subset of their employees that it can almost turn into where you can do your work whenever you need to do it. So that, you know, then they’re happy to have offered that flexibility as part of remote and hybrid working.
But what they’ve seen is an increase in staff churn, because for some staff, they’re saying, well, actually, when they were in the office, they felt like they were part of something and it was a fun place to be, it was an engaging place to be. But now it’s just like, they’ve got a to do list. So they’ve kind of almost regressed back to visa my skills. This is my to do list. And do I want to do this? You know, if it’s marketing, or whatever it might be, do I want to do this to do lists for this company all? I could go over there and get paid more to do the same to do list?
Dan Sodergren
85% of people will say bad bosses, bad management, bad culture is part of the reason why they leave.
Dan Sodergren
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s couple of things is that again, you can look at the data in the data. This is for me, it’s always the case for me. You know, in God, we trust, but everyone else must bring data. Yep. So what are the rich moments of this whole future of work? He’s everyone’s got an opinion. And rightly so because it’s our work is what we do. Yeah. So everyone goes, Oh, well, blah, blah, blah, or we talk about productivity and productivity actually went up, not down with this remote work revolution. It’s the opposite. So bosses are saying, but we need to be back at the office because we want to be more productive. Well, that’s that’s just not true. Because productivity has gone up. Now. There’s definitely an argument for and against why productivity went up. Yep. And will it be sustained? And is it sustainable? And will you get burnout and all these other things true? Absolutely. Right. But let’s not get ourselves. They’re not saying get back into the office because of productivity, because that’s not the data. That isn’t the truth. Yeah. They’re also not saying get back into the offices for environmental reasons, because there’s no environmental reasons. But they aren’t saying get back into the office because they own offices. Absolutely. And I’d be a bit annoyed if I’d spent 2 billion pounds in office like Apple did. And then no one comes back into the office. Yeah, that would annoy me, I’d be like, well, actually, you’re gonna come back in the office.
So we’ve got to be careful when we kind of think, Oh, why are they stipulate and get back in the office, because it’s the same as people saying, Get back into the fields, where they own fields will get back into the factories, when they’re in factories. Now, the difference between the fields and the factory, and now the office, and now the home, is we can work from home, we couldn’t work from home in a factory, we couldn’t work from home in a field, you can work from it. But now you can. So this is a big change. Matthew, it’s not just a small change. This is an absolutely paradigm shift in the future of work, which is d centralized things. Now people don’t like decentralized power shifts, because it freaks them out. Because that’s like, Oh, you don’t need government anymore. But we’ve got to be anarchy. Oh, God, you don’t need the office anymore? Of course you do. People need to come and buy sandwiches from technology. You know, remember what the government is trying to tell you, the government is trying to get back into the fields, the app. So we gotta be really careful, because it’s highly precise. I mean, I’ll give you a great example. So this is just just come out. But it’s brilliant. I told him, I get told off for politicizing things are certainly the future work. And I do believe it’s political angle. The reason why it’s political angle is because because you’re taking your means of production, and you’re taking ownership on your means of production, which is why the employee employee the contract is now being strained and being pulled out.
Because part of the deal wasn’t it is you went to the office, and you got to know people, you had good friends at the office, and that was part of the deal. Get you out of that part of the deal. And everyone’s like, well, I don’t I don’t need officers. And I don’t need to be friends with people. And I can be friends with people that I like. And I can work from home, I can work for anyone. And some people would pay me more. But some people actually I like more. So I’d rather work for something which has better values and has more purpose and autonomy and mastery. And that’s the biggest reason that people move jobs. It’s not money, by the way. And again, look at the data out there, you can Google it. It’s brand new, there’s so much data in this and it’s just proven again and again. Again, it’s not about money. It is up to about a certain amount. But this is like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Once you get above a certain amount of money. It’s not about money, because it can’t be so you can pay this as well as equity, the finding in law, you can pay lawyers more money, but it won’t keep them. They’ll just you’ll just pay them more money and they’ll leave because they’ll don’t actually I didn’t really like working here. Oh, we’ll pay you 15% More. Brilliant. Thanks very much. I’ll buy a new car. Three months later, I started like working here. Yeah, but we can’t afford to pay you anymore. Well, then I’m gonna leave. Now. Did that person leave? Because you didn’t pay them enough? No, because there’s always going to be a fight. There’s always going to be a bit where you can’t pay them any more money for the job that they do this because this is the market this is capitalism. Yes. The way that life is. Yeah. However, you can do all the other stuff like you can be a nicer boss. You can give them recognition. You can give them a career path career path. By the way career personal development is the highest reason people leave a job. That’s the highest reason. Yeah, the actual underneath bid.
