Rethinking HR as a product with Josh Hill

In this episode, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock sit down with Josh Hill, an HR innovator who's challenging the traditional transactional approach to people management. Josh shares his unconventional journey from the Australian military to progressive HR, where he's pioneering the concept of "work as a product" at marketing agency Tier 11 and through his recruiting venture, Super Hired.

Josh explains how HR teams can shift from rushing to solutions toward discovery-led approaches that treat employees as customers. He walks through real examples of iterative onboarding improvements, the importance of understanding jobs to be done in hiring, and why talent density matters more than filling seats quickly.

The conversation explores compensation dynamics, the value of matchmaking over recruiting, and how small experiments can build momentum for broader HR transformation. Whether you're leading people operations or navigating organizational change, this episode offers practical insights on making HR less transactional and more intentional.

Key Takeaways:

1. Start with discovery, not solutions – Before building HR processes or solutions, take time to interview employees, understand their stories and experiences, and map out what's actually obstructing outcomes. Even 10 minutes of discovery beats rushing to a result.
2. HR as a matching exercise, not a numbers game – Recruitment and people management generate real value when viewed as careful matchmaking between what work a company offers and what employees are looking for, rather than just transactional headcount filling.
3. Make HR less transactional – Slow down important conversations around hiring, onboarding, and employee experience. These decisions deserve the same rigor companies apply to external product development, not just checkbox processes.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Josh: From Army To HR Innovator
• 3:25 Defining Progressive HR
• 6:45 Work As A Product And Employee Discovery
• 11:20 Avoiding Rush-To-Solution HR
• 14:55 Building Strategic Links To Outcomes
• 18:40 Onboarding As An Iterative Product
• 22:10 Super Hired: Matchmaking Over Mass Hiring
• 26:20 Measuring Value: Talent Density And Lift
• 29:20 Compensation Beyond Salary
• 33:10 Closing Takeaways And Contact

Transcript

Peter Maddison (0:04): Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello. It's wonderful to see you. And we've got my good friend Dave and my new friend Josh, who is joining us from Adelaide in Australia today. So Josh, would you like to go ahead and introduce yourself?

Josh Hill (0:23): Yes, hello. Peter, Dave, nice to meet you guys. Looking forward to the conversation. Josh, currently residing in Australia, Adelaide, South Australia. It's a lesser known of the big cities, but I've been here for a few years now. I don't know if you can hear the birds chirping. Can you hear that? Maybe not.

Peter Maddison (0:39): No.

Josh Hill (0:40): But you can't hear it? Okay, good. Because sometimes I go and have these calls and people are like, are you in a nature sanctuary or something? But let me know if it gets distracting if you can hear it. But yeah, look, I've had a bit of a non-traditional HR path, so to speak. I started out in the military when I was 18 and joined the Defence Force Academy, which is based in Canberra, Australia, which is effectively a combined university military institution. And I was there for a number of years, studied business, and eventually served in the infantry in the Australian Army for I think seven years. So my entire career was about 10 years in the military. And I got to a point where I was a bit fed up with the same problems, the same people, the same, I guess just the context, the environment was getting a bit mundane, and there were only certain career paths I could go down from there. And I was interested, very interested in HR, have always been not so much in the traditional sense of HR, right? Like when I introduce myself to people and they're like, oh, you're in HR, what you do, like leave apps and policies and rules and shit. That's what you do. I might know. I like to think of it as progressive HR, like next gen stuff, you know. So I left the military, I work for an in-house US marketing agency now, taking some of these principles from the military, but also from what I've picked up along the way. And in the last few years at this company, I've really had a chance to incubate some ideas and have been now connected to some pretty progressive HR communities, which we can go into kind of how they think and what I've been doing at Tier 11 is the name of the company. And simultaneously, more recently in the last few months, have founded with a friend and a previous colleague, Super Hired, which is a recruiting agency, but I hate the term recruitment, but it's really a challenge to the status quo of how recruiting and talent acquisition has been done in the past, which is very much an assembly line-esque race to the result, throw people over the fence kind of endeavor, to being much more discovery-led, slowing things down, embedding in the business. And I know it's nothing new, but now with the advent of AI and kind of all these other tools, you can really start to create some magic much more efficiently when it comes to matching the right person to the right context. And that's kind of the premise of Super Hired. But yeah, very keen to talk about anything in between any of that. There's a lot of different avenues, a lot of rabbit holes, I'm sure we could go down.

