Managing Employee Experience and Building Trust, Cloud-Native HR with Joe Militello (Ep. 36)

Episode 23 · 55:50 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, you know, usually when we start this, I have some funny thing, and I do have a funny thing this time, but it coincidentally involves the guest we have. So first of all, why don't you introduce yourself briefly, guest? This is Joe Militello, and I'm responsible for the HR function at Pibble. So here's what I want to do. I don't know if those slides you sent me are like top secret or anything. I mean, I know they're not, but I want to get that one slide of the HR person pushing an office chair up the hill, because that's like, what is this? This is October. I don't know if that's, I don't know. I think maybe that's the funniest corporate slide I've seen all year. It's like, you could have one presentation with just that slide. I think it's, and to recap it, I'll put, we'll put a link to it, but there's a hill, and I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's an office on top with some, you know, office people milling about, and there's someone else pushing an office chair up the hill, and they're labeled kind of like HR, and man, if there's not a more accurate portrayal of pretty much everyone who works in a large corporation, I haven't seen it. I think that's great. And then as we'll get into, the rest of the presentation is about how to keep the chair on the top of the hill, so to speak. But I think that was great. Who did you get to make that for you? Did you make it? No, I'm not that creative. So we worked closely with Michael Louis and the marketing team on that, and it was titled, and I hope your audience will say it was titled, you know, Sipius, right? And so, you know, that was the Greek god banished to an eternity of trying to roll a rock up a hill. So we thought that would be a good analogy of a lot of the organizations, how do you get to relevancy, and how do you really kind of try value and value to the company and getting right off. Yeah. No, it was an excellent slide, as you can... Last week, when I presented on that, you know, I've shown it a couple times, and, you know,

you usually get a bunch of giggles in the audience. Yeah. Well, we'll have to, and like I said, the rest of the slides were interesting. We'll have to start back with that, about what the forum you were at and kind of the discussion, because not only I'm eager to hear, like, what you discussed there as far as, like, a taking care of and people management and all the sort of HR concerns, but it'd also be interesting to hear what other people were saying there, because it seemed like a, an interesting forum for exchanging that kind of information. It was sort of, you know, beyond the discussing deductibles sort of thing. There was a lot more discussion, a lot more than just discussing what type of office chair it was, more about how nice the top of the hill is. So, but before we get to that, I was just commenting that I was very ill-prepared. So, can you emcee our news overview this week, Richard? I can, yeah, thank you. Yeah, we balance each other well. So, I'm happy to cover news for you. We actually have you around to do all the work. I just edit the beginning and ending of the podcast, and then you do all the stuff in between. I know, you just name-dropped some stake references, things like that. That's right. So, yeah, the news this week, a few things I wanted to point out. There is some self-promotion of Pivotal. The new Pivotal white paper we put out, there's a whole campaign around Netflix, open source, and microservices, and Spring Cloud. And we've already had thousands of downloads of that paper, which was pleasantly surprising. So, I think it's a good take on what are microservices, why do they matter, how did Netflix kind of adopt that model, and then how does Spring Cloud help you do it. So, we'll have a link in the show notes, but that's available now. Yeah, I was reading through that, and I was thinking, like, haven't I read this before? And then I realized it's because you and I had a podcast episode about it. And then I further remembered, you pretty much explicitly said, I'm writing a paper on this. And I was like, yep, the old peanut in my head's still working. Still got it. I'm a big check-the-box guy.

If I do one thing, I try to make sure I can use that same thing in six other places. So, in this case, I knew I was writing a paper, so let's do a podcast so I can test the ideas first. So, mission accomplished. Exactly. Yeah, good stuff. So, the second one I wanted to point out was some of the Google Cloud updates. A lot of cloudy stuff last week following up on the Oracle cloudy stuff the week before. Google rebranded a lot of their works, their sort of office suite stuff cloud. They announced eight new regions all connected with their network backbone. They shipped their machine learning service out into public beta. So, their velocity continues to be great. I think they're continuing to demonstrate to people they're in this to win. And they had an invite-only event last week, Google Horizon. And Pivotal was one of only two companies on stage with them. And it's always nice when you get introduced as, and now next up, Pivotal. Who needs no introduction? I don't know. I like that when I walk into a room. If Pivotal's reached that stage, I guess that's pretty awesome. So, we're doing some good stuff with them. Yeah. I think, I mean, just to use the phrase, self-promotingly comment on that. I mean, I think it's been almost two years since I've been here. And I think it wasn't always the case that an introduction was not needed. But I think over the past couple of years, that's really been turned around quite a bit. Like, in the small rooms I go to, it's also the case. So, that's refreshing. And that does make me think, to put you on the spot, Joe. So, you know, whenever I see machine learning stuff, I'm always looking for, like, and just AI stuff for practical applications of it. We talked about this several episodes ago. And I wonder, like, whether it was at the thing you were at last week or whatever. Like, in general, like, are there, how, in the world of, like, HR, does, like, AI and machine learning come up? Like, how do people think about having, like, computerized agents, like, helping individuals out? Like, is that, or is that even a topic in your world? Or does that, does it come up? Yeah, the topic hasn't come up so much in terms of the, I guess, the interface with employees