The highest reason is bad management and bad bosses. That’s why people leave businesses. That’s exactly what it is. And the no one likes to talk about it because oh No, no, no, it’s because of money if we don’t pay them enough? No, it’s not. Absolutely. Because data is that absolutely not that it’s bad bosses. But 85% of people will say bad bosses, bad management, bad culture is reason, part of the reason why they leave. You look at employee engagement, employee engagement at the moment, about 85% of people are not engaged at work. Yeah, that that should scare the heck out of everybody who has a business or who has a team, because that’s not just half of you. That’s more than 85%. But that also includes your bosses, includes your bosses, your managers, we always think in these stats, it doesn’t, that means your boss doesn’t really want to work there. Your manager doesn’t really want to be a manager, and you don’t really want to work there. Yeah. So it’s this whole thing of how did you hold people in? What was a social cohesion to make these companies work? Well, it was the office space, you take it away. And then everyone’s like, actually, I’m a free agent, I can do what I like. Now, the only people who are saying get back, and I think a lot of people are saying get back into the offices. And again, this is backed up completely by data. If you have a very non diverse team, you have a very, I’m known as a pale, male and stale. But that’s the terminology that’s often used. But this is actually the case, the older the board is, the more white they are, the more male they are, the more that there’s actually the same person. They all want people to go back into offices. And there’s a direct correlation between these two. Again, Google it, you’ll find the data and it’s coming from Australia and some other places. So the less diverse you are, the more you want people back to the offices. Yeah, no, that’s, that’s again, should be scary for a lot of people. So this new future of work is most probably more to do with diversity inclusion than a lot of people liked. Because that they weren’t about that. It’s more to do with using technology. But a lot of people might like because I went about that. And it’s more to do with personal agency for the employee, than a lot of people liked it. A lot of people truly believe that you do your job when you get paid. And you should be lucky to have a job.
Matthew Todd
Scarcity mindset, isn’t it?
Dan Sodergren
It is , it’s exactly that, scarcity mindset, fixed scarcity mindset. Absolutely. Right. Absolutely. Right. I think it’s a scary thing about it, though is, is that very same mindset is the reason that these companies might not exist in three years time or in five years time, because if your leader is still believing, you’re lucky to have a job, and you’re lucky to come into the office, and you should shut up and not give him feedback, because he doesn’t like feedback, those businesses won’t exist because the market won’t, literally the dynamics of the market won’t allow them to. So the biggest change you’ve got here is the power of the people or the employees are shifted. And employees have now got more power than ever, which is what and by the way, I’m a great believer in it, you know, good on him, because for a very long time, the employee employee contract has been skewed to one side, that’s basic capitalism.
So what happens? Yeah, now you’ve got this bit where people are, well, I’ve got a laptop, I’ve got broadband, and I can work for anyone. Well, awesome, people a revolution. But make sure when you’re picking your company, don’t just pick it based on money. Because you will get bored if you’re getting paid 80,000 pounds, which I have friends who are getting paid 80,000 pounds a year or more in the software world, but they’re not moving to companies that are paying 100,000 pounds, they’re moving to cool companies that are paying them 70 Yeah, you know, the movement isn’t going for money, the movement is going for values and purpose and mastery, autonomy, nice bosses, doing something cool with the environment, you know, doing some cool with that green tackle techs are good. And these are the only real I know, I’m very privileged, and I didn’t I my echo chamber will see this more and more. And it might not be global shift. But I’m hearing a lot from recruiters that it isn’t all about the money.
Now it might be you know, with inflation happening and these other things that are crunching us, we might all go back to only caring about the money again, we might do but for right now, this moment in 2020. It seems the market and the employees especially are caring about something deeper than just the money. And that’s if you employ people based on values, which is what Your FLOCK helps you do that you’ll keep your team together for longer, because it’s something deeper than just the money.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That kind of sounds like them that alongside this acceleration of remote and hybrid working. The reason some companies are struggling and seeing people leaving whether they say it’s money or not is because actually the office was kind of the sticking plaster that was holding together. Groups of people that weren’t really values aligned. And now people are realizing more opportunities just opened up. So they are trying to find places where those values do align. So for any organizations, or for all organizations, I would argue they should really be keenly aware of and focusing on their values to make sure that they have got the right team to help them succeed.
Dan Sodergren
It’s absolutely right. It’s as simple as that. If you haven’t asked your team about values if you haven’t asked your team, I mean a classic you just mentioned, if you haven’t asked your team but almost weekly, do they want to come back into the office? Then you’re not a very good you’ll literally sorry to say you’re not a very good boss or a very good manager, because it’s you should be, you should be asking them and people that will know that over communicating. Now it’s not we live in a world of uncertainty and uncertainty is one of the worst things you can do to a human brain is to give it uncertainty. Now post pandemic in the world we now live in, we have mass uncertainty. Yeah. And because you don’t see them every day in the office, and because they’re not, they’re sitting there smiling, but we all know this. We all know the lie, don’t we, we all know people sitting there smiling in the office and going and talking to them and going, You know what, I hate this place, I’m gonna leave. And I know 50% of the conversations at lunchtime, I hate this place, I’m gonna leave.