Dave Sharrock (3:10): Well, I've got to start the conversation, if you like. Just progressive HR versus traditional HR. How do you define progressive? What is it? How is it different to what maybe many of our listeners think of when they hear somebody works in HR?

Josh Hill (3:24): Sure. So progressive, the way that I'm starting to think, and I've connected with this community that is growing quite rapidly is around considering work as a product. And what that means is a business typically puts so much rigor and emphasis on developing their external products for their external clients. We have these functions, these capabilities that exist: sales, marketing, customer success, product teams, ways of working, agile development. I mean, all these progressive things that we do to deliver excellence to our external clients, taking those concepts and those frameworks and seeing how they can be applied internally to work and people. And we have these terms like people experience, the people experience, and now we're getting these titles that are surfacing over the last few years, like people and culture partner, people experience partner, you know, people are starting to think along these lines, but it's really aggressively trying to challenge the status quo of HR is not there necessarily just to service, they're there to design and to take ownership over work as a product to be intentionally designed and delivered to the organization. And there's a lot of implications when you start to think like that. There's a lot of second and third order effects that you start to then think, and it's interesting because you then start to rabbit trail and think, well, if work is a product, then our employees are customers. And if our employees are customers, then we should be interviewing them and we should be really understanding, well, what do our customers want? What do they need? What's the ultimate outcome of what our customers inside the business ultimately need? Like what is the point of employees? So it's very interesting to unpack that and follow the rabbit trails.

Dave Sharrock (5:14): Oh man, there's some really interesting things that you're you're kind of mentioning, and I just wanted to maybe just explore that one comment you made about interviewing employees. Because of course we do interview employees, but I think you're meaning much more from a customer experience perspective or a usability perspective, like what's the experience that you are having in our company as you onboard, as you interact with, get your job done, whatever it might be, parity around where you can get help, where the support is, or something along those lines. Can you explore that? Maybe do you have examples of how things have changed as a result of viewing the people in the company and the experience that they may have?

Josh Hill (6:03): Yes, yes, 100%. I think typically, traditionally, if you take HR development, like when I say development, the creation of solutions and products, typically it's quite agnostic of that level of discovery that product teams apply to their external customers. So let's take an example of an external customer and a product team that's oriented outside of the business. So they will do lengthy qualitative and quantitative research. They'll sit down with customers, they'll map out the opportunity space, they'll identify problems, pain points, needs, desires, all leading to the outcome of what their product that they're selling is meant to do. So there's a lot of rigor around slowing down, asking questions, gathering research. They don't jump to the result of, oh, let's just develop the solution and just throw it out there into the wind. Ultimately, because if you do that, you're not going to provide an excellent service, you're not going to be able to generate revenue and the business will collapse. So when we take that paradigm inside, what that means is that HR teams traditionally are not very good at doing that level of discovery, and they typically jump to results and don't understand truly what's at the heart and center of what employees actually need to do their job. The outcome that we're often striving for internally is something related to client service delivery excellence, performance, speed. It's these kind of metrics that HR teams need to quantify. Once we quantify them with people inside the business, the leaders, the capability leaders, then we can reverse engineer, okay, well, how do we get to that outcome inside the business with our employees as our customers? So it forces us to start to have conversations with team members, with team leaders, with experts, and say, look, this is the outcome that we're looking to get this team to or this capability to. Let's explore the problem space that exists that's inhibiting you to reaching that. Pain points, any needs you have, desires you have, let's look at the tools or systems, the social dynamics, the emotional drivers of why we're all at work. It's actually a lot more complex than building external products because you're dealing with humans. Humans are the product, work is the product that they're doing, and they're all inherently different. So a lot of teams don't do that. And when I started my HR journey, I rushed to results. I was like, oh, we don't have a performance improvement process. I guess I'll just whip one up and force everyone to do it. And people were like, we don't need this now. This isn't built for fit. It's something off the shelf. It's not custom designed, it's not the right time to do it. If I had done the discovery, that's a solution I might have never even put any time and effort towards because I would have seen a different thing over here that I could have executed to drive that same lift to the same outcome. So it's more of a mindset principle shift, first and foremost, of don't just rush to building solutions, map out an opportunity space first, do the discovery. And Teresa Torres is a product thinker that's quite well known in the space. And she is very articulate, very good at explaining how people can do that, how product teams can do that. But HR professionals, it's a great resource to look into. She's written some good books. Even if you can start to just think like that, slow things down, then the solutions will be made for purpose and provide so much more value inside a company.

