Transcript
John Duisberg (00:11):
Welcome everyone. This is the Cooleaf podcast, Love Your People series. My name is John Duisberg. I am one of the co-founders of Cooleaf and your host today. Today we are absolutely thrilled and excited to welcome Priti Patel, chief people officer of G2 to share all things around employee experience, how they are elevating this across around 600 employees that are highly distributed. And I would say a lot of them are under the age of maybe 35. So super excited. But I did want to share, many of you know about Cooleaf. We are an employee engagement, employee recognition platform. We serve customers all around the world, across industries. I'm super passionate about that, but some of you may not know that Cooleaf was acquired last month by ITA Group and ITA Group is, they've been in business for over 60 years. They are a leader and employee experience, consumer experience and channel.
(01:18):
And we are just so grateful and looking forward to this new chapter of our company to really scale our employee experience platform with the backing of ITA Group. So exciting news, a lot of things happening, but I want to turn it over Priti to you and welcome, grateful, somewhat, so thankful for you, just being willing to share. Our audience is made up of leaders who are wanting to be people first when it comes to their culture and organization. So really appreciate you being willing to share. And maybe to kick us off for anyone who doesn't know who G2 is or what G2 is about and your leadership role, please give us just a quick overview if you don't mind. But welcome and thank you.
Priti Patel (02:02):
Absolutely John, and congratulations on the acquisition. I know that is
John Duisberg (02:07):
Thank you very much.
Priti Patel (02:07):
A big deal and big accomplishment. So very excited for you. Hi everyone, I'm Priti Patel and I am chief people officer at G2, which is the world's largest software marketplace. Every year we have about 90 million people that visit our website to inform their software purchasing decisions. So you can think of us as a Yelp for software in some ways. And that's really how we originated our founders. Really wanted to think about how can we democratize the software purchasing decision in much ways. Like you think about researching a hotel room when you're traveling. I am, like I said, leading the entire HR team, which at G2 we call employee success and we'll talk about why we think about that and how we position around that ideology. And that covers all of recruiting, all of our culture engagement, comms, and as well as our day-to-day people operations. Kind of the things you think of in the background to help people go through their careers at G2.
John Duisberg (03:16):
Love that. So people success, that's going to be a new standard. I love that.
Priti Patel (03:24):
I just took a call with a customer. They wanted to know what was behind calling our team employee success. So yes.
John Duisberg (03:31):
Okay, well or employee success. So maybe we can weave that in to some of our Q&A and then we're going to open it up for our audience to be able to ask direct questions to you as well. But I wanted to start us off this way because I know from speaking to you how important culture is at G2, right? That's part of the secret sauce. To win at business, you have to be able to attract and retain the best people. And I know just you've written about purpose and aligning the organizational purpose with your employees. I know that you had shared, you've been very transparent sharing how can you be an executive leader and a mother at the same time and how does that influence purpose? And so I just wanted to start here. The famous Simon Sinek. Start with why. Tell us about what purpose means to you as a leader, what it means to G2, and then how do you align that to your employees that are spread out all around the country, all around the world.
Priti Patel (04:37):
Yeah, absolutely. So to know me a little bit better before I took this role at G2, I was an executive coaching and leadership development. So I did a lot of work around this question of why. And as you mentioned Simon Sinek, he's one of my favorite other podcasts besides this one of course. And he has a podcast called A Bit of Optimism. And he talks a lot about this idea of why and this notion of why. And just a couple of kickoffs ago, I think I told you this story, John, to really drive this point home of why is so important. I told a little bit of a story, maybe some of you have heard it. It's the parable of the brick layers. And really the idea is this man was walking down the street and he comes across three people doing the exact same job and they're laying bricks.
(05:33):
And he asked that first person, "Hey, what are you doing?" And he says, "Well, I'm doing my job. I'm laying bricks." And then the next person, he says, "Hey, what are you doing?" And he says, "Well, I'm laying bricks. I'm laying bricks to build a wall." And then the third comes across and this guy looks really intensely focused and really into his work, almost like it's fun and joyful him. And he asks him, "What are you doing?" And he says, "Well, me, I'm laying a staircase to heaven." And the idea here in that story is while these three people are doing the exact same work, when they're tied back to why and exactly what Simon talks about, it unlocks infinite amounts of energy because we are aligned to the purpose, both to the company's purpose, but also to the purpose why we exist. And so I think you're mentioning maybe that article I wrote about my why and my why really comes from being a first generation American. My parents are immigrants from India and really having a lot of hardships as we grew up. Something that I draw a lot of inspiration from is showing that to my children, my two sons, Arjun and Keef, that anything is really possible when you really align to why. And they are my inspiration every day. Actually, there's a picture of them I'm looking at right
John Duisberg (07:00):
Wow. Love that. Love that.
