Tech layoffs, Okta's Businesses at Work Report, and The Ops Hotline | State of Change Enablement

Ken Babcock (00:01.198)

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Change Enablers podcast. We're here to do our second state of change enablement and what's ironic about this is actually if you're watching this on YouTube, a lot has changed. I have a new background, I have a beard, I have new glasses. I know Rocco's a big Taylor Swift fan, so I'm in my ever more era, wintery, woodsy.

Rocco Seyboth (00:25.055)

Yes.

Ken Babcock (00:28.242)

no guarantees of what it's gonna look like at the next data change enablement. But I'm pumped to have Rocko back. We had a lot of fun the first time we did this. We're gonna have a lot of fun today.

Rocco Seyboth (00:39.035)

I must be in my speak now and fearless eras because what I heard was that every time I started talking in the last pod, it was like a hot take, excited rant. And I probably have a few more of those today.

Ken Babcock (00:54.122)

Yeah, that might be the era, that might be like your forever era, Rocco, but we'll see. So as is tradition, right? Two data points make a tradition. As is tradition, we're gonna start with some top news stories for change enablers. We're gonna give the lowdown, we're gonna debate them a little bit, we're gonna rate them on the mango meter of how relevant they are, and we have got some good ones today. I'm gonna jump in with our first one.

Rocco Seyboth (00:58.781)

That's right.

Ken Babcock (01:23.914)

Now, this is a top story. This has been a top story for a while. Tech layoffs. It seems like they're happening constantly. There's been a lot of interesting data points that have come up in the last quarter. I mean, we're recording this in March of 2024. We have data that around 200,000 tech employees were laid off in 2023. There's more than double of what it was in 2022.

And you're also starting to see companies actually embrace sort of this practice of right sizing or laying off kind of a regular basis. Instacart, which is now a public company, laid off about 250 people as a part of a restructuring right before they crushed earnings. And so we're starting to see some of this behavior with tech layoffs that's really interesting where we're almost treating it as a part of like a life cycle of a company.

You grow, you get bloated, all of a sudden you have to make your company a little bit thinner, realize what is critical, what's necessary, and then you set a course to maybe rehire. In fact, Salesforce, which, which under took a lot of layoffs last year, committed to hiring 3,300 people in 2024. And so that obviously has a lot of people up in arms. Oh, you laid people off. Oh, you laid me off. Now you're going to hire more. You're going to backfill some of those roles.

But I think what it is you're seeing this ebb and flow of companies where they're right sizing, they're understanding what's critical, they're being a little bit more methodical. And I think this is super relevant for change enablers. You have to think about that life cycle and what that means for what you're trying to enact in your company. I know Rocko's got a lot of thoughts on this.

Rocco Seyboth (03:15.483)

So I hope we're not normalizing this, this behavior that there we, um, we ran companies for, I don't know, hundreds of years without, um, normalizing, uh, layoffs as part of just our, um,

profitability and growth cycle. So I, that's the first thing I have to say. I think there's, people make mistakes, even CEOs and, and company founders make mistakes. So that happens, but I hope that's not becoming a part of the playbook. And I personally wouldn't be excited to work for a company that, that intentionally made that part of the playbook because of the

consequences it has on human beings.

Ken Babcock (04:09.086)

Yeah, I mean, it's almost the net. That was the Netflix playbook for a long time, right? Where it's like, take 10% of your workforce. I mean, that, you're absolutely right, and I appreciate you calling that out, because it just creates a state of sort of unrest. But if we're accepting that this is kind of some of the reality that we're dealing with now, like what does that?

Rocco Seyboth (04:27.051)

Yeah. Well, well, so first of all, yeah. So if I think about it from a change enabler standpoint, you don't have the luxury of getting to judge the weather, whether it's good or bad, you're just there and you, and you have to deal with it. And there still are plenty of times where

Layoffs are unexpected. They're not planned. And in fact, if you're not in the boardroom, layoffs are unexpected to 99% of people in the companies anyway. So if I think about how this top news relates to change enablers, I think I need to give it for Mangoes. Because whether or not your company is doing this on purpose or not, it's happening. It's out there and we're all dealing with it.

change enablers is just all of the intellectual property that you lose in the heads of those employees. If you believe all the stats that, you know, I've seen plenty of studies that say things like between 50 and 80% of the knowledge about how companies run is not written down.

there is no standard operating procedure that is documented. So that, and if you believe that knowledge about how to work at your company is part of your intellectual property, right? So your company is made up of your people and your product and your process, right? So that process is a huge part of your intellectual property. Then just so much of that goes out the door unexpectedly.

And as a change enabler, your job normally is to keep the ship running. You then also have to try to...

Rocco Seyboth (06:20.823)

train all the new people that might come later to backfill those people that left. And so that's the first thing that comes in mind for change enablers is, are you prepared, whether you know the layoffs are coming or not, are you prepared to protect that intellectual property? I love the saying, stay ready, ain't got to get ready. Your plan can be...

Ken Babcock (06:43.79)

Hehehe

Rocco Seyboth (06:48.591)

a plan to rush when the layoffs are announced and figure out how to incentivize all those employees to write down everything they know right before they leave or maybe you have a little bit more of a scalable plan where you're constantly somehow capturing the knowledge out of those people's heads.

Ken Babcock (07:08.486)

I like that saying. It sort of relates to actually why I'm gonna give this 4.6 mangoes. So, yeah, that's a lot.

Rocco Seyboth (07:14.787)

Whoa. I didn't know we could do like tenths, Kevin.

Ken Babcock (07:19.818)

Oh, I'm gonna, I will take it to an extra sig fig every time. So next time if you come in at 10, I'm going to Honduras. But I think there's some of that which is, I think we've called it in the past, hit by the bus documentation where it's like, if all this knowledge goes out the door, how do you make sure it's still there for your company?

Rocco Seyboth (07:39.197)

Shout out to Nick, who coined Hippie the Bus documentation. We see you, Nick.