Peter Maddison (9:26): So you're kind of describing useful HR then, like something that actually aims to have another way of thinking of that is intentionality around the actions that HR takes. Because quite often, especially in large organizations, HR becomes very transactional. And you have a number of different pockets within HR, which are aimed at different parts of the organization, depending on what the needs are, and they fulfill those in almost a case-by-case basis. And despite best efforts, quite often, to your point, the systems that get put into place are not always fit for purpose, which is something that we would talk about quite a lot when we think about things from an agile perspective. We start to think about how do you design systems so that those systems are successful and that we are looking to help build the culture we're looking to grow within the organization, or we're trying to identify where there might be problems and what sort of things can we do to highlight or identify those problems early so that we can start to address them. So I mean, I can understand, I think, where you're coming from. Does that sort of sum it up reasonably well?

Josh Hill (10:41): Yeah, I think it's a bit of a paradigm shift because I think institutionally, and when I say institutionally, I'm talking about the evolution of work here. Like HR was developed as a means to control and manage and maintain and add boundaries and constraints. Whereas now we're talking about a function that value adds and that actually still maintains because I mean every capability needs to maintain the systems it builds. But I'm talking about a function, a capability where you're over-indexing on the delivery of value that's connected to the business. And when I say connected to the business, it's connected via the discovery, right? You're starting with outcomes. And to be connected to outcomes, you need to have a seat at the table, right? Like you need to have a link to, well, what's the ultimate drivers of business success from a metric standpoint? Yes, there's revenue and there's net profit and there's margins and there's all these high-level financial metrics, but what's the strategy to get to that level of growth for your company or that rate of growth or that level of service delivery? So breaking down those metrics into subordinate outcomes is very important. And the only way you can do that is if you're strategically connected to the business and you have formed relationships with operational leaders across the business, you're connected to them and what they're trying to do, what level of performance they're trying to create and build and the teams they're trying to build. What I like to refer to is talent density, which is a Netflix-ism. But this concept that, you know, if you consider a business as multi-sided, it's nothing groundbreaking, but you essentially have at least three components that are interrelated. The business itself and its need for growth and to sustain itself, and it is the entity that exists, the owners, the founders, then you have the clients, and then you have the employees. And they're all connected and they all need each other to survive. But so often we over-index the needs of the customers in the company at the expense of the employees without realizing it's actually the base of people, humans inside the business, that are the most important facet, also the most expensive, which people overlook. People labor is 50 to 60% of a company's expenses, yet we don't treat it as something to be intentionally designed, their experience and how they work together to produce the value for the clients. So if you understand that concept and the importance of that as a leader, talent density, this concept of really focusing on that employee lever, the people lever, and getting the best people in the right seats to deliver that service to the client, that's the focus that really needs to be fundamental to a strategy, especially considering how complex business is now. It's spaghetti.