and our candidates. I think there's still a large bent towards, you know, human-to-human interaction. But actually, an event that I was at last week, which was basically being invited in by a venture capital firm to talk to their portfolio companies. You know, Google was actually, was actually a speaker. A woman spoke before me, who was at Google. And they talked a lot about how they use, you know, they analyze everything. And so there's a lot of analytics. So they didn't get into that machine learning and the, you know, the interface is still human-to-human. But I think we, as a company, especially when it comes to how we're making decisions on the people side is how to use more, you know, data-driven type of decisions. Yeah. A little bit than your question. Yeah, no, I like that framing that you have because it's, it's, it's what, well, it's not that, but I was mentioning agents and things like that because I remember talking with, with some AI people, how in some intelligence agency, it's always like, oh, I can't tell you where it is, which means it's an intelligence agency. And, and they were, they were talking about how you would be assigned this little agent that would just help you out with little things during the day, like giving you context and even like helping schedule meetings. And if you go into this building, you get access to that. And it does seem like, I guess, I guess you would call that like AI augmenting what a person does. And, and it is, I like the way that you're putting it is that you probably would always prefer a human face on things. And maybe you want to kind of like cyborg them out and have someone helping them out on the backend, but still having that, that human face of it, which is, uh, that's a lot more comforting than what I usually think about when I think about AI. And I think it'll, I think it's going to depend and I think it will evolve over time. Um, but I do think that the areas where, you know, the interaction requires a high level of empathy, um, you know, maybe AI will get there at some point, but I'm not aware of any

sort of machine learning or AI today that can really, um, encompass, you know, that empathetic approach. I mean, I, I think, I think the height of AI empathy was, uh, Dr. Spatso on the sound card. Did you guys ever play with that where he, you sit down and he asks you to tell you about his problems and he talks back to you? I did not, man. I try that reference on everyone. And apparently I am the only person in the world who launched that program when I installed my sound blaster card. So, uh, everyone usually knows the talking parrot, but not Dr. Spatso. No, that's fine. We'll get you a, uh, an AI Teddy Ruxpin for Christmas this year. And I'll also talk back to you. Perfect. And go back to cassette tapes. Love it. So also it sounds like, uh, going back to the news. Uh, so Azure had some, some announcements as well. Yeah. Microsoft had their big ignite conference in hot Lanta last week and, uh, did some server types, always, you know, bigger, badder servers, which is always interesting. Uh, some new networking things for people doing DNS and IPv6. Uh, they're really making a strong play. I think with Microsoft to be the compliance friendly cloud and Azure and Amazon does a ton too, but Azure really seems to be pushing. The certifications that they can need for different countries and verticals and things like that. So they added a bunch more of those and it did some more of their hybrid stuff. So they continue to ship tons of stuff relevant to pivotal customers. Cause we do run, or we will have some upcoming announcements. We already have a beta offering in their marketplace for PCF on Azure. We're getting close to launching the full fledged experience. So we, uh, we love that we run cleanly on Google, Azure, Amazon, and everybody else. But it's great to see these underlying platforms continue to provide some additional, uh, some additional great stuff. And, and do you think, I think, I think last, last episode, we talked about how Azure maybe had the most like regional presences. Like, do you think that's still the case or did the, the Google announcements, like, did

they even it up? I forget that. I mean, who knows? No, I mean, Azure still says they have as many as, as Amazon and Google combined. And again, some of this can get to be funny math on what constitutes a region versus a location. I mean, with, with Google's updates, these regions are, you know, dual site locations in the region and, and those sorts of things. But Azure still claims the most physical regions around the world. But, you know, Google's interesting advantage is how much of the network they own. I mean, they still say, you know, they're the, they'd be considered the second largest telco. If you actually measured them that way, that their network is arguably one of their biggest competitive advantages from using them as a cloud. Yeah. Hmm. Well, there you go. And then, and then finally, there's a, there's a release candidate of Steeltoe announced, right? There was. Yeah. And our, uh, Cloud Foundry Summit last week, we, we had a couple of bits of news. So we did announce that on October 7th, people who like using Spring Cloud or like the sort of Spring Cloud Netflix sort of things, but they're building .NET apps, can use Steeltoe, which gives you things like the config server and others we've talked about on the podcast before. But for .NET teams who want to use some of those Spring Cloud services, these are kind of adapters into that framework. So that was announced and, and Google also did present at a CF summit and they also open source live while they were presenting their service broker for Cloud Foundry so that you could do things like machine learning and their, their SQL database and others. So really cool again to see more tools, more capabilities for people building apps. Yeah. No, I think, I think, uh, I think, I don't know when it'll be, but sometime next year when we have, uh, like when, when we have extremely broad support, including .NET for everything, and it will have been in market for several years, right? I mean, obviously with the Steeltoe being released candidate now, it won't have been in market, but in aggregate, like all the stuff we'll have a, uh, as I was kind of talking about last year, we'll have a very general purpose application development and runtime deployment selling into the types of, uh, of companies that we do. I think, I think we'll be like, uh, almost excitingly, like descending the, uh, the, the diffusion,

the diffusion of integration curve down into the, uh, the late majority and then over, over into the trough and the plateau of productivity, which, which, uh, you know, sounds all funny, but it'll be fun because it's always interesting to see when, when you, uh, when new technologies are apply or applied in the mainstream, like what happens and, uh, well, you know, what with going over like compliance and regions and all this stuff that's kind of like trivial, those are the, uh, it's, it, you can think of them as sort of like edge cases, but they're more like the cases in the center of the room. Well, all the people on the edges of the room have been having fun. Now we can like go into the, uh, the mix of the cocktail party and hang out with everyone. So I don't know. It'd be fun to see all that. That was a very painful analogy, but it was delightful to make. No, I wanted to see you finish it. So well done. You know, what I was, what I remember is in the center of the room is, is the, uh, the cold seafood buffet where they, I like the ones where they have the, the crab claws and they, they cut it open for you. It's like, it's like how royalty must feel, feel. They don't even have to open their own lobster. It's just like, No, you're thirst, thirst and halve a third right there. You're, you're living the dream. Uh, well, there is no transition that makes sense from there. So I won't attempt to make one, but what, what, you know, why don't you, uh, can, can you give us a, like a longer, uh, background of yourself, Joe? And then also like, like, uh, you know, you were on, I think I forget when, um, when it was some, sometime within the last year, I think before, before we added Richard to the podcast here, uh, which I don't know what we were thinking before we did that. Um, but we had a nice discussion with that. And one of the things, you know, in, in, in going over your background in more detail that I'm interested to hear is how you came to describe whatever it is you do. Cause I always feel kind of like a little guilty about saying HR, right? Like, it's almost like saying like, Oh, developers, right? Like there's almost a dismissive thing to it. And so like, like, how do you describe what it is you do and what your organization does in a way so that frankly, I, I cannot feel guilty about which phrase I use. Yeah. Well, we respond to most things,