Ken Babcock (07:41.856)

Yep.

Yes, it's like part of our internal vocabulary now. Um, but the, but the other thing that I think change enablers can play a role in and why this is relevant, I was listening to, um, another podcast. That's what us podcasters do. We just listened to each other's podcasts, but I was listening to, um, Lenny's newsletter podcast, which was great. He had Marty Kagan on. He was a legendary product leader. Um,

He was talking a lot about these layoffs and he was basically saying, Oh, you know, the product function got really bloated. Uh, we were hiring all these sort of ancillary, uh, functions to, to compliment product management. I can't believe they hired all these ridiculous roles. Like that's why there's layoffs. And you know, it's a little bit sensational, but he goes further in the episode to talk about the fact that what ended up happening with all these new functions. Is that they tended to demonstrate. Uh,

output behavior and not outcomes behavior. And what that meant was, you know, the success criteria for those new functions was, I did all these things. Check, check, check. I did all these things instead of focusing on direct results. And so, you know, my extra six tenths of a mango is going to those change enablers who are not only thinking about, how do I get ahead of this thing in the future?

but who are also checking the day-to-day and saying, are we embodying outcomes-based behavior? Are we talking about real results for our business and for our customers? Or are we just checking the box on a bunch of things that we did? And so I think that's a way to make sure that you're continuing to deliver value as a business, such that conversation never comes up where it's like, well, could we right size? Could we do layoffs? Like continue to drive value within your company.

Rocco Seyboth (09:36.619)

By the way, that's the last level for an Elite Change Enabler. There's a lot of times that your job as a Change Enabler is to help people, whether it's get up and running in their job, adopt new software, deal with change.

And we measure, unfortunately, I meet too many change enablers who measure the success of that by anecdotes.

and they have a tough time tying those anecdotes back to actual business outcomes. So it's very activity-based and very not measurable and not based on outcomes that we drive for the business. So that when you've reached the peak of your powers as a change enabler, you not only figure out how to help guide people through those change, but you can connect the dots more clearly with the actual outcome that you enable

happen.

Ken Babcock (10:43.402)

100%. I love that. That's the highest part of the hierarchy of Maslow's needs for change enablers. All right. Second story we have here. We're going to put that one to rest. Racker gave it four. I gave it 4.6. We'll call it a blended 4.3. But we've got another story. More metrics, more numbers we're going to talk about. These are a little real. A little bit more real than the mango meter.

Rocco Seyboth (10:53.835)

or change anyone's.

Ken Babcock (11:13.27)

But there is a report that we love that comes out every year. We have probably cited this report since the beginning of time at Tango. Um, but it's the Okta Businesses at Work report and it's an in-depth look at how many applications are companies using at various sizes, what are those applications that are growing quickly? Uh,

What are the expectations? What are the niche problems that businesses are trying to solve with these applications? It's fascinating. This year, as has been the trend over the last couple years, large businesses, companies with 2,000 or more employees, continue to deploy the most apps. They grew 10% year over year. Last year, they were at 211 apps to run their business.

This year they're at 231. And that level of change was relatively consistent across company sizes, but that 231 apps number is just absolutely mind boggling. It's insane, I don't even know. I mean, I think I could probably name 231, but it would take me a while. Startups grew 15% year on year. Sort of mid-size SMB businesses were a little bit smaller, but...

Rocco Seyboth (12:16.087)

completely insane.

Ken Babcock (12:32.638)

still using 72 apps to run their business. And so there's a lot here to deconstruct.

Rocco Seyboth (12:39.039)

Yeah, and even as unbelievable as that sounds, our company has less than 100 employees and we have 60 or 80 apps. So like it's easy for me to believe that if you have 2000 employees that you can have a couple hundred.

Ken Babcock (12:53.45)

Yeah, so I mean, Rocco, what do you, before I give my mango meter, because there's actually a second part to this story too, but before I give my mango meter, you're not surprised, you believe it, but what do you think is driving some of that change every single year?

Rocco Seyboth (13:08.395)

Yeah, zero mangoes on my level of surprise. I give this five mangoes for change enablers, and I'll tell you why. And I have some guesses of why this is happening, right? So we are being offered

more and more promises by software vendors that can increase our productivity. And there are some of these tools make magical promises. And now AI is coming into the mix. So now we have

just an unprecedented amount of new software being built faster that can do amazing things that 15 years ago would have been completely unthinkable. And we...

We need to compete. We need to go faster. So these tools have a really compelling value proposition. Unfortunately, what happens is, and unless you're one of the change enablers within the organization, you might not have an eye on this, but we... F...

We actually, Forrester put out this really interesting research report at the end of last year that showed specifically for sales teams, but I think this applies to everybody. You actually get a pretty significant dip in productivity every time you roll out a new tool. So that productivity tool is supposed to streamline operations and make you go faster and...

Rocco Seyboth (15:01.995)

help you build faster, sell faster, make companies, make customers happier. They actually, you take a hit on productivity and sometimes you never recover, right? Sometimes you do, but sometimes you don't. And why is that? Because we massively underestimate as organizations, right? Maybe not you listening.

But stakeholders that sign off on these softwares massively underestimate the amount of change management and end user training that needs to happen in order to get adoption. And so we get excited about the promise and the value of these potential softwares. And but we probably roll them out.

roll them out too fast. And what I know Okta has not historically done, but what I would like to see is how many of the softwares that were growing really fast a few years ago are still being actively used within the organization. How many of them are being renewed but not

heavily used anymore. Unfortunately, I think a big percentage of those 230 apps, if you're at one of those 2,000 person companies, is shelf wear, or at a minimum, you're not getting anywhere near the value you thought you would get or that you were promised.

when you went through your ROI. And that's all because no matter how good the software is and how good the promise is, end users are scared of, your employees are scared of change. And that has everything to do with whether or not, they can get any value out of all these tools you're implementing

Ken Babcock (16:50.79)

Yeah, I think that's a... It actually reminds me of a tweet. It's an amazing tweet at this point. It's a couple years old. But I'll just read it out loud. Working at any office is like, now in quotes, Okay, we're transitioning to salaria, but payroll is still in bullfrog. Did you see my noodle base post yet? Submit your timecard on fireplace and then whiz me on smack dog.

