014 : Improving Productivity Through Science, with Tim Mullen, Co-Founder of Heelix
Human analytics has begun to integrate with how we approach conversations in the workplace and in creating employee experience. As we intertwine empathy into our discussions, we get a better understanding of how productivity relates to the emotional and mental state of our employees. Tim Mullen has developed an emotionally-driven software that allows you to gain insight into your employees’ productivity through a neuroscience lens.
In this week’s episode of The Culture Design Show, Steve Chaparro talks with Tim Mullen, co-founder of Heelix, about his neuroscience and data-driven company that’s dedicated to boosting creativity and productivity through understanding your teams’ emotional state. Tune in as he discusses the importance of emotional intelligence and cultivating the right soft skills to build team collaboration, and how asking the right questions plays an essential role to team performance and improved customer relationships.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- What passions drive our desire to connect to others?
- Simplifying how people relate through people’s analytics
- The difference between measuring how productivity works on an emotional level versus an organizational level
- How to extract stories behind data and how to create conversations that provide insight.
- The role of leaders in espousing emotional intelligence, empathy and objective conversations in the workplace
- Empathy-based design thinking as a solution to company cultural problems
- How does employee performance relate to employee engagement and employee experience?
Resources Mentioned in this episode:
- Tim Mullen on LinkedIn
- Tim Mullen on Twitter
- Heelix
- See the Forest on Medium
- St. Alouarn Investments
- The Science of Us Podcast
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
About the Guest:
Tim Mullen is an Australian native with a talent for business strategy and bringing people together. He is the co-founder of Heelix, a company that uses the power of neuroscience to help people better understand and track the product of any teams’ productivity. Tim is also the host of The Science Of Us Podcast, and he is also the Director of St. Alouarn Investments, and a Partner at See The Forest, a medium publishing group that focuses on personal development and entrepreneurship.
Sponsor for this episode:
This episode is brought to you by the Culture Design Studio, a consulting firm that helps people and cultural leaders who feel constrained in their ability to engage their employees to become champions for their people through a series of facilitated workshops. They provide a practical and collaborative process to transform the culture within your creative organization.
Culture Design Studio has worked with organizations like Duarte Design, Design Thinkers Group, Red Bull, USAID, Bacardi, and the Office of Civic Innovation
If you’re looking for more than just a consultant and want someone who can facilitate your organization through a structured conversation to transform your culture, Culture Design Studio is the one for you.
Contact them today to learn more about what they can do for you and your company.
Full Transcript: Powered by Otter.ai
Announcer
Welcome to the Culture Design Show where we feature conversations with leaders and thinkers who are passionate about culture and design. Now, let’s get started with the show.
Steve Chaparro
Steve Chaparro here. I am the host of the Culture Design Show, a podcast where I feature leaders and thinkers at some of the top creative firms in the world including architecture, design, technology, and marketing. What’s the one thing they all have in common? They all believe in the power of culture and design. This podcast is brought to you by Culture Design Studio. We help people and culture leaders who feel constrained in their ability to engage their employees to become champions for their people. Through a series of facilitated workshops, we provide a practical and collaborative process to transform the culture within your creative organization.
We’ve worked with organizations like Duarte Design, Design Thinkers Group, Red Bull, USAID, Bacardi, and the Office of Civic Innovation. If you’re looking for more than just a consultant, but someone who can facilitate your organization through a structured conversation to transform your culture, reach out to us at culturedesignstudio.com.
Tim Mullen hails from Sydney, Australia where he is the co-founder of Heelix, a company that delivers business performance powered by neuroscience. He’s also working with exciting new ventures. He’s an advisor to some brilliant founders and consults with some great brands on customer-led strategies. He is driven by the following declarations, challenge the way things are done, never stop learning, and use the opportunity we have to do something that matters and have some fun at the same time. Tim, welcome to the Culture Design Show.
Tim Mullen
Thank you for having me.
Steve Chaparro
You’re hailing as I mentioned, from Sydney, Australia. Right now, it’s 9 am and over here, it’s 4:33 pm. You’re 18 hours ahead of us. What was it like growing up? Did you grow up in Sydney specifically?