Dave Sharrock (13:30): Yeah, I just wanted to, I know you're just about to talk about spaghetti, and I was just wanting to pick up. That's fine. Before we go to food. As you're saying that, there's a couple of things that really strike me on this one, and one of them is in so many organizations we see that HR is like it's a service almost to the organization that is just seen as just you know, I need more people, I need these people, I need to backfill this role. It's an action that I go out to some group and they'll take care of that. And as soon as you start thinking about it in terms of value to the business, then one of the big things that comes up is retention. It's the cost of losing individuals after three, six, eight, nine months, whatever it might be, which is quite common. So there's a whole issue that starts coming around the cost of onboarding somebody, often changing that role. And then I think of things like employee engagement surveys, where you know the common feedback is I'm not supported in the role, I don't have communication, but there's communication, different things that come in. There must be a precursor in order to go to this progressive HR model, there's got to be either a base level of systems process support in place or some other kind of prerequisite. So what do you look for? If somebody brings you in and they say this progressive HR, we want to go there, what needs to be in place first in order for that really to stand a chance of having an impact?

Josh Hill (15:17): That's a great question, and it's tough to answer because it's so contextual on the business. But I would say first and foremost, that there are some levers where it just simply won't be possible unless you can really get on top of them. And I think one of them, first and foremost, is having leaders in the organization that understand the importance of, you know, when I explain that multi-sided model, have an understanding of the importance of the people in that equation. If you're not coming at it with a mindset of abundance and focused around if we elevate people and enhance their ability to do their job well according to the outcomes of what we're trying to do, without that, you can't change how you think along these lines. And I had a really interesting conversation with this other guy who's running his own consulting agency around this way of thinking. And yeah, he finds it quite difficult to get leaders to wrap their heads around how to even think about this because of just the nature of they've been mentored into a system and they've been educated into a system and they've been exposed to a system where they're just not treated like that. HR professionals are not allowed and afforded that level of contribution and line of thinking. And it's almost like roll your eyes, get in your box, like this is not how business is done. So it's difficult because the paradigm shift here requires multiple people to come together in different parts of the business to be on the same page. But if you do have that level of alignment, which I think you can create through small iterative testing. And I think that's really the way I've broken into it at Tier 11 and how I've seen a lot of people starting to deploy this level of thinking, it's just, which is very aligned as well to the method, which is small iterative deployments of value, right? We're moving away now from HR, which is like, oh, I've got to build this thing over a quarter. You don't see them, then they present this grand thing after three months, and it's like that's outdated, that's not built for use case, like we've talked about earlier. So the method here of iterative agile shipping of value based on discovery is actually conducive to kind of edging into it, right? So the way I like to kind of frame it for people that are interested and want to start thinking along these lines is just start doing some discovery. Start setting up some conversations where you interview people inside the business after you've identified, maybe with a leader, what outcomes they're trying to drive and they're struggling with. Interview some people in their team and interview them from the perspective of seeking to understand their stories and their experience, not seeking solutions, trying to map out what's obstructing them from hitting those outcomes, see what kind of information you come away with and see what quick iterative solution you can build in, say, a week or two to try and move the needle on the outcome, as opposed to something that's grandiose and that needs to be built over a quarter. If you can get some quick wins thinking and behaving and acting like that, then you start to build momentum and trust in this alternative method. And really it's just I think that's the best approach. It's influence. And in order to gain influence and confidence from your peers, you need to demonstrate results ultimately. There's a lot of talking that can be done, but at the end of the day, it's hey, I did this thing and look what it produced and I measured it. I'm gonna do it again, but on a grander scale, and this time give me some money. Okay, fine. Let's try it again. You do it again, and yeah, so that's what's been working for me at least.

Peter Maddison (18:58): What sort of small iterations have you been trying? Like when you're saying, hey, we discover things, what sort of things do you experiment with?

