Welcome to The Workplace Therapy Podcast!
Episode Summary
Work is a significant part of the human experience. Most of us will spend more time in pursuit of our vocation than we will on any other singular aspect of our lives. Given how much of ourselves we dedicate to our work, it's not surprising that the workplace can also be a significant source of trauma in our lives.
That's why we created Workplace Therapy - a podcast that puts the human expriences of work front and center. Because if we're going to work together, we need to learn how to heal together.
In this pre-season episode, we'll introduce you to our hosts and talk a little bit about why we created Workplace Therapy and what we hope it will become.
Scott Arrieta, CEO
Scott Arrieta is the Founder and CEO of Unity & Company - a consulting firm that leverages a strategic understanding of human experiences to drive business performance in the areas of customer experience, employee engagement and leadership development.
Dr. Sarah Gould, VP of Learning & Development
Dr. Sarah Gould is the Founder and CEO of Sarah Gould Consulting where her mission is to help people to reach their full potential by helping them to understand the source of their value to find the leader within.
Skylar Lewandowski, Director of Special Programs
Skylar Lewandowski is a mid-career professional and recent graduate from Yale's School of Management. She specializes in DEIB, customer experience and program management and is driven to make work more enjoyable and rewarding for everyone.
Transcript
Scott Arrieta
Welcome everybody to Workplace Therapy! So we're going to just take a few minutes here in our first inaugural episode and give you a little glimpse into what workplace therapy is about, why it exists, and i'll have the pleasure of introducing you to the rest of the workplace therapy team. But let's start our conversation today by just giving you a little bit of background on what is workplace therapy and why we decided to start this podcast.
Well, you know one of the things that I’ve realized in my journey through corporate america and that all of us should also be able to identify with is that work is a significant part of the human experience we spend forty, fifty, sixty plus hours a week invested in the things that we have chosen to do for work.
Most of us work for a living and work in the context of being in community with other people. Not very many of us have a work situation where it's just us in isolation. Furthermore, people are at the heart of every business so regardless of what business you're in and what profession you've chosen, your business is the business of people and that can be anything from the customers we serve, the employes who serve them, the leaders who develop those employes - we’re all infinitely complex individuals with a diverse set of experiences, strength, beliefs, biases and these things inform our actions, our expectations, preferences - they're the lens through which we see each other and through which we see the world. And this diversity can be a really wonderful thing. It is fuel for innovation and growth and we've proven time and time again that when nurtured properly, a diverse and empowered team can make a massive positive impact not just in their organizations but in each other's lives and in the world in general.
But there's a problem. And that problem is that even the best of organizations - we drop the ball from time to time and because work is such a huge part of our lives, the impact of those ball drops can be really traumatic and those traumatic experiences can be things that we carry with us into other aspects of our life. And you don't have to look very far to find examples of workplace trauma, especially in this day and age with massive layoffs across multiple sectors of the economy. It's not uncommon for us to hear or experience examples of unfair employment and promotion practices or even just toxic gossip at the water cooler. It can have a heavy burden on the lives and mental health of today's employees.
So this podcast is going to be a place where we can share and study these stories and use our collective experiences to figure out what the hell to do about all of it and how to enter into life and work as fully empowered and confident people
So given that we're your hosts on this therapeutic journey, you probably want to know a little bit about us and our experiences so i'll go ahead and start.
My name's Scott Arrieta. I’m the CEO and Founder of Unity & Company. It’s a consulting firm that specializes in partnering with organizations to leverage a strategic understanding of human experiences to drive business performance. Specifically we focus in three main areas. I alluded to them earlier - customer experience, employee experience and leadership development.
Prior to founding Unity I spent twenty years working as a senior leader in customer experience operations and HR. People have literally been the center of everything that i've chosen to with my career and i wouldn't trade a minute of it for anything in the world.
I’ve spent the last ten years of my career specifically working with fast-paced, venture-backed startups at nearly every stage of development from pre-revenue all the way to IPO and then even beyond IPO to an eventual exit in a couple of cases. And so throughout my career I’ve had the opportunity to lead large, global teams across a variety of functions and industries and maturity cycles.
I’m really well acquainted with the challenges of developing and sustaining inclusive cultures and the pitfalls of getting it wrong. So that's me in a nutshell, I’ll hand the mic off now to Dr. Sarah Gould who is an amazing woman I’ve had the opportunity to work with in a couple of different contexts over the last few years and she's going to add a perspective to workplace therapy that's all her own. Sarah, I’ll hand it off to you.
Sarah Gould
Thanks, Scott. So, I currently sit on Scott’s team as the VP of learning and development. I have about twenty years of professional experience as an educator and leader. Something I'm very passionate about - similar to scott - people have been centric to every part of my professional and personal journey.