you know, generally, we're just happy to get a phone call and someone reaching out for help. That's right. It's, it's the, I try to follow the, Hey, you policy as well. I'm just happy to talk to you. Yeah. So there's, you know, there's, there's a real answer and then there's a, you know, a self-deprecating answer as well. Indeed. And yeah, I don't know if you've seen this, uh, Dilbert, um, cartoon, you know, I saw it about, right, but it's been around for a while, but I remember looking at it for the first time about three years that describes human resources. And, uh, and then the Dilbert cartoon basically says, you're neither human nor resourceful. Change your name. Um, those are the jokes. Those are the jokes. Those are HR jokes. But, um, you know, I think the, you know, the way I'd really, you know, kind of describe the role is really focused on, you know, the experience of our employees and our candidates. You know, that's really the most, I think, simplistic, um, and factual way to look at it. Not that we always get that right, but that is really the, you know, the focus of the overall people team, um, is to just focus on the overall experience and making sure that our employees have what they need to, you know, to do their jobs and to be the best that they can be. And everything we do is aligned to, um, you know, support the goals of the business. My official title in the system is chief people officer. Um, but you know, I just generally say I'm just a member of the people team and part of the leadership team and we're just here to help. Yeah. And, um, I'm happy to share my broader background if that's interesting to the audience. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, it's interesting to me, so I'll assume they care. Uh, but, uh, like, like I, uh, without, without going on too long, cause there's a lot of other stuff that it'd be good to talk about. Like how, how do you end up as the chief people officer? Like what, uh, were you like six year old, you're six years old and you're like, I want to manage, I want to manage the experience of people. Like how, how, uh, how do you end up in that position? Oh, I might need to sit on my couch and answer that one. But, um, yeah, so, um,

I guess, you know, I guess luck at some level if you want to call it luck, but, um, that's how I manage my career. No, no. Yeah. And that's, and I guess I got to remember that I'm actually maybe giving career advice here. So I probably have to be somewhat serious, but, um, yeah, I've actually, you know, I've been really fortunate with my career. I started off actually in the military. I was in the military for four years, uh, in the Marines. And then when I got out, I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Moved to Boston and wanted to go to my, uh, MBA at, uh, Boston college. And, um, I started working at EMC. And so I had jobs both inside and outside of, um, HR at EMC. I was actually in corporate for about two years. And when EMC approached me about HR, it was actually the last thing I was actually thinking about. I was looking at sales jobs. I was interviewing for financial jobs. Goldman Sachs. Um, I was interviewing for business dev jobs, you name it. I was interviewing for it. And they, uh, they called me in and said, Hey, we'd like to just talk to you on a one hour informational interview. Went from one hour to eight hours. And they were actually looking for a junior military officer in their manufacturing facility in Franklin, Mass. And they thought the skill sets that I had in, uh, Marines was applicable. And, you know, one opportunity led to another. And then, uh, when EMC acquired green plum, I got EMC into big data and data analytics. Uh, I was asked to move out, um, to California. And that's where I started working closely with, uh, Bill Cook and Scott Yara and a lot of other members of the legacy green plum team in summer of 2010. And then when we formed Pivotal, I had the opportunity to join a company for, uh, for this journey that we've been on for the last three and a half years. Yeah. I, I think, I think that's, that's, uh, like one, one, one way that's interesting. And, and, and it is, it is sort of like, uh, you might call it guided luck the way I manage my career, but, but I think, I think especially, you know, someone, someone like yourself, who's, uh, who's helped you, you and the team who's helping manage the experience of the

employee, right? It's good to have firsthand experience of like, uh, a career is not really a ladder. It's more like a maze, right? Like it's, it's like this weird thing. You went, you can, some people it's a ladder, like it's predefined and it's one track and all this stuff, but like there's, uh, there's all these different things that come up and what's important is to like figure out what, uh, at least to me, what's important is the best choice for the individual and the organization and how they fit together with each other, which I think is, uh, it's, it's not always the experience I've had with how, uh, I've been managed by organizations I work for. So that's, that's, uh, that's nice. That's heartening. And careers are very generally not very linear, right? And, and my definition of luck is when, you know, opportunity, you know, means preparedness, right? Right. You gotta, you gotta love what you do and you gotta show value and you gotta fit within the culture. And I'm generally, uh, operate my life more through, you know, because faith, right. If you do the right things, you know, good things happen. So I wanted to ask you, I'm, I'm kind of new here. It's six month anniversary tomorrow. So I got to go through the process and come aboard here. And I don't know, I've never worked somewhere like this, where human resources in my typical experience is often looking out for the company, not necessarily the employees. It's you're calling me a resource for goodness sake, like you're not calling me a person. So that's typically been HR is, Hey, look, we're going to help you get onboarded. But our goal is to kind of protect the company. I, there's a genuinely different vibe here and it's not just naming. It's not saying we're chief people people. It's, it's actually, it seems to be a different vibe. How does that start with you? I mean, how do you kind of create a culture within what is traditionally called HR where it's not just about, well, how do we pay the people the least possible and keep them at least marginally happy so they don't leave? So, I mean, there's gotta be a different approach here because I've never worked somewhere like here before. Yeah, no, that is true. And I mean, what you're describing is mostly conventional HR. And as we can talk later, what I was presenting on