Josh Hill (19:07): So at Tier 11, the onboarding process has been a big one, has been quite a comprehensive project that we've been co-creating with candidates coming into the business and hiring managers and capability leaders. And that's quite a complex, it's quite a complex but an extremely important high value part of the employee journey, right? It's when someone comes into a business and they're like, oh my gosh, like I'm flooded with all this stuff, not only the tangible systematic things I need to get my head across, but all the social, emotional, intangible things about where am I? What is this culture like? Who are the people I can trust? But at the same time, there's very definitive business demands on how quickly someone can ramp up and be productive and start providing value, especially in an environment like Tier 11, which is fast-paced. It's a marketing agency, it's at the top of the adoption curve, we're constantly moving and adjusting, and we've got new tech coming in. It's quite convoluted. So the last couple of months, we've been going quite deep with this discovery approach by making sure we're very diligent with having regular touch points with candidates as they go through the experience, identifying their experience from a need standpoint that it's not being met, but also opportunities. The hiring manager is also a very important stakeholder because they're involved throughout the hiring process and through the onboarding process. And then the capability leader, for example, the head of operations, they have expectations around what this person should be able to do in this amount of time. So there's a lot of different stakeholders, and at times they may have conflicting demands or expectations. So immersing ourselves in the middle of that and just listening, just being the facilitators and getting people in the room to map out exactly based on the North Star metrics here of what the capability leader is setting and what the business needs, mapping out what's feasible, what we can build, what we can ship. So as a result of the discovery, we've migrated our entire onboarding from Jira to Asana because Jira is clunky as hell. I don't know if you guys have used Jira, but it's terrible, at least for a marketing agency.

Dave Sharrock (22:22): We may have used it, yes.

Josh Hill (22:24): So I mean it might be good for software developers and SaaS, but it's not good for a marketing agency. So I mean that was one of the big decisions that we made was to migrate platforms. And now, you know, how do we create an onboarding process that takes into consideration all of this feedback? So it's very iterative, right? I haven't just interviewed everyone and then said, all right, I'll have that to you in three months. It's let's do a round of conversations over two weeks. We'll build an MVP, we'll deploy it, we'll test it, we'll get feedback, then we'll create a version two, version three, version four. And now we're up to like version five, and you can see the incremental lift of the experience of the hiring manager, the candidates, because we're capturing that data, and it's just you know, it's just such a better, more sustainable way of working. It's more efficient, it involves everyone in the process of creating and planning and delivering, and it's based on principles. So you can build anything with agile, you know, with sprints. I mean, it doesn't really matter what mechanism you use, the discovery is the foundational component, which is the most important part.

Dave Sharrock (22:30): I'm waiting for Peter to jump in here.

Peter Maddison (22:34): I was actually going to ask about the other piece you're talking about, because when you're talking about onboarding, obviously that kind of nicely segues into the other area you were mentioning at the beginning that you're working on, I think you call it Super Hired. Yes. And so I was kind of curious because you mentioned that the processes you're going through there in identifying candidates is a better way of hiring people. So I'm kind of curious, tell us a little bit about that.