But most people don’t, because they’re too scared about what like they can’t go and they haven’t got the agency to leave. But they sit there moaning Yes, disengaged at work, but disengaged at work, and they cause this disengagement. But if you’re not talking to your people enough, then you’re going to have a deep problem. Because that feedback actually is what you need. You don’t have the visceral feedback of the office space anymore. What you actually need is data. And you need to ask every week, oh, how you feeling? How, you know, for example, let’s say Matt, where we were, we’re both caring people. And that’s one of our values yet, and the company we work for isn’t particularly caring, but we know that our team is. And then our team leader every week says, hey, you know, what can we do that’s more caring this week, you’d be like, ah, button, I don’t know, let’s do so for charity, let’s do something nice. Let’s do something we can give back on it. And that’s the level of knowledge you need to have with your team, what motivates them, what makes them tick? Now let’s see if you’re treating everybody the same. And let’s say that we know in law firms autonomy is a really high driver. So if you treat everyone the same, and say, Hey, you don’t have any autonomy, come back in the office, and I’m going to micromanage you, then they’re going to leave. That’s one of the reasons why lawyers leave, they don’t they leave because they’re highly autonomous people, but they’re not treated like highly autonomous people. So they leave the law firm.
Yeah, the problem is, is that most law firms are the same, it’s really just jumped from ship to ship, they go to a big one, go to a small one, go to another one. So the actual culture has got known for a 44% of employee turnover rate. I mean, I don’t even just understand how they can still be businesses of that color, right? Because they are because they charge a lot of money. And they build a lot of hours, and they make things very stressful. And then what happens is, the more stressed you are in the work, the more likely you are to leave. But the problem is when people start leaving, you have the management have to make you work harder. So it becomes more stressful. And so you just get this spiral, you’re just gonna get a spiral, and then you get burnout. And then you keep people leave. But if you’d ask the questions to start off with, you will have this problem. And this is thing that and this is again, I find this fascinating. So what we find with the data that we get, is that the things that we believe to be the case often aren’t the case. Yeah. So I’ll give you a great example. When COVID happened and the pandemic and all these things, I presumed because I didn’t have data, I presumed that it would be I presume that it would have been young people that would it stay at home? Yeah. And I would say yeah, like under 35. Because I’m 46. So let’s say under 35, we’ve got to stay at home because they have fun lives. And they were playing the Playstations were like you don’t need all this nonsense. You go with your own narrative, which is all rubbish. Yeah. And old people want to get back into office, because they’re old fashioned, and they’re boring and blah, blah.
It’s the exact opposite. It’s apparently stitchy in law in the companies that we work with in law, it’s the opposite. Young people want to get back into the offices, older people want to stay at home. Now, why is that? But if you say to everyone, oh, you everyone’s coming back to the office. Just everyone’s going back to the office full stop. You can annoy most of your key players, because they don’t want to come back to the office. But you’ve never asked them when they leave. And they go on the road. And they go somewhere. You know, as the great stats today from Gallup. It’s something like 93% of people want to have flexibility about where they’re working. Yeah. And then 73% want when they work. Yeah, so this is the whole asynchronous kind of thing. And if you if you stop that level of flexibility, you’re going to piss off like most of the people who work for you. And then put them is probably not going to say we’re annoyed. They’re just going to wait and then leave.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, people are quite bad at raising these type of things, aren’t they?
Dan Sodergren
Exactly. Yeah. And so if you’re not asking the right questions, most probably using a piece technology so it can scale, then it’s the great unsaid. And so the great understand is the deepest problem, because it’s when you if you’re if all you’re doing is doing exit interviews, most people will lie in an exit interview, they won’t tell you the reason. They’ll say, Oh, I went because they’ve offered me more money. Now go and you go, we can we offer you more money, and they go, Yeah, I still want to go. Well, what about if we match it? You’d have to worry about 10% More well, okay, maybe. And all you’re doing is keeping a toxic employee. That’s all you’re doing. You’re just paying more now. And you think you’ve kept them. So HR people pull HR people and it’s going, Well, if we give them more money, they’ll stay. They will but they wanted to leave anyway. You just don’t know why they wanted to leave because you’ve never bothered to ask them and that’s just bad management.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, and there’s what damage are they doing? You know, whilst they do stay, you know, not just productivity wise, but also, you know, how are they kind of sharing their perspective with other employees, other team members, etc, as well? Their viewpoint?
Dan Sodergren
Well, they will be because we all know the whole Classic bad apples, you know, it doesn’t tell you very much. The thing is, if you are a manager and you haven’t got the feedback, and you haven’t got it, who needs one to ones? What are the values of the team? How are we, you know, what are the behaviors that we’re driving in the company that are making people more disengaged or more engaged? And all this? By the way, if you’re listening to the podcast, and you’re like, What the hell’s he talking about? And you are a manager? You have to go online and find out what I’m talking about. Yeah. You know, the whole point about being a leader rather than a manager, if you are literally thinking, I don’t know what he’s talking. That’s, if that’s, and that’s okay. Because everybody’s understanding begins at one point. Yeah, and we’ve got to be really open to learning new stuff. Because this next jump, this next paradigm shift, means that a lot of people have to learn new skills. And a lot of those soft skills are what we call the soft skills, and I hate cold himself, because it’s actually harder than the hard skills.