last week and, you know, the way, you know, when we formed a company three and a half years ago, you know, one of the things I was sharing with my team is we're going to have not a lot of policies and not a lot of process, right? We're going to really focus on, you know, treating employees like adults and hoping that they act in pivotal best interest. And we're not going to design a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of processes and policies around, you know, solving for the 5% bad actors of the company. Let's just create a really cool company and a great experience for the 95 or 99% of the employees that want to be here and do great things. And I think generally speaking, our traditional HR, you know, may be focusing more on, you know, being much more risk averse and trying to just really protect the company at all costs, which I think has, you know, unintended consequences. And a lot of what we modeled HR over over the last couple of years is, you know, our development culture around agile, right? And agile requires this level of, you know, experimentation and this level of, you know, focusing on the candidate and employee a level of risk-taking. No, that's good. I mean, how does a company who's not like this, I mean, I'm sure, you know, people at EMC or Dell or others who observe how we operate and may look at us and think we are czar, but I mean, how does a company who doesn't have the sort of mindset you described, one of our customers or others who have a very risk averse, you know, kind of by the book, tons of policies approach? How do you start to unwind that, assuming you want to? Yeah, well, I don't really worry about other companies except for the ones that are paying us or want to, or want to be customers of ours. Sure. And I do. And so we do interact with the myself and my team actually do spend a lot of time with customers, especially the more, the larger ones, and the ones

that, you know, are, you know, talking about, you know, their own transformation. Sure. Right. And obviously, maybe not obviously, but I think obviously, you know, we're trying to get them to adopt our platform as quickly as possible. And a lot of times, not all times, but a lot of times, you know, we do that through labs, right? And get them started. And that's just one path to get them onto the platform. But when the conversation quickly changes for those really, really large companies, I'm not going to name them unless you want to get into examples of them, but they quickly realize that they need to make a culture and people transformation. And so my team works closely with Siobhan's team, which is the transfer transformation team. And we run into exactly what you're talking about, right? You know, they want to build software like us, and they want to be able to much more quickly, and they want to be able to take a lot of their existing applications and migrate them onto the platform. But then they look internally, and a lot of the processes and systems and culture is not set up for that, right? You know, there's one major client of ours that's just called a $20 million plus client of ours. You know, they've outsourced their entire recruiting function. So they call us in to try to help them. I'm like, right, let's just talk to your recruiting org. And they're like, oh, we outsource that. Or, you know, they're trying to hire a, you know, a programmer and it takes them, you know, six months to get an offer. That's very different than how we operate. And so they are, they do have a lot of challenges in trying to help them with that. So, and, and tell me, tell me if this is a good, uh, sort of theme to, to, to bring out the broader question. I mean, the broader question is like, and this is why I like to have you on this podcast. You described it just there is, is we go talk with people who are pivotal customers. And one of the first things we tell them is like, you have to change your culture, right? And, and like, you know, we're a software that on the product side, we have software to sell, and we can talk a lot about transformation and things like that. But I think it gives you and your team an interesting

role in it to describe how we do things and the challenges we face. And so like, I think that's a endless vein of fascination, how, how you switch things over. And so one way of that, I think is something that kind of runs through a lot of it and maybe can allow us to highlight what are some challenges and things that you change in the, uh, the employee experience area is, and is this idea of at the product level, uh, or with the software level, you have this notion of like, let's use a bunch of experiments or small batches, as I say, to kind of figure out what our software should do. Like we're not going to know 12 months ahead of time, what we should code or what the best experience for the user is. So we'll put a bunch of experiments in place and verify it and collect data and always be fixing that running experiments. And it also, you know, uh, occurred to me a long time ago or relatively long time ago, that if you're a manager at an organization, you have to do that same thing with your organization structure to change it around to figure out what organization structure works well and which employees work or what types of roles work well. So all that idea of experimenting with your organizational structure very quickly comes up. And I imagine in, in a more traditional HR world that has all sorts of weird challenges, let alone when you go back to, um, uh, like, like people, HR policies itself, like experimenting with people policies must be incredibly difficult. So, I mean, I just think this idea of how you introduce experimentation into the organization is, is a fascinating one that is very representative of the change we ask our customers to go through. And so I wonder like how you're dealing with this idea of experimenting with not only different like people policies, but also just like helping people out, change their organization around to operate in that way. Yeah. No. And I'm happy to give you some real examples, but this is very much part of what we're doing. So you think about previous organizations that, you know, either you've been at or your audience, and it doesn't necessarily need to be something that HR rolled out. It could be

HR or another support organization, IT or finance. And they rolled it out, rolled out this product, right? It rolled out this process. And you and your colleagues were looking at each other and scratching your head like, what is that? That adds absolutely no value. Right. Right. And, and that's, and, and real companies do that, right? Sometimes where, you know, maybe some larger companies, right, they'll go and they'll build a product and they'll spend, you know, 12 or 18 months building this product. They'll think what the requirements are, but they never really tested or validated. that along the way, right? They had a hypothesis, but they never really, you know, tested their assumptions along the way. So we really have incorporated a lot of the, you know, lean, lean startup thinking and HR and a lot of the principles and tenants around agile and extreme programming because, you know, the, my team, they don't want to roll something out or do something that they think is adding value, but then it falls flat, right? No one wants to do that, right? No one wants to spend weeks, months, quarters doing something and then your customers don't see any value in it, right? And so this concept of experimentation allows you to get feedback early on, right? So you have a hypothesis in terms of a problem you're trying to solve, what you're trying to do. There's a series of assumptions that we come up with within the HR organization. And then we, we test those, you know, along the way. And then we get feedback and we adjust and we change course. Now, do we always get that perfect? Of course not, but that's certainly the intent. And, you know, one example, maybe, you know, more recently, you know, as you mentioned, you know, earlier, you're filling out the survey. I'm assuming it was the benefit survey, right? We, benefits is really complex, but it's really important to our employees. And a lot of our colleagues have, you know, really unique circumstances at home. And, you know, we're going on this journey of separating from EMC and going on our own benefits. And so we are going to make sure that this process is very inclusive, right? We're not going to just come up, you know, spend time in