Tim Mullen
Yeah, I’ve always been based in Sydney. I did have a stint overseas in the UK, in London for about three years or so but predominantly always been a Sydney boy. I love living in Australia and I think when you travel the world and then come back, you realize how great a country it is and how lucky you are to live here. So, yeah, that’s a little bit about where I’ve been.
Steve Chaparro
Yeah, well, maybe when all of this craziness is over. I can pay a visit to Sydney. I’ve not been there yet.
Tim Mullen
We’d love to have you.
Steve Chaparro
What are some of the passions that have driven your work in your lifetime?
Tim Mullen
Well, I think for me, when I started I sort of had a varied career and I won’t bore the audience with everything that I’ve done, but I guess I started in marketing communications moved into more of a strategic role and then ended up in the startup space. For me, I’ve always had ideas I remember back to my first job. I remember even then having these business ideas and concepts that I wanted to work on. At the time, I think I never really understood enough about it and I was sort of had advice from people to say, just do the corporate job and get your experience all the rest of it. So, it was only a little bit later in my career that I then take that leap and start to do things in the startup space.
What’s driven me is about anything linked to how we can bring back our humanity. I think all the ideas that I’ve tried and brought out have been things that either link us socially to try and form some level of connection to try and bring out some level of even physical interaction. We’ll be doing that right now. And then also, I guess, just to try and where I am right now with Heelix is trying to raise a level of humanity effectively in the workplace because I think that it’s something that we tend to lose. We go in and we’re very focused on exactly what we have to work on, and we don’t think about the fact that at the end of the day, we’re still humans, and we’re governed by emotions. If you can understand that a little bit better and how people operate, you can actually get a far better outcome.
Steve Chaparro
Where do you think that passion to increase our level of humanity and connection, where do you think that comes from? I don’t want to get all psychotherapist on you. But is there something in your life that you think that has driven that passion?
Tim Mullen
I think that I was very fortunate to have been raised by a great family in terms of teaching me the power and the benefits of having more of an EQ and awareness, understanding of looking after people, that kind of stuff. I think that what probably frustrated me when I was in the workplace, particularly in the corporate world, was that I’d see a lot of politics, a lot of just weird ways of doing business where you’d see great opportunities in front of you, but you’d have to go through 10 committees before someone would sign it off. not set on great ways of actually just making it a bit more of human experience. So, I think for me, it was kind of a combination of my upbringing, but also what I saw in the workplace. It just sort of frustrated me. I was like, well, there’s got to be a better way of doing this. There’s got to be a more human way of doing stuff.
Steve Chaparro
Yeah, I think that resonates with some of the things that I’ve observed, maybe in my own life, but also with maybe startup entrepreneurs. If we’re looking out into the world for something and we don’t find it, then we seek to create it for ourselves. Another thing, I had a friend that told me. He says that which we desire for others is also that which we desire for ourselves. Does any of those two sayings resonate with you and your work?
Tim Mullen
One hundred percent. It’s a great way to sort of live. I couldn’t agree more.
Steve Chaparro
Yeah. How has that passion you evolved over the years if at all?
I think if anything, it’s gotten stronger and I think that particularly with the work that I do now with Katharina Kuehn, who’s the Chief Strategy Officer of Winning Group, but she also has the post of the head Neuroscientist for Heelix. She’s taught me so much. I think when we first started the company, we lacked the science component. When we then joined forces with Katharina we got a wealth of information to understand who we are as humans, how we operate.
I mean, the fact that we process emotions 200 times faster than we do any rational thought all this sort of stuff. I sort of, maybe I had an inkling of it because I feel like I’ve been more of an emotional person myself, as I’ve grown up. But I think to work with her and to truly understand how much we are governed by things that we don’t actually know are going on. That’s given me an even greater sense of purpose about how we can use that science. How we can go back to the basics of who we are as humans on that fundamental level. So how we can use that now to create a more positive impact whether it’s in the workplace or broader society.
Steve Chaparro
So specifically, Heelix, what are some of the challenges that Heelix seeks to solve? How do you help bring those solutions to bear?