Priti Patel (07:03):
Yeah. And so you asked about G2, how do we align why to G2's purpose? So we took a lot of inspiration from Chip Conley. He wrote a book, Peak and he used to be a COO of Airbnb. And the whole idea is Maslow's hierarchy of really starting with what do employees need at the bottom at the basics to make sure their necessities are met so that they can really reach their full potential. And so all of our four values is called PEAK stands for performance, entrepreneurship, authenticity, and Kindness. And we really align our entire culture around those values so that folks can really align to their own why and make sure that it's aligned to G2s. And we can talk all about that journey because it hasn't all been easy.
John Duisberg (08:02):
So first of all, we were joking earlier, we're going to play the Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven theme song next time, but what an incredible parable, right? I'm going to reference you in this parable any chance I get because it just hits home the untapped energy that I think described that people can have when they understand the why behind why what they're doing. And I think this kind of leads into my next question, which is perhaps a lot of folks in the audience, looking back 12 months, it's been a rough road, a lot of layoffs, a lot of people don't talk about it, a lot of frozen budgets. And it's like, Hey, it's great to talk about culture and these things when times are good, but what do you do when it's a challenging, right? And so talk to us a little bit about how you at G2 have navigated this. Are there any lessons learned? Where are you now? Where are you looking at moving forward? Just a little bit about these past 12 months and bring us up to the now.
Priti Patel (09:09):
Yeah. What has been great for G2 is our values have really stood the test of this current turbulence and really the turbulence we've hit along our 12 year journey of being around. In fact, I like to tell people that our co-founders actually created peak values before they knew what G2 was going to do, funny enough. And the reason is they are so purpose driven and they knew that if they created a company that was around these four values of performance, entrepreneurial spirit, authenticity and kindness, that they could really stand the test of time. And so the context I shared with you, John, you're right, times have changed a bit. When I started, we looked at this chart recently at our recent kickoff when I started Growth to Profitability was valued eight and a half times more than profitability. And now times have really changed the market is valuing profitability as much as growth.
(10:18):
And so that has really changed the mindset. And for me in my position, what that felt like was needing to hire, we're a 600 person company, we needed to hire 150 people in a quarter. One of the first quarters I started, and that was just to meet our growth objectives and now we're stable in hiring, not really hiring much at all besides backfills. And so what we've really been able to do through this test changing of times is be more transparent about the business and double down on the peak values. And people have really leaned into that and actually have told us, Hey, I appreciate the transparency. It's okay that the business isn't doing well. Help us understand how we can really help drive the business forward. And that's been really empowering and energizing for people.
John Duisberg (11:13):
Yeah, no, I totally appreciate that. I know for us in one of our board meetings, it went from growth, growth, growth to talk to us about your path to profitability. I mean literally in one quarter.
Priti Patel (11:25):
Exactly.
John Duisberg (11:26):
The whole environment changed, it felt like. Anyway, but I wanted to touch on that because this is not just a, Hey, when times are good, we talk about culture. This is what gets us through the challenge. And I love what you said about your team. They want to know how can we help drive us forward because they understand the why behind what they're doing. Another area, how you can measure your culture and how this is just something that you can be proactive because you actually have data to tell you how you're doing and where you have gaps and so forth. Many people in our audience today, they may be familiar with the ENPS, the Employee Net Promoter Score Industry best practice. It's something that we encourage with all of our customers to do. But at G2, you took this one step further, you created your own ENPS. So tell us about the ENPS. Tell us about why it's so important, the impact. Just give us the overview of ENPS.