But it’s not about technically how good you are technically anymore. It’s how well do you manage and work with the team, because that’s what keeps companies together, it’s the emotional intelligence. And this is actually the reason I’ve invested in Your FLOCK, because I lack emotional intelligence that I knew that was a problem area for me. In fact, the double Ironman is I, I tried to build Your FLOCK and couldn’t get the team together to stay together for long enough to build. Double, I’d say, so I already knew that I did, I had problems. But a lot of managers. And I’m not gonna say it’s mainly male managers who don’t have the data to support that. But it’s certainly something that I would think might ring true and resonate with many, because we don’t have and certainly people who become managers, because they’re technically good at what they do. So they rise through the ranks only because they’re very good. We get this in coding. And in law, especially, we’re getting a very male dominated industries. And so what happens is you are a lawyer, you’re propelling loads, you’re very good at what you do. And then you become the kind of team leader or the manager of these other lawyers who are coming through.
But you’ve never done management training, you don’t have any skills in management, you’re not a people person. And deep down, you don’t really care about people. But you want to be able to build more, become a partner and build more and therefore billboards. And so you break all your junior staff. And you say all the reason why I reason why I do this, is because that’s what happened to me. Yep. And we hear that a lot of that we do that you always did every day, this is the way that I did it 20 years ago, so therefore, we should do the same. The problem is the next generation of people because of COVID, because of the pandemic, because of all the technology we have, they will I don’t think they’re going to accept that they’re not gonna say, you know, it’s a bit like saying, Oh, I’m abusive, because my father was abusive. It’s that level of misunderstanding of self awareness. It’s literally saying, Well, the reason why the world’s bad is because it was bad before. Well, no, that’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable behavior.
Matthew Todd
You can, and I’ve seen, you know, managers promoted because they were technically good at what they did. Therefore, that was seen as a way of rewarding that. But I’ve also seen managers that weren’t technically good enough and promoted out of the way of the other team members. But I think, regardless of the reason for them being promoted, when they do become managers, a lot of them are like, I’ve got no idea what it even means to be a manager. Therefore, someone above me is going to be measuring me on my effectiveness, because I’m not doing all of the work anymore. They must be holding me accountable for my team’s productivity. Therefore, I need to micromanage.
Dan Sodergren
Exactly, so you have the other side of it, which is the worst, one of the worst thing in the world, which is micromanaging. And then people leave. And it’s like, that’s exactly it. So people don’t leave bad businesses, they leave bad bosses, or bad team managers, or team leaders or whatever. And it’s, it’s the management thing.
But we’ve got to realize here is it’s not about management. It’s about leading. So if you are good enough, ask yourself the deep question, why should anyone be led by me, because that’s what you’re doing. Now. It’s servant leadership, you are leading people, and you’re not necessarily leading from the front, because leading from the front doesn’t work, either. It’s like, one of my favorite quotes is from a CEO. And he said, My job as CEO, actually is to create an environment where my team do the best work. And that’s what his job was. And there’s all sorts of jobs to recruitment, get investment, etc. Now, that company is doing very well. And everyone likes working there, and people don’t leave. And the reason being is the CEO sees it as his job to be the culture and people person for the business, which it is, yeah, that’s he’s leading that company. Now, you’ve also got to have a similar leadership kind of mentality in all your team leaders.
And the team leader says, My job partly if they left a lawyer at the same time, or if they’re a coder, at the same time, is to do some coding. I’ll do some lawyer and fine, but actually, if I’ve got 10 people underneath me, it’s to create the environment where everyone likes working here. And the thing is, he rightly said is now because we’ve lost the office space, people are missing the fact that they have to go and see their team. Yeah, talk about conscious gathering, and we’ve talked about this online, it feels a lot more time that I’m arguing against the office space. I’m not I’m just telling you the stats out there so people don’t want to go back to the office space. But that’s because the office space was a bad thing. Anyway. To factory, we had factories and offices and factories. And all we did is put more offices on top of offices. It wasn’t it’s an organic process that actually if you think about it didn’t serve a fundamental human thing, it was just the culture.
Matthew Todd
No, very factory like. And as an as a slight aside, you’ve literally just reminded me of a previous company I worked for they had a big open plan office spaces is often the norm, lots of developers there, etc. And the manager there, built himself an office inside the office, it was three walls and a big glass wall on one side where he would sit at his desk, overseeing all of the staff and he would occasionally exit his office and shout at people then return again. It was a ridiculous scenario that would be you know, comedy if it wasn’t true.
Dan Sodergren
Oh, no, I’d absolutely right. And then you wonder this, these same companies would then might wonder why people come back to the office, you know, how come they were more productive when I wasn’t shouting at them, and I didn’t talk to them. You know, it’s just the toxic masculinity problem that we have in the modern office space. And I do use those words carefully, but also, I think correctly is masculinity problem. And that doesn’t mean it’s male, but it’s the masculinity problem. There’s also toxic problem. And it is the classic, I’ve got this class offense, and I come out and I shout at people, you know, exactly what happens. Yeah. But then, and then make them work faster. So I give them a whip. And occasionally, I’ll give them a raise. And then we have beers at four o’clock. And everyone sits around for the beers. And this is what a great team atmosphere we have. We have a ping pong table that no one ever uses and beanbags for no reason.