Tim Mullen
Yeah, I think right now, when you’re looking at trying to get insight from your people about sort of that general mood about how they’re feeling, a lot of the time, the wrong questions are being asked and you’re not getting it fast enough. I think that added to that you’ve also got the problem that people management is often seen as this thing you got to do over here. Let’s do all of our work. Let’s focused on that. A lot of work to do, this people piece over here. So, if you’re missing out on all those core insights, which are fundamentally business insights because your people are what powers your business.
You’re then missing out on a lot of things when it comes to how you increase your performance, the level of connection within your people. So, that productivity output, all that kind of stuff. So, you’re missing out on potential opportunities with revenue, your attrition can arise, etc., etc. So, what we try and do, what we do, do I should say is we give people real-time insight at an emotive level about how people are feeling about their work. We connect them through a sort of a social collaboration piece. We also allow them to have much easier conversations one to one. At the end of the day, as I said, people management is this awkward thing that managers never really know how to do. What we’re trying to do is make that a really simple process that exists as part of everything that you do today.
Steve Chaparro
Just in my observation, kind of being part of the human resources or whatever we would call that the people side of a business conversation. In the last five or seven years, I’ve seen a big rise in the conversation about people analytics. So, one, there’s the data and then two, there are maybe some consultants who come in to acquire that data on behalf of the client. But then there’s this camp of whether it’s quantitative and/or there is this qualitative? Where does Heelix fit in that spectrum of all three of those things?
Tim Mullen
That’s was a great question. I think that from where we sit at the moment, we always talk about there’s best practice and then there’s the next practice. So, a lot of what we see in the market is still fundamentally based on best practice, which is rehash sort of HR principles and procedures, which haven’t changed in HR. I think there’s a term that was coined in the 1960s and it hasn’t changed. Patty McCord has talked a lot about that. I follow her a lot. So, I think fundamentally, then when it comes to how can you change things? If you’re looking at your question when you said people analytics and the amount of data you can get. It’s great to have all of this data and to call it data science and your solutions powered by science and that sort of centers around the number of data points you collect.
But if those data points are fundamentally flawed in the sense that they’re recording the wrong things, then it doesn’t matter how many data points you have, because measuring cognitively, that says if you’re asking questions like, do you have a friend at work or whatever it might be. Stuff that doesn’t necessarily get to the root cause of how someone’s feeling? I think you’re missing a bit of a trick. So, you’ve got to get to a point where you’re measuring at an emotional level because as I said, we are emotional beings. We process emotions far faster than we do rational thought. So, if you can measure that emotive level and understand what is truly driving someone into why they then act the way they do, then now you’re onto something in terms of how you can start to improve that solution, the environment for that individual. You improve the team, you can have better conversations, because you’re getting to the root cause and you can solve something then far more quickly and far more effectively.
Steve Chaparro
Yeah, I see how getting down to the emotional side of things. I’m not sure if you mentioned this or touched on this. But a lot of times the motions are not necessarily rational. It is sometimes you’re in the heat of the moment and, in the space that I work in specifically is with creative companies. I’ve talked to some of the people and culture leaders at these creative companies and say, creatives, you guys are a pretty emotional bunch of people. You either are going to flock to conflict, or you’re going to stay away from conflict and that human side of things.
I think a lot of times when we talk about HR tech or people tech and whatever term we want to use for the technology that is used to enhance the human experience. We sometimes think that technology has the risk of making us less human. But what I’m hearing you say is that this enables us to be more human. Is that what I’m hearing you say?
Tim Mullen
Yeah, 100% and to your point where you just sort of mentioned before about people, not really understanding. Well, they kind of do. There was a study Katharina references but it was a study in the late 90s by some people called North, Hargreaves, and McKendrick, and they looked at how you can correlate the stimulus of music on wine sales. They did this sort of supermarket which effectively played French music. When they found that when they play French music, the results, basically was that French wine outsold German wine three to one. When German music was played the German wine outsold French wine two to one but when the people were questioned, when they got to the checkout, they had no idea why they chose that. They just did.