a conference room and approach it from a cost perspective and us tell our employees what they need for benefits. You know, we want to invite them as part of the process. And we got this, we got a lot of positive emails. One last week where this boy wrote up to us and said in my 20 years working at companies, you know, I've never been asked to actually help, you know, or be invited to be part of the process to help shape what type of benefits we have. Yeah. That's, that's, that's a, that's a good point. And I mean, without, without getting into too easily getting into some trough of past cynicism, like it is, uh, I think that's true. It is nice to have, uh, you know, usually there's sort of like some committee of people and then, and then as you're saying, like each employee finds out every like 12 to 14 months, like, here's the new plan, enjoy it. But it's, uh, in, in, in, in the same way that, uh, we would talk with our customers about, you know, I have, I have this, this funny story I tell of like what user experience is, is going and talking to the users and figuring out what works well for them, right? Like, like it, it turns out you can just ask them and observe them and do what's good for them. And, and I think, I think one abstract way people put this is to have empathy with the people you're working for or working with or whatever. And I think while a survey may seem kind of like cheesy, like sending out those things and engaging with people and what you were just saying shows this amount of empathy of like, we're trying to figure out what's best for you and, and not only what's best for you, like what you want and what, what's going on in your situation. So that, uh, and that survey is actually just a, it's not the beginning. That's not the beginning and ending. Oh, you mean there's more surveys? Oh no. What have I asked for? Get ready. Um, it's actually that survey is going to help guide go focus groups, right? And employees are not going to be obviously forced to participate in them, but that, you know, we're going to go and talk to our employees through a series of focus groups across all functions, across, you know,

all geographies and actually talk to them and see what's important to them and share the results of the survey and, and get more, more data. So it's not just, Hey, we're going to do a survey. Thank you very much. We got all the information that we're going to go and, and solve this and we'll see you in nine months. Right. That would not be part of this. I think what's cool is that you're also using and sharing the data. I mean, I don't know, as I was taking this, even the questions weren't being worded like an HR goon trying to yell at me. Instead it was like, Hey, this is a trade-off you might think about that this or this, or some people are going to value this. And I would suspect when we're done this, you all may share some of this data. So even if this goes somewhere that maybe isn't my preference, I can look and see, well, my colleagues really preferred this, or this was where something where we did decide to make this choice. It just feels like a very genuine partnership versus a, Hey, we already decided, but we'll throw out a survey. So you feel like you had some say in it. I don't think that vibe at all. Yeah. And that's, and that's not the intent in that. You know, my ask is, you know, keep us, definitely keep us honest as we go down this six to nine months, because it's certainly not the intent. So, so if you were to have a, uh, I don't know, sort of like, uh, most important, I don't know, two or three things that, that when you're, when you're, uh, consulting with, with our customers or people like, what are, what are sort of like the effective, like, here's some, some worst and best practices that you would give people like, like we, you know, like we touched on one. That's the, the blindingly obvious ones are always the most useful and the most ignored. You know, I mean, there's the old thing about common sense is uncommon, but one of them is obviously like, well, you should ask people what's helpful for them. Right. Like, and you should actually do that. But like, what, what are some other things with this idea of having not only being able to run experiments, but having, having, uh, I don't know, a more agile HR organization. What do you find in the organizations we talk with? There's some, some easy and hard wins of things that they should focus on. Yeah. The, um, I think part of it is, um, you know, a lot of the organizations we deal with,

they, they get freaked out really quickly, right? When they, when they hear out, you know, they're going to have to change the way, you know, they operate or their structure, or they, do they have to go to pairing, you know, do, you know, how does this scale? And so there's always this initial kind of, um, trepidation, um, especially when we're dealing with our, you know, our counterparts, HR counterparts at other companies, because, um, generally speaking, they tend to be a little bit more conservative and risk averse, as we talked about earlier. So we try to just at least put at ease of first saying, Hey, this, this does scale. We have seen this before. Um, so that, you know, and just letting them know that, you know, we try to show them that empathy as well, that we're here with you. We'll help you. And we'll help talk this through because they do get this initial freak out. So we try to at least, you know, stabilize, you know, and bring some level of, um, I'm sorry, calm, but you know, some sort of, Hey, we're here with you. And the last thing we want to do, and I don't think we've ever done this for me, this last thing we want to do is, you know, freak out a part of the customer and we, you know, we put a dealer at risk or put a, you know, you know, put our relationship at risk. So we take, you know, our interactions very, very seriously. Um, but the, you know, I think the more, I guess, you know, obvious thing with them is once we kind of get through that first conversation is that you just need to get started. Right. And at the end of the day, like, we're not there to change them. They've come to us, you know, per se and saying, Hey, we want to learn to do things differently. And so that can come in many different shapes and sizes, right? So they don't have to necessarily look like us. They don't have to necessarily do 906 standups. They don't have to do everything that we do. Um, there's things that we certainly have an opinion on things that we recommend they do, they do, but it's, you know, they need, it needs to fit and work within their organization. Um, and so, you know, one tip that we do give besides just, Hey, just get started. Let's find a project. Let's find a team that's going