I have a doctorate in leadership and I'm certified as an executive coach. I've had the fortunate opportunity to work globally and focus on change management, leadership, equity and vision work. I’ve partnered with schools, nonprofits, startups, large companies, military and a host of other small businesses and individuals. I currently own my own consulting firm - Sarah Gould Consulting. I work with companies like The Breakthrough Leadership Group, Franklin Covey, and I also have an app in development that focuses on entrepreneur support which is so desperately needed in today's industry.
I've really learned that leadership is about communicating people's worth so clearly that they're compelled to see it in themselves and really my dream is for the world to wake up to their full potential and that I can be part of that dream. And with that, I'm happy to also introduce our partner Skylar.
Skylar Lewandowski
Thank you! So, I am also working with Scott at Unity and I actually originally met Scott in one of my first roles out of undergrad about seven years ago and now we're working together. I'm really excited about that.
I'm still kind of early to mid stage of my career. I recently graduated business school and have been lucky to work a variety of experiences so far so i've done marketing, customer support, strategy, project management and I’ve worked at companies ranging from startups to huge global corporations so I kind of like to think of it as like a mixed box of doughnuts - really delicious and something for everybody there. I'm driven to make work more enjoyable and not just something that we do for eight hours a day and dread on the weekend. And a big part of that is talking about some of the not great things that we've experienced in the workplace. I think like every millennial I know that therapy is really helpful but I'm still a little nervous about it so we can go through this together.
Right now along with Unity, I’m focusing on some entrepreneurial activities. I have a travel startup that I’m working on and really trying to understand what my professional values are and connecting them with my personal values as well.
But I thought to kind of get to know us a little bit more. I would love to hear about your first jobs and Sarah if you can go first.
What was your first job? Did you like it? What did you learn from it? Was it like everything you imagined and more?
Sarah Gould
My first job was actually at a chiropractic office when I was fourteen. So my mom would drive me after school and drop me off two days a week and I would just alphabetize files because back then we had paper files for all of our patients. And that is a job that I actually ended up staying at as a temporary or seasonal employee through college and so I got to see the business change and grow.
The name changed, the practice changed, partners come and go but the chiropractor that I worked for, Dr. Jeffrey Bruner was always just such an inspiration for me because he wasn't just about helping people heal their bodies. He is an incredible human being. It taught me resiliency. It taught me how to work in a small business family-owned practice and i think starting so young at fourteen before I could get a work permit was really good for my soul because it taught me a lot of integrity and hard work very very early on in my career and i've always had a fascination with well-being and health and i attribute it to that very first job.
Skylar Lewandowski
That’s amazing. You know our experience might be a little opposite because my first job, I worked at a frozen yogurt shop. So it wasn’t exactly going towards well-being and health but I guess for the soul? But I actually loved working there because I do love ice cream and frozen yogurt.
But I remember I would come in and I am now like an expert fruit cutter due to this job. So I can cut any type of fruit within like two minutes because I just had to come in every morning and chop all the fruit and then serve people. But it did give me a really good understanding of customer support just dealing with different types of people and I was a teenager so it was nice to just have that first work experience and have that in your life.
Scott, what about you?
Scott Arrieta
Skylar, well hold on before I answer the question for myself - I'm curious - what fruit was the hardest to learn how to cut? Which one was the hardest to master?
Skylar Lewandowski
Well, pomegranates are notoriously difficult because you have to soak them first before you cut them and yeah I would when somebody asked, “Can I get all pomegranate seeds on my yogurt?” and I was like, “No, you cannot.”
Sarah Gould
I didn't know that was a thing!
Skylar Lewandowski
Yeah, you can get pomegranate. It actually tastes really delicious but i was like, “No, you can't get these because you only get one scoop.” Because I didn't want to go cut another one.
But my favorite food to cut is pineapple. I can do that really quickly.
Scott Arrieta
I don't have a lot of experience actually cutting pineapple. That's one fruit that I just buy pre-cut in whatever shape I want. You know you want the little circles, you want the cubes, you want the dices… Um, so what's the secret to that?
Skylar Lewandowski
Um, I guess getting a good sense of where the core is and cutting it out?
Scott Arrieta
Interesting, well thanks for the thanks for the education. Actually, I was just stalling because I'm trying to figure out what my first work experience was and whether there were any redeemable lessons from it.
The earliest job I can remember taking was actually in a contact center. I had no idea that that would be foreshadowing where I would spend the next ten years of my career in contact center environments. I know it's like, I really just got a job because I wanted to be able to buy things and you know, survive. Which is I guess why everybody gets a job, but I wasn't very discerning about where I got that job is what i'm saying. So I ended up working for this contact center.