Do not upload to crackers without Yammer approval. Like that is the modern enterprise. And just saying that, I know those are all fake pieces of software, but saying that out loud, that's really daunting for a new hire, or just if you're bringing somebody new into the mix with tools that you're rolling out, I'm not surprised by that productivity dip.

Rocco Seyboth (17:46.079)

It's daunting for me. So what do you do if you're a change enabler? First thing is, as the IT operations, L and D, digital transformation, training enablement person, I hope you're getting brought in at some point before the purchase is finalized.

And usually you're there to like make it work. What you should be first and foremost, especially if you have any influence, you should be the software purchasing rejection department. You should be the voice in the room that's saying, let's think this all the way through.

How many other softwares have we asked these people to learn? How many do they already have to use on a daily basis? How well are we taking advantage of the ones we already have? And no matter how great the promise is, how likely is it that we're gonna get that full promise based on getting our end users to really adopt it successfully? That's probably the best favor you can do for your organization.

is point out all the reasons why you don't need it or should wait. And, I mean, when you look, I mean, Ken, when you look at some of the tools that are the fastest growing, well, one password is on there. We're going to talk about one password later. I have a little bone to pick with one password. A lot of people here at Tango love it.

I have a bone to pick that's gonna come up I think later in the pod but if you look at like HubSpot one of the fastest growing, Figma one of the fastest growing, GitHub, Monday these are among the ten fastest growing apps according to this

Rocco Seyboth (19:54.875)

easy to use because so much thought has been put into the user experience. And yet they are workflow tools, which means they are endlessly customizable and they, the workflows in there are, are as good as how you adapt HubSpot, GitHub, Monday to fit your business processes. And so no matter how nice the UI is. Workflow tools are.

extremely, when they're extremely customizable like HubSpot and these other ones are, they can be extremely complicated to use because, not because of the tools, because your business processes that you put in there are extremely, are extremely complicated. And so that is again, something that, you know, we don't

we don't think about enough ahead of time when we roll some of these tools out.

Ken Babcock (20:55.87)

Yeah, the word of caution there is almost like, similar to your advice earlier, but it's be wary of the sleek user interfaces. Those are gonna help to a point, but if it's a workflow-based tool and a lot of the value gets unlocked via personalization and customization, you better have a plan in place. Because otherwise that can get really unwieldy really quickly.

Rocco Seyboth (21:21.491)

Yeah, like one example that comes to mind is one of Monday's competitors in the project management space is Jira. And Jira is, historically has had, sometimes people go on the internet and complain about Jira. And the question I always asked was, was it?

at Lazian and Jira's fault or was it the way you set up Jira to be incredibly complicated? And that applies to all of these workflow tools, many of which appear in Okta's report.

Ken Babcock (22:00.554)

You know, I actually call this the, this is the Chipotle dilemma. You go to Chipotle or Subway, you construct this concoction based on all the options that you have available. And if it tastes like crap, you actually blame yourself, or at least I do. I shouldn't have gone with that combo.

Rocco Seyboth (22:05.324)

Huh.

Rocco Seyboth (22:16.811)

Yeah, if the guy at the end can't roll your burrito into the foil, is that his fault, or did you ask for extra veggies too many times?

Ken Babcock (22:22.593)

on you.

Ken Babcock (22:28.734)

Yeah, or did you go with the half chicken, half steak, thinking that you were outsmarting them, but now you've got a broken burrito. So I think that's the perfect analogy. I think this story is absolutely five mangoes. And I almost couple it with another stat, and I'm gonna try to make the tie here, but another stat that I saw from Saster. So Saster, many people know Saster through the conference, maybe through Jason Lemkin.

Rocco Seyboth (22:33.259)

You were outsmarting them. Yeah.

Rocco Seyboth (22:44.503)

Mm.

Ken Babcock (22:58.19)

great content marketing over at Saster. They have a ton of followers. They're able to pull their followers and pull some interesting data into the fold. And at the beginning of the year, which is only a couple months behind us, they basically asked, do you feel more burnt out at work than last year? And 66% of folks said, either yes, I am more burnt out, or I'm about the same. So that means that only 34% of people are

you know, got that sort of rest recharge heading into 2024. I think that makes this app overload piece and this end user adoption piece even more critical because you as a change enabler need to be thinking about who your end user is. If you're saying, oh, I'm gonna get one of these amazing sleek UI tools with a ton of customization, deploy it out to my organization.

Rocco Seyboth (23:41.472)

Interesting.

Ken Babcock (23:54.602)

If you want to accept another reality, which is that two thirds of your team is probably burnt out, they don't have a ton of tolerance for training and enablement. You have to do something that we talk about a lot, Rocco, is give people minimum viable context so that they can move forward. This burnt out piece, that only emphasizes that this is a five mango story if you put those together.

Rocco Seyboth (24:19.139)

That's interesting, yeah, the saster.

survey almost feels like not obvious news to me because I don't know that I would as a change enabler I would immediately make the connection from burnt out employees to myself but I think you're I think you're spot on there's a lot of the things that can frustrate us on a day-to-day basis are related to change that we don't want or don't understand systems not working for us work being you know complex there's plenty of other reasons why you could be burnt out as

ship. But that's an interesting connection that I think is right on.