to work on this and we'll work with the HR teams and the recruiting teams, etc. Um, but one tip that we generally tell customers is it may make sense to kind of have this team off to the side for now. It may sound counterintuitive, but generally for the larger organizations, right? If we work with 5, 10, 15, 20, or 30 customers, but then they go back into an organization of 300 or 3000 or 30, 30,000, which oftentimes has they get to assume. And so we do, um, recommend those customers that really want to do a major cultural and people transformations that just keep the team separate and you keep adding to that team. And so when that team then gets to a level of critical mass, they're not going to get to assume, you know, by the larger organization. Yeah. That was a scale out strategy. So that, that's how you see that taking effect. For sure. Right. So if we, you know, brought in, you know, say we worked with 20 or 30 customers, including some of their support functions, but you then put them in an organization where they get quickly outnumbered, they're just going to revert back to their old ways of doing things. So you have to kind of keep them separate and just keep building that mass into that organization is, you know, equal to or greater weight, you know, weight and error quotes to, you know, to the, uh, to the formal organization. Yeah. No, you know, those, those, uh, I mean, again, those, those sort of three things are interesting in the sense that they, they almost map to on, on the other end, a lot of advice that we tend to give people, like if, if you want to do all this digital transformation, cloud native, use software better to run your business, you know, essentially like, uh, as I was just telling my, my, uh, almost seven year old son last night, like learning's hard, right? Like you, you fail a lot and it seems really weird and you don't know what's going on. Like, I always try to remind him how resistant he was to learning how to ride a bike and he would get upset and it wasn't working out. And

nowadays he doesn't even think about it. And so like, in that same way, if you're learning, if you're changing your organization around and doing things, it's good, as you said, to be aware that you're going to freak out, right? Like things are going to seem crazy and weird and that's normal. You just got to like get through it. And then I think, I think as, as we see a lot, um, among customers, right? Like, uh, it's a little counterintuitive, especially in a large organization. But as I like to put it, like, it's not a good idea to rewrite the.com site as your first project, right? Like you should, you should pick something smaller and like learn it and build up credibility and then expand it out. And I'd like to think that the expansion out is kind of like the mythical hockey stick thing. Like it starts off small and then all of a sudden you can blow it out really large at the end. But whatever, whatever way the stick is going at the end, I think it's definitely a pretty much established best practice that you should start with small things and grow up incrementally instead of biting off everything at once. Yeah. And, and that's the approach. And the other thing, which I think is just a byproduct of who we are helps provide some comfort with the customers is that we're not your typical consultants, you know, and think about maybe your typical SIs is that when they're talking to us, we're actually practitioners as well. So what we're sharing with them are things that we actually do, right? Things that we incorporate in our day to day with certain customers, you know, I'll share with them our own transformation. Right. And when we were formed three and a half years ago, right, it was a thousand people, you know, showing up on day one. It was seven different companies, you know, that EMC and VM were acquired over the previous three years. And so we looked a lot differently than we did then. And so we take them through some of the steps and things that we did and some of the mistakes we made. We made lots, you know, lots of mistakes and we had a lot of challenges over the last three years, three and a half years, but we've, we've learned from them and we're able to impart some of that, you know, to our, to our customers as well.

So I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you about something that we're starting to do and some in the industry are doing a little more around pay transparency. So if you could maybe tell us what that, that spectrum is, because there's obviously the one end of the spectrum is nobody knows anything about what they make in concert to others or their range or anything to the other end of the spectrum. Like you put my salary on pivotal.io, like there's probably a full spectrum there of things. So I mean, what are the core ideas around page transparency and where does pivotal land in that spectrum? Yeah, it's actually a very timely question. And I think you described the spectrum accurately. We actually built the spectrum internally of, okay, well, what is, what's the extremes of both sides of it? And, you know, aspirationally, where does pivotal want to fall on that spectrum? And so, you know, I'm actually going to be writing an email out to all of our employees here in the next week or two to actually answer that very question. So I can give your audience a little bit of a sneak preview. I'm not sure when this actually will become available, but I'll have to hold back certain things because I want to make sure the whole company here could at once. But the, we do want to make some movements. So today, I don't think all employees really understand how paid decisions are made. So that is a step on the journey of becoming much more transparent with the pay. So we're going to publish a pay practices document so that all employees understand how to do salaries. We're also going to share and educate employees in terms of how you do, how we actually benchmark, right? So you think about, we have colleagues in, you know, 30 plus countries and many different cities across the world. Like, how do we even come up with the pay ranges and the benchmarking and what do we benchmark against to it? And so we're going to share that methodology, you know, over the, in the coming weeks and the coming months. The ultimate goal is not

actually publish, put your salary out on Pivotal.io, whether it's internal or external. We've made a decision that that's not something us as a company can do. And we're 2,300 employees and we're not even sure what that would actually, you know, get to. Now we will, we are going to put on a, put us on a path where all employees will know where they fall within the first, their perspective pay range. And so we are actively working, you know, that right now, we're working with leaders. So that will be a goal so that all of you know exactly, you know, where you fall in the pay range and why you're paid, you know, what you, um, what you're paid at. Now the, one of the ultimate goals though, with pay transparency, in my opinion, is around fairness, right? And pay equality. And so one of the things that, you know, I'm going to share with the company and actually put on, uh, you know, right on our Pivotal.io blog is actually going to talk about, um, gender quality, um, when it comes to pay. Um, and Pivotal has recently signed, you know, the White House, um, equal pay pledge. Um, and also we've done some analysis, you know, with a third party, um, to find out, you know, how much women earn, you know, or every dollar that a, that a man makes, uh, in the U S. And so we're going to share those results with the company in the next couple weeks, which I think is, is the right thing to do. Um, not a lot of our peer companies are doing that, but that's, that's basically the path that we want to go down. Interesting. What are the, some of the challenges of doing these sort of models? I mean, obviously, you know, somebody who was just toiling away blissfully unaware that they were, you know, grossly underpaid and now all of a sudden they're disgruntled or, you know, you hit some other things. What, what do you see in the industry as challenges around paid transparency? And are those just things that are overcome by finally having some of these conversations that maybe we've shied away from for a heck of a long time? I don't know why it's that hard to be honest with