Priti Patel (12:39):
So ENPS stands for inclusiveness net promoter scores. So like you mentioned, John ENPS is all about the engagement of our people inclusiveness. Net promoter score is all about how authentic do I feel in our culture? How do I feel I can bring my whole self to work? And we ask that in the same cadence we do our engagement survey. So every quarter we're asking this question and we've been doing it now for five years. So we actually have a lot of data to see how it's moved as the business has changed. And originally we were a little skeptical. We have a lot of data nerds, including myself, lovingly say, nerds on our team. And we kind of said, well, maybe it'll just follow engagement. And we know engagement follows business performance. So as the business goes up, inclusiveness will go up and as it goes down, it'll probably come down to, and in the beginning, first few quarters, we did see it roughly follow engagement.
(13:44):
And what was really interesting, as you mentioned, times have changed in the last few years, we have seen some headwinds in our business as well. Engagement has taken that dip as business has and inclusiveness has for the first time ever diverged and in fact increased. And what that tells us and our team is the culture work that we've been working so hard to lay down as a foundation is helping us build that resiliency in what G2 is so proud of in its culture. And we're really excited to see that because what it tells us is, wow, there's actually some ROI real ROI in the work that we're doing. And then of course, we couple this with all other kinds of feedback too, like exit interviews, we call our grow interviews, or excuse me, our stay interviews, our grow interviews, how do we grow at G2, as well as all of the qualitative feedback we get in our engagement survey. And so we're really seeing this picture from our employees saying, even from our exiting employees who say, you've built extremely special in your culture and keep doing what you're doing because it's working.
John Duisberg (14:56):
Wow. Yeah. That is awesome. Yeah, congratulations on that. So this was the first time that I heard of an ENPS inclusive net promoter score. And it actually, so you're doing this with your engagement survey, but this actually diverted from your engagement scores even when time the business was, you were facing those headwinds. Really interesting for these Thank you for sharing.
Priti Patel (15:24):
And I got to plug, because I think it's really neat, we're now getting other companies asking us if they can use G2's IPS metric. And so we're actually in the process of building a little bit of a toolkit of how to implement ENPS at your company. And so stay tuned on that. That'll be coming out sometime this year.
John Duisberg (15:43):
Love it. Well, we will definitely want to promote that. Love that. And we also, we want to make sure, so our audience full of HR leaders, executive leaders across the board, and we want them to have the opportunity to anything that's on their mind that you can share to be helpful as they're looking to build employee first engagement culture strategies and their organizations. But I wanted to, one final question really just overall, is there anything, if I'm an HR leader that you would recommend that I focus on to just really elevate what I can do for my organization? Is there something that you can leave the audience with as kind of a final parting gift here for the interview?
Priti Patel (16:31):
Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned earlier that I, right before G2 was in executive leadership and coaching, and I before that actually grew up in finance. And I think that has afforded me an ability to really infuse business impact with everything we do. And so what I would share, if you didn't start your career in finance, if you maybe in some ways don't think about the HR work directly in terms of numbers to do that. My CFO, Chad Goul who just joined us a few months ago, I asked him a question as soon as he onboarded, how do we get off to a good relationship? How can we build a strong connection? And he said, prefe, all I want from you and our partnership, which by the way is probably the most important relationship besides the CFO to the CEO is don't surprise me.
(17:32):
Don't surprise me. Don't tell me too late that there's going to be a huge expense that we didn't know about. And so my advice is really taking the time to understand the business drivers and how the work you're doing in your HR teams drives the business forward and build predictability into that. And I think the more you do that, what it's allowed our team to do is prioritize in a way that drives real impact that I talked to our board about every quarter in terms of business impact. So I'll give you just a quick thing to leave you with. If you think about our business SaaS businesses are 90% people almost, let's say more or less. The cost is 90% related to people. And we as chief people officers, as HR teams, we control or influence the work that happens around 90% of the costs. So if we can build more integration of thinking about how we're best utilizing that cost, we can then have so much more relevance and impact, frankly, as we move forward as leaders.
John Duisberg (18:47):
That was amazing. Love it. Priti, thank you so much. Never surprise the CFO. Don't note taken. Got it.
Priti Patel (18:58):
I don't think I've surprised Chad. I don't know if I'll ever listen to this, but if he listen to, hopefully he agrees I haven't done that.
John Duisberg (19:05):
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This was wonderful.
Priti Patel (19:07):
It's been so fun, John. Thank you.