Ken Babcock (24:57.046)

Yeah, so all that's to say, keep that in mind. This is a 5.0 mango story, highly relevant for change enablers. If you're listening to this podcast, maybe you're not in that burnt out cohort, but you have to be mindful of the folks that are, that are sort of the end users of what you're doing. I think that's a good transition, Rocco, to go into not so obvious news. So we did our top stories. I think...

during this state of change enablement. We'll do kind of quick, not obvious news. We've got a great follow. We've also got a great quote of the day. So our follow is actually Jeff Ignacio. So Jeff is the head of go-to-market operations at Regrow AG, founder of RevOps Impact. People listening might already know of Jeff. He puts a lot of great content out there. He helps people think about, you know,

how to maximize some of their systems and processes. In fact, just yesterday he had a post talking about something Rocco and I talked about, which is pipeline integrity, pipeline data integrity, and how you drive that within your teams. Everyone's obsessed with this, Rocco. I think they listened to your episode and were like, oh man, I gotta think about this too.

Rocco Seyboth (26:13.416)

I don't. Yeah, I have news for you. You missed the last time you're trying to automate everything away to fix your pipeline integrity. Stop that. Stop that. That's not the way to solve it. Eventually human beings need to type things into your CRM. And that is where all the reports come from. If you don't fix those human beings pipeline integrity.

Not, I'm doing a, this is a big thumbs down for those of you listening, not watching. So hopefully Jeff has some advice. Hopefully Jeff has some advice for how to solve the humans.

Ken Babcock (26:39.658)

Yeah, Jeff agrees with you.

Ken Babcock (26:45.91)

Yeah, solve the humans. Maybe that should be the new name of this podcast, solve the humans. But yeah, Jeff's great, give Jeff a follow. We'll link him in the show notes. We'll shout him out on social media. Definitely worth your time. And then another quick one we'll do, quote of the day, this is a little bit of a shameless plug for an episode that's going live in a couple weeks. My friend, founder of Pod, Patrick Monnet.

basically said, we're living in a tab apocalypse. The tab apocalypse. Yeah. I'll leave that as a teaser. It relates back to a lot of what we were talking about with the Okta Report. More tools than ever, more systems than ever, more things to keep track of. People are burned out. People want simple, straightforward ways to conduct their jobs so that they can.

Rocco Seyboth (27:17.059)

to apocalypse feels like that.

Ken Babcock (27:38.262)

they can actually leverage their unique skills and not be stuck in the tabpocalypse. So listen to Patrick, who's gonna join us in a couple weeks. That's gonna go live.

Rocco Seyboth (27:50.403)

Speaking of Tabpocalypse, our producer, Danielle, told me to close all of my tabs before we started this. I still have 11 tabs open, and that's after I closed a bunch. But there's some that if I close, I don't know how to get them back in. So I still have 11 tabs open.

Ken Babcock (28:06.358)

Okay, well maybe 11, maybe that's your minimum viable tempocalypse.

Rocco Seyboth (28:11.107)

Your tapocalypse is strong over here. For me.

Ken Babcock (28:15.21)

I feel you. I mean, I was just going through my dock on my Mac and like, okay, I got to, how many things do I have to close? I was just force quitting, force quitting, force quitting. These poor tools and systems. No one ever talks about the tools and systems that are subject to our abuse and misuse. Maybe that's the next segment is empathy for the tool itself. But actually our next segment is something that...

Rocco, I know you've been excited to kickstart. We didn't do this the last time around, but I think this is gonna become the most popular segment. It's called the Ops Hotline. It's almost like an advice column from Ken and Rocco. People writing in, people asking questions. We're gonna give our response live in real time. So we've got two questions that Rocco's gonna tee up. And we're gonna...

We're going to talk through our response and why don't you take it away.

Rocco Seyboth (29:13.067)

Yeah, first of all, producer Danielle told us that thousands of people listened to this pod. I didn't believe her. So the fact that a couple people actually wrote in to ask us questions, I was pretty happy about that. We actually had a few questions to choose from, believe it or not. And that we chose this first one based on the timing being great based on the timing

a conversation that I recently had. So the first one is from Lucius, who's in HR operations at like a 550-ish person insurance company. And I'll read what Lucius said. I'm supposed to be launching Workday sometime in May and worried because our last few big internal software rollouts were a, he says, I'll say a poop show. That's not what Lucius wrote.

We'll say last few internal software world's were a poop show any suggestions Um, I feel you. I feel you lucious. Okay, so um Because lucious is rolling out work day if you're not familiar with work day, it's a um, Um a really popular it's actually uh

Previously was one of the fastest growing apps on a previous Okta report It's one of the top few apps that Tango customers the Tango customers use to it's one of the top apps that customers use with Tango to create training and it's a it's a operating system for everything that happens in HR for employees and

So it's I just had I chose this question because I just had this conversation like less than two weeks ago with a gentleman named Ken at Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium. Yeah, seriously. Another Ken.

Ken Babcock (31:17.454)

Another Ken? There's more than one?

Rocco Seyboth (31:21.587)

So this Ken, by the way, even though the acronym letters don't work out perfectly, they call themselves Search. It looks like Cirque, but they say Search. So Ken from Search also just rolled out Workday to about 1,500 employees at Search. And they're a series of...

doctor's offices and clinics in southeast Alaska. So healthcare organization, highly regulated. I learned a lot from Ken that I think will help Lucius. So I wanna share some of the top things that I learned from Ken. Lucius, hopefully they will be insightful for you as well. So.

Rocco Seyboth (32:22.135)

So I learned a lot from Ken and hopefully these learnings I'm gonna share will be insightful for you as well, Lucius. So first thing that Ken talked about when we met, by the way, let me tell you about Ken. So he works for the CIO in the IT organization. He's the director of ERP. So,

Enterprise Workday is an enterprise resource planning software, and it's such a big software for the organization that they created a small team for within the IT organization that Ken leads to make sure it's successful, not only getting rolled out, but on an ongoing basis. So the first thing Ken said,

and I think this is really interesting because he's part of the IT organization. He said that sometimes in a new software rollout, especially if you're a technology, IT-minded person leading the rollout, you can over-index too much on the technical aspects of the rollout, the data migration from the old system to the new system, and...

under focus on the end user experience and the change management and employee aspects of it, sort of like we talked about earlier. And so that was kind of his first caution was, yeah, data migration can be difficult, but ultimately probably all the ways you'll measure success.

at the end are determined based on the feedback you get from employees, the feedback those employees give their leaders and stakeholders. And so really the end user change management is the most important thing. One interesting observation he had on that, Ken had a lot of ideas to make the transition for end users easier.