Josh Hill (22:59): Yeah, this is something I'm very passionate about. I mean, high level, I think everyone knows that recruiting and hiring right now is completely buggered in terms of how companies are, yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. Especially now with AI in the mix, it's just completely making it a shambles. So the philosophy at the base of this is really that bringing people into a company is all about matchmaking, really. I mean, I don't like the term bad hire in terms of, you know, a bad person, a poor fit. That puts a lot of emphasis on the human. Whereas I think the emphasis should be on the business, really understanding the work product that they're offering in all the dimensions, emotional, social, functional. And if you've heard of Clay Christensen's job to be done theory, that's really what we have at the essence of this matchmaking. It's we need to understand the jobs to be done when people look at work and what they're subscribing to. Why do I want to work at Xodiac, Increment One, Tier 11? Like, what am I getting from this company? When I subscribe to Netflix, I'm getting, for the amount of pay, I'm getting most, if not all, of the jobs to be done. I mean, I would rather there was more selection and this and that, but at the end of the day, I'm happy with the subscription, I'm paying for it, I'm gonna remain a subscriber. A lot of people with work are subscribed, and people that are content usually have some of their core drivers being facilitated, being met. And people that are not happy or disengaging have got core drivers that are not being met. So, with that method at the foundation, it's this understanding that if work is a product that a company is offering and people are subscribing to, then a company needs to understand the product it's selling. And you need to understand through the matchmaking process throughout hiring if the person is the right fit as a subscriber and even if they want to subscribe to your product. Because a lot of the times companies rush to a result without probably and diligently explaining what the work product is they're offering. And people are in a situation, due to the nature of the economy and, you know, depending on their own personal situation, they're in a rush and have pressure to subscribe to a product. So that's how a lot of mishires happen. It's like, hey, come join us. What do you do? It's all good. We need someone. You've done this before. This is your title, right? You've worked for these companies, it's kind of similar. Come in. That's high risk. You know, a better approach is what we're exploring and advocating and starting to test is we work with clients and do discovery for two weeks minimum with companies, which is the same level of due diligence that HR teams internally should be doing. We understand the work product from all the different dimensions. We understand and start to sell it and market it like a proper product. And then through the interviewing process, we put as much emphasis on explaining the product of the company as we do on gathering the expectations from the candidates on what work product they want to subscribe to. So we've got a couple of exercises that we do with candidates where we get them to essentially rank and order their jobs to be done from the job that they want to subscribe to. And then we say, ooh, there are some overlaps here, which is great, but there's a couple of things here that aren't, you know, you say you don't want to be in a really high, fast-paced environment that does this, that does that, but the work product is actually not offering that right now. It's offering this and that. How do you feel about that? Can we explore this? It just opens up a dialogue to discovery. So all the stuff we spoke about discovery in the business, this is discovery front of house, sales and marketing before you even get customers in.

Dave Sharrock (26:34): Can you share a little bit about the value created by that? Because I think different markets have different sort of eagerness to hire based on their need, the company's need in terms of how it's scaling or growing, but also in terms of people in the market and what they're prepared to come in and do. So, what's the benefit of investing the time that you're describing? Is it retention? What are the real kind of tangible numbers that change as they go through that process?

Josh Hill (27:09): I think it's hypothetically, because we haven't matured this enough to actually measure downstream that far yet. But hypothetically, it is all of the above with regards to retention, engagement, all of these overused terms, but really this concept that I talked about before about talent density, it's like putting someone in a company that not only mitigates potential cost of a bad hire, but is multiplicative in that it enhances the team's performance. Like if you add the right person to the right team, where all of their jobs to be done, their drivers of work are being met, or not all of them, because I think that's impossible, but close to, it lifts the team. It just takes it to another level. And the tide rises for all ships. And I've seen that happen in multiple teams that we've placed. I've had it happen to myself many times where I've seen someone join a team and it elevates everyone around them. It instills confidence in the business, in the leaders, in the decision makers, it instills confidence in the ability to achieve the vision. It really, especially for small businesses where the ratio of talent and the density of talent can be more easily influenced by adding one good person or one bad person. Yeah. So I think it's a key unlock. And the reason why I'm focused on hiring is because it's the entry point to a business. If you can consistently hire correctly and consistently make good decisions, bringing the right people in that are suited to the context, then over time you see a big difference. I think when you start adding two, three, four, five, you start mitigating and reducing those costs, but then increasing the ability for the team to perform. The work as a product methodology extends throughout the whole customer journey. So, I mean, I've got a lot of people that I've talked to that are focused further down the customer journey in the business. How do we look at performance and performance management and appraisals in this method, in this mindset? So, yeah, it's interesting because ultimately the best gold-plated solution is to have this capability all in-house and to have a complete integrated approach to this. But that's, we're not there yet. But I think the biggest lever is getting people in that are the right fit.