The, one of the reasons why is because this person would have looked at Google or something. And so that’s how Google did it. This is I always use Google or other people like that as an example. Because what you’re actually seeing there is the stuff on top like the free beers, and they have an A, by the way, that the real danger kind of drink uncomfortable. So the free beers, let’s say, on the free food, or the ping pong tables, or whatever it is, whatever cliches you’ve got in your own mind with them. That’s the stuff at the top. 90% is actually about company culture, and people liking each other. That means that beers work on a Friday because they do it organically, like everyone was stopped working on our dyno and fancy just chillin out for a bit together, or playing hacky sack or whatever. But they did that you didn’t give them a hacky sack and say, write everyone four o’clock stop work. That’s all a hack attack, because that’s the wrong way round. Because in companies that liked each other, and that’s outside and met do went to the beach together. Of course, they you know, they had surfing holidays together. If you look at really clever companies like buffer, or Basecamp, and some other folks, and you look at those companies, you can see that they they don’t have a problem recruiting talent. And the reason why they don’t is because they have great places to work.
But also underpinning it is a great company culture, which includes things like we’re all remote first, rather than remote forced, everyone’s flexible in a sink, you can do your work when you want it. So objective based, people are nice to each other most of the time. And by the way, every three months, we’re going to go on a company retreat somewhere in the world, which will pay for you to go to, and we’ll all meet up together. Now, that’s either been created by luck. That’s just cool people doing cool stuff, which means a cool company culture, or somebody’s come in and go, Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we also asked everyone what they would like, and everyone’s voted for and said, I tell you what I’d love, I need to be able to meet people, I’m a coder, I’m very productive at home. But every week or so I want to get to meet people, or go on together or do something like this. So many other things you can do as well as pay people more, I think it wrong. If you’re not paying people the market rate, that’s a problem. But I can also guarantee you can pay people on the market, right? If you’re a startup and other things, you can’t afford to pay the market rate, because you’ve got a great company culture, because people will move to a startup and get paid less money, because they want to do something cool with autonomy, mastery and purpose.
This is what people do. Otherwise, startups will not exist, everyone would just work for massive corporations and startups could never afford to match their wage. Indeed, or people, the CTO wouldn’t leave a huge company and then start his own and then do a really cool thing. But you can see it happening again, and again, again, this what happens, right, you’ve then got other things like, if you can recognize people, and you can get feedback from and you’re nice to them, they didn’t get wrong.
There’s other things like if they’re working from home, you should provide them with a good chair or a good seat or a you know, the office environment at home should be the same as office, I’ve been in the office, you know, just because you’ve saved 2000 pounds or more per person, that money shouldn’t be just your profit, that money should be plowed back into the company culture, which includes, you know, chairs and all these other things you do at home. But also people you know, we’ve got Your FLOCK here, and it’s there to help teams stay together for longer, but it doesn’t replace people. It just gives people the data, they need to know their teams better. So then they can be nicer. It just gives you data you have to be nicer than happy people doesn’t get rid of the person. So the person has to consciously start thinking, Okay, what does my team need and want nine out from their team? Like loads of people want to go back to offices, but obviously if you might not be at a foreign office five days a week, if people only want to go want to go back one day a week, but then it’s not an office that you need. You just need a place where you can all meet once a week. Well, you could make them anywhere in the world like you could have You can meet in the park, because it’s a nice day.
I don’t want to say but you know, when you break out the circle of it have to being school, it could be anywhere, couldn’t it. And this is where we’re moving to now, as Bruce Daisley rightly says, in his, in these data, we’re moving from this kind of school mentality to maybe been a bit more of a college or university kind of vibe, like, you know, you’ve got to have agency and you got to enjoy your time. But if you don’t, you’re not productive that you don’t pass the course. But really, you didn’t have to turn up at nine o’clock every time. Sometimes you didn’t tell it to lessons, but you’ve got notes from a friend, you know, if you don’t know, it’s like, we got a treat, we got to treat employees now I think we’ve got to treat them much more like adults, that perhaps we have been before. And certainly for the knowledge sectors that we primarily work with Your FLOCK, the way to keep your team together for longer is to get the feedback from them as adults get to know them as adults and as individuals, and then use data to make sure that your decisions for the future, or based on that feedback, not just I think everyone should come back to the office, or I think we should all go out for dinner. Because lots of times, you know, there’s lots of reasons why people don’t come to the 430 beers on a Friday. And it could be their introverted. It could be they’ve got kids, it could be they don’t drink.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s interesting. Yeah. And it’s just doing it as you say, for the right the right way round, isn’t it? It’s not saying, Oh, we’re gonna start doing this now. Because these are people over here did it. But they did it because that’s what they wanted to do. And then makes the question of, should we come back to the office kind of irrelevant if you just ask people and have a way to get the data, as you say.
Dan Sodergren
There’s a proven fact that diversity inclusion means that you make about 20% more money.