Rocco Seyboth (34:18.868)

One thing that they noticed was that when they sat and looked at all the different things that their employees would need to do on work day, they challenged themselves to break every work day process down to the...

Minimum viable process meaning the smallest chunk imaginable An example of that is he told me we didn't make one standard operating procedure and how-to guide for Submitting an expense report when they actually looked at all the individual things you might need to do in doing that They ended up with 12 different SOPs and therefore 10 different guides for things you would do while submitting an expense report

The rationale behind that minimum viable process is that people...

don't want to fill their head with a bunch of process knowledge that they may not need. Right? And so he believes that for the best end user experience, you need to break the processes down as small as you possibly can. And then therefore, the training that you end up making associated with those processes is also very specific. So when you're going to learn how to do something, you get just the exact amount of knowledge that you need at that moment.

pretty interesting. They ended up, how many processes do you think, individual processes again do you think they had for their workday instance? It was a 1500 employee company.

Ken Babcock (35:55.194)

Work that covers so much surface area.

Ken Babcock (36:02.667)

Well, let's say 100, right? Can't be more than 100, is it 100?

Rocco Seyboth (36:04.499)

Yeah, that's what I initially thought dozens and I was surprised, I guess, impressed to find out that they identified over 400, almost 500 individual processes that needed to be documented that people might need to do. So that's a lot. I can guarantee you Lucius. Yeah.

Ken Babcock (36:28.15)

That's crazy.

Rocco Seyboth (36:30.451)

Lucius, I can guarantee you when you're thinking through all the processes, you are probably underestimating the number of processes you have. It's not just true for Workday, it's true for any workflow tool, any CRM, any software. And that meant Ken and the couple of people on his team had to document all of those processes. So that goes to another learning he shared, which is they actually started creating standard

six months before the launch. In fact, of course, they used Tango for that. So if you're not familiar with Tango, customers use it to do a bunch of things including capture processes that can then be shared out as training a number of different ways. And they started capturing Tangos for their workday processes six months in advance. Now the...

The next thing you might say, Lucius, is like, well, that's not gonna happen, right? It's, you know, a lot of times when you're a changing name rolling out software, you have, you have just you, right? And you have no, you may not, in fact, I think Lucius mentioned that

He's trying to roll out work to you sometime in May. So if you haven't already started documenting all of these processes and figuring out how you're gonna train your end users, you might already be a little bit behind schedule. Here was.

Ken Babcock (38:02.434)

Well, the good thing, I mean the good thing, Rocco, is Workday tells you all this, right? They say, oh, get ahead of it. They say, oh, you're gonna have 400 processes, right?

Rocco Seyboth (38:13.196)

I don't think Workday tells you this, but here's Ken's trick. So Ken enlisted 50 subject matter experts that were not part of his team, that actually were not really directly responsible for helping to make the Workday rollout successful, and he enlisted them to help

Ken Babcock (38:16.418)

Bummer.

Rocco Seyboth (38:40.871)

shared knowledge about processes that were happening in the previous ERP and figure out how those would translate to Workday. Now, Tango Pro Tip. One cool thing about Tango that Ken talked about was that in Tango we have this, instead of making documenting SOPs the old way where you have to go through, get the screenshot, write a description, like assemble it all, we have this thing called Click to Create where you just click through the process

would in real life so you can make a how-to guide in like one minute instead of a couple hours. He found that by using click to create

Other people who would not previously be willing to give their time to go through the tedious process of creating documentation were actually willing to contribute their knowledge because it was so much easier for them. So that was a big part of his trick to get this done in time was his team would have never been able to document those 400 processes are on their own, but with Tango, he was able to get 50 additional people to contribute, which is one of the only ways he was able to, to make that work. Um, so that I thought was, was pretty.

interesting. The other thing Ken felt pretty strongly about the way they wanted to train their 1,400 employees on workday. So one of the things that Ken felt strongly about was not doing tons of on-site classroom training

you know, PowerPoint training over teams, not sending out a lot of videos. He didn't think that those traditional training methods were gonna work because people don't wanna read wordy documentation, they don't wanna watch long videos, they don't wanna sit through training sessions about processes that they may never use or that they may not get to use for days or weeks later. So Ken's idea instead was just take all the knowledge that you might need

Rocco Seyboth (40:47.957)

stick it right inside Workday. The way he describes it is, our employees just learn Workday processes while they're doing, while they're using Workday. And again, Tango was able to help him with that actually, where we have this feature called guidance, where guidance just shows up inside Workday. So if you need to submit an expense report and you're not sure how to do it.

If one of those experts had previously created a Tango about how to submit an expense report, it just pops up in front of you and starts showing you what to do right on your screen. And so that led to some pretty incredible successes that Ken shared. So this rollout we're talking about just happened a couple weeks ago. They... Um...

reported a huge success and he defined that a couple different ways. First of all, he said everyone is using Workday.

and he can see that they're using it successfully because in Tango he gets these process adoption analytics that shows when people start a report, start a process if they finish, if they get stuck on a certain step. And so most of the end users are successful. He's hearing great anecdotes back from those employees saying how easy it is to use Tango to adopt Workday. The other way he measured success that I thought was pretty fascinating was

by the number of tickets they expected with people asking for help or needing training compared to what they got. So he said that they only got 20 to 30 tickets a day in the first week, which is 90% less than what he was expecting. So, and he attributed to that the fact that people were able to self-service because all the content they needed was there. It was right in workday where they needed it. And I thought that was,

Rocco Seyboth (42:46.362)

pretty fascinating way to measure the success.