I’m dating myself a lot right because this was back in the day when there were contact centers still doing cold calls to sell land line phone packages. So like, call waiting, three way calling, caller ID, digital voice mail like these were the big disruptive services of the day.
But that's not what made the job bad. What made the job bad was the way that you would get routed to our contact center was you would have to have a dispute or a question on your bill. So people would be calling in and like ninety five percent of the calls would be people who are like, “my bill is too high. I don't remember ordering these services.”
And that's fine, like doing service recovery can wear on you day after day but that wasn't the hard part of the job. The hard part of the job was even though we were there to help people kind of figure out where these charges were coming from on their bill, we were also dually incentivized, or even probably more incentivized, to make additional incremental sales on those calls. So like someone would call in and say, “why is my like monthly phone bill a hundred bucks? I have all these additional like services that i don't remember signing up for.” And what we'd have to do is explain to you why they were there and sell you even more stuff like on top of that.
And so the people who were actually making great money and who were the most successful in this environment were the people who talked really fast and frankly got older people to sign up for more services. Essentially just shock and awe confused them into adding more stuff into their overall packages. So I think what I learned - first of all, I didn't last very long. I maybe finished training and spent a couple three weeks on the phone and just just like this isn't for me because this doesn't feel like service, this feels like exploitation.
So I think like that was a really interesting lesson and you know, now that i reflect on it, I think it really kind of planted the seeds in my mind as a non-example of what customers service should be. That was a very extreme example of how the wrong incentive structures take people who are fundamentally good people but have them lose compassion and empathy for the people that they are serving on the other end of the line. So I think like incentive structures impacts culture. It makes a ton of difference in the world of customer experience in this case, but also the experience of the employes because it was a very disheartening environment to work in. To support that kind of business model day in an day out. Anyway, sharing a little bit of my workplace trauma.
So I didn't do frozen yogurt, but I did quickly thereafter find find Starbucks and so I was really into the frozen coffee beverages at the time. I eventually got more hard core as I had tons of like four am shifts and really just needed a more straightforward way to shock my system with caffeine.
But Starbucks was actually like a really good case study in a lot of ways a great company culture, especially at the time. This was the early 2000’s. Starbucks was really focused around what they called the “third place experience” and creating a meeting place for the communities they served and so I think they've lost a little bit of that magic as they've been expanding their footprint and become increasingly commoditized over time. But it was a good time in my life in my career to be at Starbucks and and get a good example of what creating kind of a human centered experience looks like
Skylar Lewandowski
What’s your coffee order?
Scott Arrieta
My coffee order today is just cold brew. Some stevia. A little heavy cream. I used to get like six shots of espresso over ice. That was my go-to for a while.
Well, I had to be hard core. I mean, I was in a band at the time. We would play shows late into the night so…
Skylar Lewandowski
Yeah.
Sarah Gould
That’s hard core. It’s so emo of you, Scott.
Scott Arrieta
Absolutely, we'll get more into my emo background I’m sure as we get further into other episodes.
All right, anything else from you ladies? Any hopes, dreams, thoughts about what workplace therapy can become?
Sarah Gould
I actually love, Skylar, what you said about how as a fellow millennial, although I’m like more like zennial to be honest with you, um not to age myself, but I think that idea that we accept that therapy is something that we need to normalize and I think with personal therapy we're getting there. But what we haven't normalized is asking for help in the workplace.
We feel like vulnerability and is a sign of incompetence and so I think this idea of workplace therapy is something that is very unique and really just starting to emerge. I'm really excited about doing this podcast through the stories that we share and the articles that are out there because if we can get to the paradigm shift that we have with us as milennials that hey you know personal therapy is actually really important mental health is really important if we can shift that to be normalized in the workplace can you imagine what that does for us as human beings and as society?
I just think the topic at hand is the right time and it's the right place and i think we're the right people.
Skylar Lewandowski
And I've got chills.
Scott Arrieta
I'm definitely honored to get the conversation started with the two of you. Sarah, I think what you said is just so important. We have been conditioned not to ask for help in the workplace. We spend so much time in the context of work and yet even though it constitutes a significant proportion of the days that we spend on this earth, we're not really truly ourselves in those environments. We don't feel free to articulate what our struggles are and where we need help and leverage. And actually, I think that's the perfect segue into our first episode here on workplace therapy which will be dropping next week which is all about psychological safety - how do you create it in the workplace, what is it, what are the benefits of having it, and why don't more places make it a priority?
I think that's a great place to kind of end our introduction for today and we'll be back next week with our deep dive into psychological safety.