Dan Sodergren
Absolutely. And it could be, you know, the reason why I’m so passionate about remote work, is because underneath it all, there’s this inclusion piece, which is if you allow people to work in different ways, and you start to deconstruct jobs, because remember, jobs is just a construct, and the future work actually will be not with actually not having jobs, but having particular roles. And it’s going to be a really fascinating world. Because if you if your objective based driven, you could actually have several jobs at the same time working, you know, almost working as a freelancer for for different companies doing the similar role, but they use mobile app, or you could decide and say, Hey, this week, I’m only going to deal this month, I’m only going to do it two thirds of that, because I’ve got, so I suppose what I’m trying to get to is, we’ve got a chance here, but like with call centers, many moons ago, those people who understood the technology jump, instead of saying telling everyone to get into the call center, which was a horrible environment, they were like they said, did it at home, and do it when you want and login when you want to. Yeah, and so instead of having 1000 people work for them, they had 10,000 Part time people, but those apart, but by doing that you allow people who were disabled. Yeah, who wouldn’t normally go into the office and wouldn’t be able to do all this stuff, you allowed them to do it, because you gave them the kit to do it, you’re allowed to single mums to do it for a couple of hours, because they only had a couple of hours. That’s awesome.
Because that means you’ve then got diversity inclusion in your piece, which means your company is more resilient. There’s a proven fact that diversity inclusion means that you’re you make about 20% more money. And your bottom line is the reason why I harp on about so much in technologies, because we’re building bad technology products, because we’re not diverse, inclusive enough. It’s not just the fact that it’s the morally right thing to do. You’ve actually made better companies and better products. If we don’t all act like Uber, you know, the world’s gonna be a better place. You know, the reason we did is because they were started by blokes, and it was a very blokey culture. And you could argue, and I’m not gonna go into too much. But if we were a lot more conscious about how we recruit, and what we create, then the world changes. That’s like, Your FLOCK is just one small part of that, that changes you. I’m so passionate about it. Because I say we can help people be happier at work. Because if you’re happier at work, you’re then normally happier at home. Yeah, you’re happier in a variety of different ways. And that makes the world better, because then you’re doing you’re not so cross.
So because you’re not commuting. And because you’re not angry about your commute, and we can cut down on how many people crash their cars, because they’re not so rushing to get to work. Yeah, well, we could, it would probably make a difference to have the violent crime because people aren’t flapping because of burnout. You know, I don’t know, there’s lots of other things that happen when you make the world of work, a happier place to be, there’s a load more spin offs in the end of it. And I think what we’ve actually done is made the world of work a quite an unhappy place to be for quite a long time. We’ve, as you said, we’ve used the the office as a plaster over the top, and try to hold it all together. But actually deep down, there’s always been some deep problems. And I think as long as we get the feedback and get to know our people better, that we’ve gotten much more of a chance to build resilient teams and companies that are happier places to work. And by doing so, not only do we affect our bottom line, but we affect productivity, and let’s not get ourselves you know, productivity is going to be a key factor in the in the future of work. Because without that productivity, you know, with a recession potentially coming, we’re gonna have to be more productive. But I can only say we can we can only become more productive by not burning out and being happier.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s 100% True, and I think that’s a great Vision and Mission alongside it to be aligned to is let’s make it a happier, more resilient place to be. And yeah, I think that’s a really great way to kind of summarize what we talked about so far. And I, you know, I want to be respectful of your your time as well. But just before we do wrap things up in terms of Your FLOCK itself, and you’ve obviously talked a lot about the the data and the way it can help kind of scale. Getting some of that feedback as well. What’s what’s next for Your FLOCK? Kind of what do you see the future of Your FLOCK being?
Dan Sodergren
Absolutely right, that one of the deepest problems I think with, sometimes with the gains in technology that we have is it becomes, and certainly this next bit with artificial intelligence, it becomes this moment where we have to be really careful on what path we choose. And sometimes technology is, is is used to get, get people out of the equation, and that maybe that can be okay. Sometimes, for example, when we started using computers, a lot of things like Excel doesn’t have any bias in it at all, it’s just a calculator, you could argue computers themselves with just a calculator. The thing with artificial intelligence, though, of course, is it depends on the dataset that you use. And so four plus four doesn’t always equal eight. And it’s a bit it’s a lot more nuanced than this.
The whole point, if you’re not doing artificial intelligence is machine learning. And most of these things are actually machine learning rather than intelligence. But they do make it an easier world, we just say it’s artificial intelligence. And there’s a big danger with confirmation bias, but also with the datasets they’ve been using. Great. So it’s similar to a human bid, if you teach a human being that African names are complicated, and African names are associated with low performance. Yeah, then that formula is not necessarily true. But you could run a dataset through it, which says that’s 100% True. Every single time someone’s not called Tom. And they’re called Jill. Well, Jill, we use and Tom state or the algorithm that says autonomy. And yeah, now people believe that it’s not more nuanced than that. But actually artificial intelligence intelligence at the moment, it’s about the intelligence of an 11 year old, and a 12 year old. So if you’re giving your recruitment strategy, or you’re, you’re allowing your 12 year old to pick the people for your team, that’s a fundamental problem. Because if that 12 year old believes that, if White people who will call Tom are the best people, for you to employee, you’re going to employ a load of white people called Tom. Now, that’s okay. But that doesn’t work for a team and it doesn’t work for for diversity inclusion, but slightly deeper, and thankfully, excited deeper reasons, it doesn’t actually work for the company, either.