Ken Babcock (42:51.07)

Yeah, that's great. I mean, Lucius, there you go. Find Ken, talk to him.

Rocco Seyboth (42:54.527)

Yeah. So don't underestimate the number of processes that you need. Enlist people from your organization to help you. Maybe you can use Tango to make it easier for them if they normally wouldn't make documentation. Consider whether or not your employees really need to memorize.

400 workday processes and if they're willing to pay attention in the training sessions or watch the videos or if maybe you can just Stick the knowledge in workday for them think about the impact that's going to have on your on your help desk and

And then think about how you're gonna show the impact. Remember earlier in the pod we talked about, when you get to that final level where you're at the peak of your powers, then your workday rollout, there's a few ways that you might be able to communicate to your boss and your stakeholders, whether the rollout's working or not. The worst way, which is the way that a lot of us do is just anecdotes. We set up a Slack or a Teams channel and we say, hey.

I'm not getting any questions or complaints, so I think everything is going fine. Or maybe we say, hey, the Google Doc I sent out telling people how to do things in Workday, it got a lot of hits. So that must mean people are doing things. A little better way of doing it is like, hey, I can see people are logging into Workday. The problem with that is that doesn't mean they're following your processes you laid out in the ideal way. So what's the best way to show you?

impact and to show that Workday is working and that your training is working is if you can say hey people are actually completing the processes with the exact steps that we laid out. So there you go, there you go Lucius, good luck with your project.

Ken Babcock (44:36.46)

Yep.

Ken Babcock (44:40.926)

Hey, Rocco, I've got another question, if I can. Pull it out of the bag here. It comes from Sheila. I think you saw this one. Sheila, okay, Sheila, okay. So, we have a question from Sheila. Sheila's a sales director, 275 person software company. She asked us, I've got 10 new sales reps starting over the next few weeks. I'm under pressure to get them closing as fast as possible. Insert any sales director here.

Rocco Seyboth (44:46.231)

Yeah.

Oh, Shayla.

Ken Babcock (45:11.682)

I read your Stop Training Sales Reps on Software blog. Great blog, by the way. And it sounds nice in theory, but I'm skeptical it's going to work on my team. Do you have any examples of where that worked?

Rocco Seyboth (45:27.035)

Yes, I love this. Shayla, thanks for calling me out and challenging me. So, I was a director of sales a long time ago in a past life, so I know, I feel you, Shayla. This is a major problem. First of all, things are probably going, sounds like things are going well for your company if you've hired a bunch of sales reps. So that's great. For those that missed the,

stop training your sales team on software blog. Here's what it says. You need to get those reps selling as fast as possible. In fact, just the difference of getting your average rep to close their first deal in their second month compared to the third month could be the difference between

those reps getting fired or staying on to your company and flourishing could be the difference of you hitting your plan for the year. It makes a massive difference in profitability. What a lot of people may not know is reps get paid their full commission in their first few months at your company whether they're selling anything or not. So if it takes you a long time to get reps up and running, you're paying them out a lot of money for no results.

Rocco Seyboth (46:53.194)

it makes a huge difference and what the what the blog says is there's so much you need to teach them about

your product, your customers, your story, your features, how to demo. There's also so much you may need to teach them about how to sell, right? How to handle objections, how to create urgency, how to close. So much there that is really core to their ability to do a great job for you. Unfortunately, what you actually end up spending

a ton of your time on in the beginning is teaching them how to add a lead in Salesforce, how to convert a lead in Salesforce to an opportunity, how to fill out all the fields correctly so when you try to convert the opportunity to the next phase, you don't get an error message, how to fill out all the fields so that those pipeline and forecasting reports that your boss pulls every month actually have accurate data that you can make decisions on

a sequence and outreach so you can email your prospect with a nurture sequence after you have your first conversation. Really those software processes are the gateway to all that real work and that real knowledge that your rep needs to build up to become a really successful rep and it dominates the initial time that you spend with them.

in those first couple months. And so we say don't train your reps on software at all. In fact, don't ask your reps to memorize any of those procedures. Do a Kennet search tip. His story is not specific to sales reps, so do a Kennet search tip. Take all the knowledge in your HubSpot CRM or Salesforce or whatever you're using, embed it. Let your reps learn how to use the CRM while they're using the CRM. And...

Rocco Seyboth (48:51.207)

That way you can spend all your time teaching them how to sell. That is a pretty crazy idea, Shayla, so I get that. I'll share a story from a customer that I met recently. Tom, at a company called SCW, is...

both a sales manager at his company and he's also responsible for sales enablement for the entire team. So he manages some of the reps but also is responsible for enablement for all of their reps. And he really bought into the idea that we don't train our sales reps on software. So he shared a story with me at about five new sales reps starting a few weeks ago.

He took the time to use Tango to document all of their HubSpot CRM processes. He built them right into HubSpot using the Tango guidance feature. And he said it's changed everything about the first couple of weeks for these, for these sales reps. So, um, first of all, he talked about the emotional difference that, that it has. Reps, your reps would rather.

talk about selling and customers and product features and not software, right? He also said that emotionally it's different for him. When you sit there and try to walk a sales rep through how to create a lead in HubSpot and they don't have a lead that they actually need to create at that moment in HubSpot, the way he described it is he got a lot of blank stares. So now what he does instead is he lets the reps.

with Tango guidance just go through creating leads and hubspot on their own time. And he uses a phrase that stuck with me called haptic feedback. So he gets haptic feedback in two ways. Number one, Tango just lets him know when the new reps successfully go through the process. So he gets that type of feedback. He also mentioned that...