Peter Maddison (29:24): Generally, I've seen that especially in larger organizations, they go down one of two paths. They either take hiring and they basically offshore it. They have some other organization take care of this for them. Or they if they do bring it in-house, then they'll have a couple of people who maybe they're focused on particular areas of the business where they're looking for very particular types of people, or they're going to engage more heavily with business leaders, especially if they're looking for maybe the more senior people they'd want to hire into the organization and take a little bit more care.

Dave Sharrock (30:00): This idea of just understanding the experience and matching or jobs to be done, but the idea of matching the role that you're looking for and the expectation that the organization has on what needs to be done, but also there's a lot of support that needs to be in place, as you said earlier. The leadership has to understand that this is the value of the investment as you're going through it. I do feel if I build on top of that, there's one topic that you cannot avoid but talk about at some point when it comes to hiring, which is compensation, salaries or compensation. And there's so much talk in that space, not just about you know how broken the recruitment process or experience is, but also about this sort of tension between organizations and employees and the basically the money that gets paid, however you look at that. What are you seeing in that area? I mean, that just feels like you can't have this conversation without touching on that at some point.

Josh Hill (31:10): Yeah, that's interesting. I think I mean my perspective on this is if we go back to that multi-sided model, I mean, there is a contract between these stakeholders, right? Written, unwritten, there's a contract. There's value distribution that's shared. And I think when it comes to compensation, my approach is always based on research of what is best market rate and what is current market rate, because that is indexing against other opportunities and what other companies are willing to pay. And it's a good starting point, but there's also an argument for, well, that's a starting point. And it also depends on the context of the company and their numbers and you know what they can afford, what they can't afford. So it's quite complex, but I have a feeling that there is something that needs to be done radically in this space. And I don't know what that is, but I don't think companies are very good at inciting a level of skin in the game for the people that they want so committed to their cause. And I think a lot of leaders will spout a big game when it comes to we have this strong vision and you know, we want everyone to work hard and we want people to be committed, but then you know, you treat them like an input to a production process that is trying to achieve that goal. It's counterintuitive. Even if you pay people well, and remember, compensation is a driver of work. It's a job to be done that shows up in everyone's assessments that we've seen as quite high, because that's just the nature of why we work. It's an exchange of value. But it's quite obvious to see that there's distributions and it's dynamic. Some people are quite comfortable with earning far less if their other work drivers are getting hit. So if you're creating an environment where you can offer certain things, certain jobs to be done to people that mean more to them tangibly than being paid a certain amount, it's just all value. You know, if I can provide hard challenges for someone to solve consistently with good leadership and a respectful, safe environment to do work, then that is value that's being exchanged to the person and that resonates with them and the context that they're looking for. If you know you delivered that as a company and you're consistent in that delivery of that part of your product, that feature of your work product, then it puts you in a better position to market it and sell it and to have that alongside the compensation narrative. So if you just look at compensation in isolation, it's a tricky topic. But if you look at it in combination with all of these other value distributions, then it becomes more of a dynamic conversation with people that you're bringing into the business and in the business as well. But at the end of the day, we all need to get paid, right? I think I'm very interested in how can we weave this compensation discussion more with these other drivers? And how can we look beyond just salaries to getting people more invested in the business? You know, like profit sharing, equity distributions, like these types of incentives are really good because it allows people to feel like they've got ownership over the business. And I don't think enough companies do that.

Peter Maddison (34:17): I think it very much depends upon the individual, as you were saying there. So all of those other pieces are a part of it, but a lot of it will come down to does the person feel like they're being treated fairly, that that's a fair salary for them for the work that they're doing? Do they feel appreciated? Do they feel like they have autonomy? Do they feel like they're related to the organization? All of these things are key aspects of how they are engaging with the organization. So I think it becomes a little tricky, I agree with you, when you start to introduce the concepts of how much should I pay this person for it? Because a lot of that is on how much that person feels they should be paid for it, like how much do they feel they're worth. And that can be a tricky negotiation at times, as you figure out what is the right place to go.