If recruitment was as easy as just get the same people in all the time, and your company does, well, then you would have a slightly different world that we did. And, but it does. Luckily, for the lucky for one, not even lucky, it’s just evolution proves the point, if you do mono culturalism. In farming, it fails. If you do if you only one species in the sea, it fails. This is an ecosystem we live in, it has to have diversity inclusion has its very nature of being. So the AI systems might create purity, and they create these, and they create an issue for you. And that’s why we can’t rely on AI systems. We’ve got to bring the human back into the humane should I say back into human resources. But we’ve got to be really worried about letting abrogating our responsibility about team and team dynamics into an AI system that we don’t understand ourselves. Because all we want is the output. And the output, though, would be negative for it. But we wouldn’t understand how it works.
Matthew Todd
You can’t ask why, can you?
Dan Sodergren
So i think you know. No exactly. These black boxes don’t allow you to ask why. But even worse than that, is that that people might not even ask it that anyway, they’ll just go jump through the numbers, five minute applications delivered, right there, the three picks, right, let’s crack on. Because sometimes they might not care. Also, sometimes it might actually hate might actually reinforce their own confirmation bias. So they’re like, Oh, the machines right? I’m right, the jeans, right? You know, we all know the classic, you know, computer says no, that happened in banking, but a bit ago when we remove bankers from the equation, computers, no credit score systems, and all this sort of stuff. And we got to be really careful, because recruitments a lot deeper, I think a lot deeper, bigger, bigger, bigger thing for us. So we’re just gonna do I think, gotta be really careful. So for Your FLOCK, we’re not going to use AI systems.
For that very reason. We do have a very diverse data set, but we’re doing machine learning and machine learning is just how do you get better read? And how can you help people more using learning development around the values to create more aligned teams, that’s a very, that’s a very different data anyway, and it doesn’t need any confirmation bias and it doesn’t touch recruitment. So we’re very happy to do that. That will then most probably start to align more with AI as AI becomes more prevalent, but that’s because every every company in the world will be using AI in southern description at some point in the company, we’re not, we’re a tech company. And if we want to scale a tech company, which we do, AI will be part of it, whether it really is AI, machine learning, and I don’t want to get too geeky about it, but they, but the actual, the exciting bit for Your FLOCK won’t be moving into AI systems, even though we have data that could do.
So it’s actually much more about how do we integrate with the ecosystem that exists, right. So at the moment, your flip is very much a standalone SaaS products, which you do, and you can do for six months, and you help your team stay together for longer, which is awesome. But if you’re not then tapped into Slack, and that communication channel rather than emails or into WhatsApp and that communication channel as we become more hybrid and more remote, I think they’re the exciting bits for us as a company, because that’s exciting. And how do you help more people, and you can help more teams, if you become more mobile based rather than desktop based, that’s just the nature of the modern world is going to be much more mobile. So that’s the bit that I’m so excited about Your FLOCK, as we scale, we can go back into mobile more. And because we can go back into mobile and more, we can hit different markets, and we can help more people. So I’d love to see Your FLOCK being used by the hospitality sector, you know, and helping your bar and restaurant teams become happier at work. And they’re not particularly happy words, got the term rates so high in those particular industries. I don’t think we’re going to be used by everybody. But of course, you know, it’s an invest in the company, but also somebody who wants to help a million people. You know, I want the more people.
I think our next bit will be stepping into mobile, then most probably into AI. But you know, if you ever see Your FLOCK in the metaverse, you know, we’ve gone we’ve gone one bridge too far.
Matthew Todd
We’re not quite yet, not augmented reality.
Dan Sodergren
No, no. And I’ve done this before, of course. So if I if I come back to the year, so we’re launching a VR goggles to say, Damn, you did this with augmented reality, you’re gonna have deep pockets.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, definitely. But yeah, I can certainly see what you’re saying with the the mobile annual we were talking to someone on the podcasts yesterday morning, actually, and they’re involved with corporate intranet, it’s, you know, helping, you know, sharing knowledge within large enterprises. And they were also talking about making things mobile, and you know, certain people in certain companies, you know, they’re not all going to be deskspace in the first place instance. Anyway. So actually, that mobile expansion I can see is a definitely, you know, an interesting point in terms of, you know, reaching people that you otherwise couldn’t reach, but also giving people more natural kind of communication mechanisms that come along with hybrid working in many ways.
Dan Sodergren
That absolutely, if we were, if we are lucky enough to get the next tranche of investment, and we hope and pray that we can. That’s where a good 80% of our development time will be spent will be, how do you kind of almost backward engineer this inside a WhatsApp, Slack environment, because that’s because that’s where it should be, it should naturally be in there. It’s just at the moment, our customers don’t use Slack. And professional services don’t use that they use Office 365 emails, I use those things. I don’t personally want to go into the office 365 environment do this for a load of reasons, which are based on my dislike of the company from 10 years ago, which is no longer relevant because their CEOs, James says Microsoft has company, which is why it’s doing so well. Their company culture, in fact, is completely changed and now much more diverse and busier than ever before.