you know, we, you know, we, we, we started having this conversation literally in Q2 and said, Hey, we want to be much more transparent, which is how we pay. And I think part of this also is, you know, we want to just continue to foster this level of transparency and trust with our employees. And we just think it's a, it's just a logical path for us to go down. Now, I think maybe some larger companies, um, maybe their data isn't great and they're afraid of what it says, you know, maybe they're a little bit more risk averse because, you know, they're afraid it could lead to some sort of, um, lawsuits. Um, and so, you know, some, but some bigger companies are tackling this, right? You know, Salesforce.com and Apple and others have come down this, come down this journey or going down this journey. But for us, this does fit within our broader focus around diversity and inclusion. And I do think that, uh, the really create a, an inclusive, you know, organization, you know, the, the senior leadership team needs to continue to make some overtures to help fostering that trust. Right. And then hopefully over time, that's just, it'll be completely earned in uniform. And you don't have to do these types of things that you just trust that the company does the right thing. But I think we need to do, you know, some of these things in order to help build and foster that trust and confidence that folks have in the company. Yeah. You know, I, I was, I was, uh, delightfully laughing at your comment that, uh, I don't know why it's so hard. Cause I, cause I think, you know, it, it, it gets back to that general thing that, uh, that, uh, I'm always returning over and over again too. Right. Which is like, uh, so if you want your company to be high performing, right. In a, in a weird innovative sector, right. You're not just like, I, you know, I, I think pretty much every job you want people to be like creative and high performing. It's just a matter of like how, how you structure the business.

It's like probably one of the first things you want is your people to be happy. One, you have to be able to, uh, hire people and be a desirable place for them to work. Uh, but then once they're there, you want to retain them and grow them. And, you know, whether they go through a maze career or a ladder, you want to take advantage in all the best ways of the resource that they are to, to use a bunch of weird mixed metaphors there of, uh, of sentiment. And, and it seems like the best way, as far as I figured out with people to like, have them be happy is to like have a huge degree of trust with them and also like, don't take advantage of them. And, and it seems like, you know, the, uh, once money is involved, everyone's always suspicious. So having the maximum amount of, of logical transparency around it sort of removes that as a source of conspiracy theories and everything. And anyways, it like kind of gets that nonsense out of the way. And you can just focus on people having a good experience and having good people, which allows you to recruit people, which will allow you to have a business that functions and does well. Right. And, and all of that stuff, it sounds like, again, really normal when you explain it, but like, man, the amount of effort that companies have been struggling over this stuff is indicative of something weird going on. Right. Yeah. And the, the word of, you know, views in terms of, you know, I've actually drafted this blog so far, just want to take the mystery out of it. Exactly. Like there's no, there's no, this black art. We're not like in conference rooms trying to figure out how to, well, right. Everyone is well-intentioned. Yeah. Um, everyone is trying to do the right thing. And, and so let's just, let's just take the mystery out of it and let's just share how we do things. And, and over time, we'll let our employees know where they fall within the range. So we have to do it in a way that's thoughtful and that, you know, they're educated and managers are educated in terms of, you know, what data means and methodology. Right. I think it's doing the right thing. It's not hard. Yeah. And that, that with, as, as the last topic before we wrap up, that brings up something you and I had, had, uh, have talked about previously and that is, uh, and I wanted to talk about this

because I hadn't really thought about it until you mentioned it is like how, how as, as a company, you sort of explain and embody the values that you have. Right. And, uh, you know, like our, uh, we, we have the values of like, do the right thing, do what works and be kind. Right. Which, which, which, you know, sort of sounds like pretty normal, but I think, I think the challenge is figuring out in any given day to day situation, like how, how you communicate and prove to employees, not only the seriousness of what that is, but what those things actually mean, like, what does it mean to be kind and do, do what works. And so I'm interested in, we didn't talk about it in great detail, but like, how, how are you thinking through sort of like defining what those values are and then also sort of, um, having everyone prove to each other that they're following them or being an exemplar of it? Yeah. And good question. Um, we have a lot of work to do there and I think we've made a lot of progress. Um, but you know, when we formed the company three and a half years ago, you know, we had lots of different cultures and different values that we just inherited. Right. Um, and you spend 10 minutes in a larger organization, you're going to pick up some of that, those values and cultures, and then also all those previously acquired companies. So I've actually been on this journey of kind of figure out like who we are as a company, like, and what are we, what are our values are? And Paul, you know, has greatly shaped that. And, and so has, has Rob. And I remember early on, you know, my team asked me to publish our values, right? This was like mid 2013 and let's write them on a website. And I said, no, we're not going to do that. I said, because it would be very disingenuine. And most of our employees would not even be able to even recognize themselves or see themselves in those values because we need work. The leadership team has work done. Um, and so we are at a point now where we do talk about our values and as those, you know, those three in terms of, you know, do what works, do the right thing. And I'm, but I think, I do think, and I've had this conversation with Rob recently,