Josh Hill (35:07): Agree. I've had many of those conversations where someone's like, I feel like I'm worth this much. It's like, all right, we need to unpack that, you know. And someone needs to be willing to have that conversation. And then the person on the other end needs to be willing to have that conversation as well. And a company needs to know what else they offer aside from compensation, and candidates need to understand that. And typically they do, I find, like if they're in the business already, you know, I've definitely found that yeah, there's an acknowledgement of particular parts of, like you said, if people are getting what they want in terms of autonomy and you know these other key components, then they value that to a point where it does influence the amount of rigor they apply and their intensity towards wanting to get paid more. But I feel like there's a baseline, right, where that level of thinking is projected from. And I feel like that's just, that's what the market sets. Like you have the market rates for particular positions, which if you start going below that, it becomes very hard to defend. And you just need to be much more across your work product and have that vision around what's the journey towards getting to a place where you can get paid fairly. Because fairly often is attached to what their peers are getting paid and what the market is paying them. So if you can meet market rate ideally like 10 to 20% above, that's standard operating procedure, I think, for a business that doesn't know its work product well and is just looking to have a sustainable workforce. You know, it's nuanced.

Peter Maddison (36:38): So on that note, I think we're probably getting to the point in the conversation where we normally like to wrap these things up with a point from each of our speakers. And we always go for three. So, and since there's three of us, well, let's go with guests first. So, Josh, what point would you like our listeners to take away from this conversation today?

Josh Hill (36:56): I think there's a lot to unpack and it can be quite overwhelming. I think the central theme here is discovery and it's not rushing to a result. So I think the takeaway here is next time you find yourself being pressured to build solutions, take the time, whether it's 10 minutes or two days, depending on the luxury that you have, to talk to people, identify the outcome of what the solution you are feeling pressured to build is trying to achieve, and just build out a problem space to first identify what are the levers you can pull, which may lead to different solutions. So I think that's just a good place to start thinking.

Dave Sharrock (37:36): Dave? I knew you were gonna throw it straight now. This has been a really interesting conversation, and I think for a couple of reasons. One is we started talking about the impact of AI on the workforce, and we've not discussed it at all. But what I really liked about this conversation is we're beginning to think about the people who work in an organization as being one of the things that are worth investing time and effort in and creating an environment for them to succeed, which has come through with that whole look at the people experience part. But also really seeing this as a matching exercise when so many conversations around recruitment and HR feel to me like a numbers exercise. Feel to me like it's just a job that has to be done, like you know, the dishes and laundry and things like this, rather than something that generates real value and that is worth investing time into. And just as we closed the conversation, your thoughts on compensation and where that comes in, but just I thought was really indicative of just that whole piece that we're looking at, which is there's real value here. How do we look at this in a way that everybody comes to the table and has a decent conversation about what we're really looking for, whether we're the employer or the employee. So I really thought that has left me worrying in my brain thinking about what that means for organizations and how that might look. Over to you, Peter.

Peter Maddison (39:13): Okay, so I think I would go with the whole piece around making HR less transactional in nature and being more open to the conversation, slowing it down, as you put it, Josh, to actually make sure that you are having the right conversations and that you are taking the time because they're such important decisions. And we run into a lot of problems where it feels like it's taking too long, but and then it becomes bad for the person who's trying to get into the organization. So this is double-sided if it's from an onboarding perspective. But once people are in the organization, we seem to almost forget about all of that. We can often spend almost too much attention at the onboarding part of it, and after that we sort of forget about well, has that person actually got the things they needed, like where are they now? And we put processes into place, but they don't always get that well followed, I found. So I think there's a lot of value in starting to rethink how we've traditionally gone about having those conversations and bringing that back into the actions that we take to try and help people succeed. Well, I'd like to thank both of you, as always. It's always an interesting conversation. And if anybody wants to reach out, they can at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com. And I look forward to next time.

Josh Hill (40:30): Thanks guys. Yeah, it's great. Thank you.

Peter Maddison (40:33): You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and David Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.