And I believe that’s the way to deal with the rise of their company as well. Look at how Microsoft now three competitors, all the ecosystem, it’s completely different to what they did 10 years ago. So it might go good. But Microsoft has also built their own version of Your FLOCK to be completely honest. So they’re not going to buy us out they’ve already been because they know this space is really exciting. And and that’s a really good, really exciting thing for us when you see large companies also doing what we’re doing, because it proves that this is the future of work. And they look at if we weren’t, which probably won’t be partnering with that organization as of yet. I think if we did, I’d be really interested to see where that would go because you’ve then got the depth of LinkedIn knowledge, this calendar this with the with the rest of the calendar systems and the booking systems, lots of other stuff you could do environment, but I think we’re much more of a we’re more of a pirate ship. We’re more of a startup we’re more than Canada will probably look much more into Slack and WhatsApp than we would do with Microsoft. That’s probably just that’s a company culture thing. I think that’s all we’ve done pretty go to think that anything else but yeah, it’d be great.
Matthew Todd
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And no, certainly, we’ll be watching to see how how things develop. And for anyone that’s listening to the podcast that that wants to find out more about either Your FLOCK itself or any of the topics that we’ve we’ve talked about, are there any kind of recommendations, where should they head to?
Dan Sodergren
Well, the first one, just goes to our website, why not? www.yourflock.co.uk and check out what we do there. Also find myself Dan Sodgren on LinkedIn or Michal Wisniewski. It’s probably easier to spell my name but.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, we’ll put LinkedIn links in the notes as well.
Dan Sodergren
I’m very lucky because I, because of the reading I do, the research I produce every two weeks, a newsletter, which is subscribed by with quite a few people subscribed to it, which is around the future of work. So that’s a good thing and a free as well. So that’s a good free resource you could use. And then do I would honestly say if you’re really interested in this area, have a look at one of the blogs. And just because I just wrote a list of, a reading list that I created for over the summer, so that you can have a look out over anytime you could then look at there’s a good 30 or so books on there. And they are amazing books. I think if you’ve only just started looking into this verse, you know dipping your toes into it. You start with those books first and some rounded knowledge around this these concepts and then then you’re something like Your FLOCK. And I don’t mean it’s disrespectful for Your FLOCK, Your FLOCK is one of the things you can use.
There’s lots of other things you could use Your FLOCK’s, kind of secret source, it links into values into something slightly deeper, and therefore we found it resonates and works with the market. But incidently, heck, you could just just ask people through Survey Monkey, you know, all type for just just ask you people, it’s asked 1020 30 People do whatever you want. But make sure you’ve got this a way of, but don’t just get the data and then do nothing with it. This is one of the biggest problems that we find with this world is that in business leaders understand, they’ve got to ask the question. So they ask the question, but then they don’t act on it. And that’s what your job helps you do and help the team leaders do you get the answers back. But then you’re gonna say, Well, based on those answers, maybe try this in based on the values therefore you could do that. And so by the way, this Jimmy wants a one to one, but Sarah really wants you to become more caring the company. Well, actually Thomas decided that he didn’t want one. But he’s a he’s a three out of 10 and engagement. So you’ve got to look at Tom because Tom might leave.
But it gives you those points you can look at with a date, you’d get that if you did that just the type of things it becomes you just have data overwhelmed. The whole point of your system is it gives you those clear points to work on very quickly. As a team leader, it saves you hours if not days of work. And that’s what that’s why it’s an exciting place to be. But we are one of a multitude of different SaaS products and consultancies that you could use, I mean, but start with your own education, start, start by learning stuff yourself, get excited, you know, get passionate work, you know, start loving again, what you do, I think as soon as people love what they do, is what my TED Talk talks about, the future of work isn’t going to be what you think. And it’s not necessarily what you fear, it’s actually what you love. And if you find that you love being a manager, and love leading people and want to change people’s lives, then you’re perfect for doing it. And you know, get your own agency and enjoy your lives and do it and make happy, make your own people be happier at work. Obviously, we’d love you to use your blog to do so because that’s our job. But I do it yourselves and come and tell me what you’ve been up to. Yeah, I’d love feedback from from everyone, if you read one of the books, and you’d like to detail it. Yeah, they can find it quite easily on LinkedIn, and very happy to do so. So we’re always happy to chat about the future of work.
Matthew Todd
Fantastic. Thank you very much. And thank you very much for your time today as well. I don’t really have anything to add other than to echo what you’ve just said and encourage people to listen to that advice and and go and actually act on it. So I think that’s a great place to leave it keep us both posted as to how you you get on. But Dan, I’m sure will we will talk again in future and find out how the future of work is changing and what that may evolve into. But you know, thank you for your time today.
Dan Sodergren
That has been fantastic. Thank you Matt your a star and hopefully speak to you in the near future.
Matthew Todd
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the ScaleUp. Remember for the show notes and in depth resources from today’s guest. You can find these on the website insidethescaleup.com. You can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from. Thank you for listening.