um, that I do think that a lot of employees really need help understanding. What does that actually even mean for them? Right. To your point, right. It is simple. Well, like when you do your job every day, what does that actually mean? Right. As a sales rep, you're interacting with customers or your colleagues. What does that mean? Your PAs, your PAs are interacting with, you know, your reps and the product organization. What does that mean? What does it mean for engineers? And so we're actually going to, um, um, Rob is going to get in front of, uh, he does this, um, he's going to participate in this lead on session for managers. And this is going to be just one start. And we have over 300 people, managers at Pivotal and just do some storytelling. Right. And so I think that's one way in which, you know, we can help our employees really understand and our managers understand our values is instead of just referring to the three of them and hoping that they're interpreted correctly, it's actually, well, let's do some storytelling and actually talk about what does that actually mean for different functions and, you know, different levels of the organization in terms of how, um, you know, Rob and the leadership team expect, um, not only them to behave and carry themselves, which is really important, but also how the rest of the company, um, operates. Uh, no, I, I think, I think, I think it's that, uh, that storytelling, which is nice. And, and now that you say that, like thinking over, uh, the kind of discussion of values and corporate policy, like over the past, like couple decades of my career, like I kind of only remember the stories executives would tell like, like actual things they would do. And it gives, it gives a good guideline. And, and, you know, like, like, uh, to, to have my own sort of like, uh, story of it, so to speak, I was just talking with one of our, our, our sales reps last week and you and I had talked about this before that. So I was, I was kind of asking him the question, like, what do you think of these values? And, and like, like a lot of the, um, uh, I mean, some of it has to do with the nature of large, long, uh, enterprise sales that we have, but the, I always think salespeople are an excellent test of values of corporations, like the closer to the

money, the more, the more of a, of a chaotic Petri dish it is. And the discussion we were having was, was essentially like more of the consultative nature, just sort of, uh, uh, you know, giving, giving prospects and customers advice about how they should do thing and hooking them up with information rather than just trying to, uh, sell them the stuff or make the numbers or whatever, like, and it's always important for a salesperson to focus on that. But, you know, as I was discussing things with him and avenues, he had been, uh, sort of suggesting customers go to and things that they should not do. A lot of it was a good example of like him figuring out what was good for that organization and then trying to map to the capabilities that pivotal has and kind of not only steer them to things that they would spend money on us with, but steer them away from things that wouldn't make sense for them. So it seemed to me that like that, having your salespeople, um, be happy to tell customers that like, no, this product's probably not a good idea for you at this point. It seems like a good, a good example of, of doing the right thing. And, and also it's funny because like, it's also an example of it, it, it works in the sense that you're not telling them to do something that won't work. So that's kind of a negative example, but it's also kind to like, be nice to people and actually, and try to help them out. But, uh, yeah, I mean, the stories are good. Yeah. And I've heard, you know, I've heard Bill Cook, you know, say to, um, our company and to our sales organization, right? He, he would not want to see us do a large ELA where the customer, you know, wasn't going to get any value out of it and they weren't going to use our software and it was just going to, you know, just sit there and we're not going to consume AIs, right? This is not the right thing to do. It's not just about getting the deal done, right? We want to show value and help our customers get to the outcomes that they want. And obviously this does tie to our business model in terms of making sure that folks are renewing our subscription, right? And so it does help put some of that behavior in check because of our subscription business is that we need our customers doing

renewals, right? And if we're trying to sell something that them just to make a number and a quarter, which is important, um, you know, it's, it's gonna, it's not going to be the right thing for them and it's going to actually hurt our business model in the longterm when those, those customers turn. And then also Edward has been talking a lot about, you know, engagement plan, right? And I think engagement plan that you have early on in your conversation with your customers, you're actually building that roadmap in terms of, you know, the outcomes that they're trying to get. And that just keeps everybody keeps everybody honest. Well, absolutely. Well, before we wrap up, is there, uh, any, any other topics you don't think we've, we've, uh, we've covered sufficiently that you want to raise up? No, this is great. No, I just, uh, appreciate, uh, both of your time and, uh, it's great chatting with you. And, um, certainly if, uh, your audience has any questions, they can always, uh, you know, feel free to reach out to me directly or remember my team. Yeah. Well, you're, you're now in a very small club of people who've been on this podcast twice. So, uh, whenever, whenever we get the budget to print up jackets, we'll have to send you one or, or maybe just a really nice image in an email we'll send. We'll see. We'll see. Oh, so I won't, I guess I won't read into it if I don't invite it back for a third. The club of two is, uh, hit the threshold. Very exclusive. That's awesome. Well, well, uh, well, thanks for being on. And, and, and if, uh, if people want to follow up with you, like, do you, do you have like a Twitter account or anything you want to throw out? Yeah, they can, uh, follow me on, uh, on Twitter. Um, you know, joe.militello10 on Twitter. And, um, you know, my email is jmilitello@pivotal.io. So feel free to reach out to me either way. Well, that's great. Well, we'll, we'll have to be sure we'll put, uh, Coté's favorite slide of 2016 up somewhere. That'll be, that'll be good stuff. And, uh, and, and, and as always, uh, thanks for listening, uh, everyone. This has been Pivotal Conversations. You can find

the show notes, uh, with, with many of the things we mentioned, if you go to pivotal.io slash podcast, and you can also go directly to our not so secret backend for hosting this in SoundCloud. If you go to soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations, it's a lot to type, but easy to remember. And it's always nice if, uh, if you like this episode to recommend it to people or just drop us a line through whatever weird channel you, uh, you like using, or if you really want to be like hyper, uh, responsible or something, uh, you can go into iTunes and leave us a review or rating. I think if you did it now, you would be the first person to do it, at least as far as written, uh, leaving a typed up thing. So there's, uh, the first mover advantage of your awesomeness that you could achieve effortlessly. Uh, you probably have to log into Apple or something, which is exciting. Anyhow, we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.

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