Rocco Seyboth (50:56.227)

If he doesn't need to sit and watch a rep go through it They're going through it in real life versus in a document or a training video. So they're learning by doing now Tom

said that some of his reps were successfully completing their core HubSpot processes on their first day, first day working there, which is incredible. When I was a sales director, that never happened. No one was using Salesforce on the first day. And he wasn't sure yet, but he was pretty sure. He told me to check back with him, so I need to check back with him. But what he said was he believed this increase in confidence.

of the reps knowing how to do things and the increased time they were spending on selling versus software would translate to those reps closing deals faster. And that seems like that is what would happen, right? And so Shayla, I know it's kind of like an extreme.

different view to take on training your sales reps, but give it a try and hopefully Maybe we can have Tom on one of the podcast episodes soon You can talk about what he's seen after his reps were able to spend a few weeks at their at their company

Ken Babcock (52:15.922)

Yeah, it's an awesome story. You know, I watched some videos of you and Tom kind of talking about this, Rocco. It's just, it's such a powerful mindset shift to think about meeting people in their moment of need. I think we see this time and time again with a lot of our customers, the ones who are fully ready to embrace Tango and alleviate this burden of training off of themselves, but also off of their teams. And so...

I love a lot of what Tom shared. I think with that, we're gonna go to our next segment, On Second Thought. So On Second Thought is a fun one where we get to revisit past episodes. Maybe some things we wish we would've chimed in on, some responses that in the moment maybe we didn't love, or some things that just got us thinking a little bit more. And so I had my friend, Jamie Meyerson, on talking a little bit about

the experience that she had with Maven Clinic, growing like crazy during the onset of the pandemic. How do you sort of address those moments where things are breaking down, you need to get people up to speed. And I'll just let the clip do the talking for now and we'll come back to it. Let's do a quick pause.

Ken Babcock (53:42.37)

So, you know, reflecting again on Jamie's answer, you know, she sort of gravitated towards an LMS as the way to solve kind of their newly pronounced training need. And what I missed an opportunity to do was share a little bit of Tango's point of view on where an LMS should be applied and where it shouldn't be applied. And so in this specific situation,

Jamie and Maven had been onboarding tons and tons and tons of providers to help meet this sort of virtual care need that had come about as a result of the pandemic. They relied on an LMS. And so when I say LMS, learning management system, I mean things like Lessonly, things like Adobe Captivate. They were using that to get everybody up to speed on their policies, on how to conduct sort of virtual care meetings. I don't think it's

great for that. I mean, what an LMS can be good for is maybe improving your soft skills, maybe re-skilling, revisiting something you used to know before, testing for competency, not, yeah, go ahead, Rocco.

Rocco Seyboth (54:49.483)

Yeah. LMS. Yeah, for people who don't have an LMS.

LMS delivers content primarily two ways. They deliver it as a video, hopefully short video, although sometimes short can mean 10 or 20 minute long video. So you can decide if you think that's short and they deliver it as slides. And then what's great about the LMS is the employee watches the video or goes through the slides and then usually it's course-based so you can answer a little set of questions at the end to make sure that they like

through. LMS is a critical tool for a lot of bigger, bigger companies. But yeah, as you said, Ken, it's, um, it's good for like background knowledge, um, skills, right? Um, so, um, we don't think, we don't think you, we think you should have an LMS by all means, but when earlier when we were talking about how like, uh, Tom from SCW and Ken from search, how they don't like video.

They didn't mean they don't like video for transmitting any kind of knowledge. What they meant was that people don't like video for step-by-step procedural knowledge.

And that's where a lot of times, if you try to use the LMS and the videos and the slides for step-by-step procedural knowledge, there's a lot of issues with it, right? Number one, people get bored. They don't wanna watch a 10-minute video for a process that should take 30 seconds. Number two, you're probably not.

Rocco Seyboth (56:27.231)

you're probably not ready to use the knowledge right now. You're watching the video and taking the test about how to do something in your CRM or on workday that you may not actually get to do until days, weeks, months later, or never, or never, right? So it's not in the flow of work, right? And so that's where you just have to make sure you use the right tool for the job

Ken Babcock (56:53.854)

Yeah, and I kind of equate an LMS to, you wouldn't necessarily use slides or a long form video that you just sit and watch to maybe learn, I don't know, like a sports move or a dance or something. Now, you might learn a dance by watching the video, stopping it, playing it back, but some of these things that are so

you need to be engaged in the activity. You need to continually reforce it. You need to have something that you can compare side by side. I don't think that's where an LMS works. And so what I wish we would have done in the episode is engage with Jamie a little bit more about what was that LMS's purpose? What were you trying to do in that moment? Because as she elaborated, it was more to do with some of these workflow based.

tasks that they needed people to go ahead and complete. And so just be wary of that. LMS can get thrown around a lot. You know, don't misuse it.

Rocco Seyboth (57:55.651)

Ken, the same thing happens with knowledge bases. So every day we talk to people who, their primary tool that they've been given to help disseminate knowledge in their organization is a knowledge base, right? And again, knowledge bases are absolutely necessary. We use Notion and Tango, we love it, we rely on it. It's really good for reference information, but...

it not the best for step-by-step procedures because again, if you are gonna, if you're an employee, you need to learn how to do something step-by-step, especially in software. If you go to the knowledge base to find that what you are probably going to get is a PDF with a ton of stuff in it that you have to read. Maybe you'll find a video again, videos not great for the reason we talked about earlier.

There is a lot of people don't realize there is another type of training tool that was built specifically for

step-by-step software procedures, it's called a digital adoption platform. And that's actually, a lot of people would put Tango in that category, as Tango being a DAP, a digital adoption platform. And so, yeah, if you're doing reference information that's designed to level up skills, video and slides and courses and tests, great for that, use the LMS for that. If you have reference information, knowledge base, great for that. But if you're teaching people how to do

step-by-step procedural tasks in software, you need a digital adoption platform for that.

Ken Babcock (59:36.982)

And speaking of adoption, I want to transition to another new segment. Now, you've probably heard us talk about ambivalent adapters, which is a tango trademark courtesy of one of our customers.

Rocco Seyboth (59:51.563)

No, no. Yeah, Brittany from, shout out Brittany from PCG.

Ken Babcock (59:55.606)

The ambivalent adopter is not necessarily a bad person to be. It actually means that you're laser focused on just executing in your role and being strategic about how you use your time. Most ambivalent adopters aren't paid to adopt software successfully. And so when they see new software being rolled out, big change is coming their way. They get really frustrated because it's an impediment.

Rocco Seyboth (01:00:15.892)

No.

Ken Babcock (01:00:25.454)

to what they're trying to do in their role. And so we're lucky in the sense that Rocko is actually a massive ambivalent adopter.

Rocco Seyboth (01:00:34.023)

I'm very passionate about teaching change enablers empathy for ambivalent adopters because I am the definition of an ambivalent adopter. I care deeply about the company and I am, um, I am even actually great at adapting to change, but not software change and

I am not lazy. Just because I don't think that it's a priority for me to learn all your new software and your processes doesn't make me lazy. And yet I'm very misunderstood. We have a wonderful person that works at Tango who is our head of support. And she also helps out a lot internally with doing internal support help desk. Her name is Angela. She is a beloved member of the Tango family.

And yet, you know, I scream at Angela at the top of my lungs often, because Angela sometimes when she's trying to help me learn how to do things, teaches me the way that it works for her. And her brain and my brain work very differently. An example comes to mind...

actually with one password. So first of all, most people at Tango love one password. Obviously customers love one password because it is the fastest growing software in 2024, according to Okta, based on the number of customers year over year, by a lot actually, if you look at the report. So they're clearly doing something right, but.

For me, ambivalent adopter, not easy for me to use one password, right? One of my jobs.

Ken Babcock (01:02:19.545)

For Rocco, we actually call it two password because he often needs a new one

Rocco Seyboth (01:02:22.491)

Exactly, exactly. There was a scenario recently where I was in the middle of a live demo, doing a live demo to hundreds of people. Supposedly one password was set up and it was gonna log me into my demo environment. And what do you think happened, Ken, when I was right in the middle of my demo to hundreds of people, one password did not know how to log me in to my demo account.

And so that was that was bad enough, right? Then I got off that webinar slightly embarrassed and asked Angela for help and she sent me a tango that was supposedly going to walk me through what

First of all, she did not have guidance enabled on that Tango, so shame on you Angela For sending me a Tango that did not work in guidance mode. If you don't know the difference You can send a Tango as a guide that looks a little bit like a PDF. It's a little fancier than that It's got screenshots and descriptions or you can send me a Tango in guidance mode Which means I can click a button and it takes over my screen and literally Shows me what to do step by step as if an expert was sitting over my shoulder

If you're an ambivalent adopter, that's what you need, right? So the Tango that she sent me wasn't in guidance mode. And then, to make it worse, she sent me a Tango

for the desktop version of OnePassword, when I was logged into the web-based version of OnePassword, I didn't know there was a desktop version of OnePassword. So all the steps looked different to me, and I don't know if you can tell, I'm getting pretty excited reliving this right now, Ken. I have a PTSD from this moment. So I was getting really irritated with Angela. Angela was getting really irritated with me

Ken Babcock (01:04:12.692)

Oh, you can see it.

Rocco Seyboth (01:04:22.425)

what was going wrong. And it was all because One Password to Angela is like the easiest program in the world to use. But not for me, not for me. And as great as Angela is, she made too many assumptions about what I knew and what my skill level was and my background knowledge about One Password. And the guide she sent me.

I got news for you. I'm not I'm not I'm not reading your guide. I'm not reading your guide, right? Just make it as easy for me as humanly possible and I'm spoiled most people know when they send me a tango I use it in guidance mode and when it didn't work in guidance mode. That was it. I And and you know what I did. Here's how the story ends Ken. How do you think the story ended?

Ken Babcock (01:05:11.61)

you successfully got into one password and every demo was magical from that point forward.

Rocco Seyboth (01:05:16.743)

No, I literally, no, I gave up. I swear, I gave up. I said, I guess I'll just never do any more Tango demos again after this. So I gave up and I figured out a way to manually log in to the Tango demo systems without one password because I would rather punish myself.

then go through that experience again of trying to get the software to work. The software that's supposed to save me tons of time of keeping track of all of my passwords gave me so much pain that I gave up.

Ken Babcock (01:05:53.706)

Yeah, well you are in your forever speak now era so that's the dramatic response we expected. And you know what's interesting because I got to witness a lot of this interaction unfold on the slack thread is that Rocco, our resident ambivalent adopter, also didn't lay out all the context that he needed for Angela to be successful. And so

Rocco Seyboth (01:05:58.355)

Love you, Angela.

Ken Babcock (01:06:20.158)

You have to expect that your ambivalent adopters too are going to come with you, urgent, I need this, I can't get in. Okay, what about more details is going to allow me to help you solve this? You're just not going to get that.

Rocco Seyboth (01:06:33.823)

Look, Ken, I was seeing red. I was seeing red. Come on, you can't expect me to remember all that.

Ken Babcock (01:06:40.446)

Oh, hey, in the State of Change Enablement podcast, we are all about accepting the harsh realities of software enablement, and you, my friend, the ambivalent adopter, that is a harsh reality.

Rocco Seyboth (01:06:56.759)

That's right.

Ken Babcock (01:06:58.57)

So with that, that wraps up the show. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening in. We're taking more Ops Hotline questions. So please, please write in.

Rocco Seyboth (01:07:09.931)

Now email ops, email ops hotline at tango.us and we'll try to get your question on the show.

Ken Babcock (01:07:14.572)

Yes.

Ken Babcock (01:07:18.35)

can't wait. Rockc, we'll see you in a couple months.

Rocco Seyboth (01:07:21.215)

Thanks Ken, it was fun.