So, I think that that’s just a very simple example, to sort of show how we are governed by all this external stimulus and by things that when they come into our mind, our mind is just looking at it from that emotive level first and foremost. I think that again if you can come back to that fundamental piece of who we are because, at the end of the day, when you walk into the workplace, you’re still human. We tend to put up these barriers and try and become this different person because we’re interacting with a different social hierarchy. The fundamental fact is that we are still governed by things that we’ve been governed by for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. So, I think that if you can get back to that point, and understand that and leverage that for the positive good, I think that you are going to effectively make us a lot more human than we are tonight.
Steve Chaparro
One of the things that I have been wondering, and it’s a question that I have and I’m seeking to understand. How would you describe your company, number one? Is it the people analytics? I hate to put labels but just for the sake of maybe our audience by understanding what space it sits.
Tim Mullen
I think for the audience, they would probably see us as sitting in the HR tech and user engagement and experience space, but really, I guess where we see ourselves is more of a behavioral insights tool. I guess that’s the blending of those two things. But again, normally when we deal with the companies they can sort of see how this can help them from a business standpoint, I think that the conversations we have, yes, we still talk to people and culture leaders for sure. That’s still a valued part of the stakeholders we deal with. We find more and more than we talk with a lot of CEOs, CFOs CTOs because they’re the ones that, I guess can understand how you can blend the idea of people with business performance.
Again, as I made that point earlier, but without people, you don’t have an organization. I’ve referenced this to other people in the past, but if you’ve read the book “Sapiens” by Yuval Harari.
Steve Chaparro
Yes, I have.
Tim Mullen
In that book it talks of [inaudible]. I think for me, that’s fundamental, one of those game-changing books where you start to realize a lot about yourself. But in that he talks about the concept of an organization and an organization is really in the figments of our imagination. We’ve created it. It exists in paper. We seem to give it the same legal rights as human beings. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t exist without humans. So, if you were to take all the people out of an organization, it might exist there as a shell and become a memory if it all folds and goes under, or do you remember, company XYZ? It’s the people that give life and allow that organization to live.
Steve Chaparro
So, we talked earlier, and the question I was going to ask is if we’re talking about making the workplace a more human space, and you mentioned before the values and practices or even appreciation for empathy and human intelligence. I would imagine that on one hand if you want it’s an art to learning how to ask the right questions. You mentioned that, making sure you ask the right questions, so you get the appropriate data. But then even when you get the data, it’s more than just numbers. I would imagine a story behind the data itself. How do you help clients in a sense extract the story that comes from those insights? I guess that’s what insights are. That’s the story behind the data.
Tim Mullen
Yeah. I think that where that starts with is simply because what can often happen is that when people run a traditional sort of people and culture survey or whatever they sort of call it, normally that’s done for a lot of companies annually, bi-annually. Some talk about pole surveys being every three months. Obviously, a lot happens in three months. I think the problem with those is that you get a lot of information, and then they have to work out how do we process this? What do we do with it? How do we address this and announce it to our teams etc.?
So, the fundamental part of what we’re trying to do is encourage more conversation. This is something again I’ll reference Patty McCord because it’s something that she says. We just need to talk more. I fundamentally believe that because I think we can go into a bit of a shell. We don’t know how to have conversations I think is another problem. Particularly, what you find is a lot of managers are thrust into a position of leadership without really knowing how to actually lead people. That’s no fault of their own. You actually find out and that’s another separate conversation altogether.
But a lot of managers can be experts in a field and they seem to be doing obviously such a fantastic job in what they’re doing that the logical step is to progress them and to put them up into a management position when (a) they may not even want to be there themselves, because they’re more comfortable in the expert position, but even if they are willing to go there, they often can lack the skills to do it. So, if it comes back to then how do you have those conversations? What we do is really try and break it down so that when you sit around a table, rather than saying to each other, well, how’s everyone feeling? The likely answer, everyone sits there going, it’s great. We’re all fine. You don’t really get a lot out of that conversation.
What we try and do is we give teams really simple insights to show them how they’re feeling across 10 key performance metrics that we know are directly performance in connection. That’s something that Katharina has done in her proprietary IP research that’s built into Heelix. But she also tested that for effectively three years, with the larger parent company that actually owns Heelix and that’s a company called Winning Group, which is 1000 people strong. So, she’s actually been able to test do these factors actually work out when it comes to how people perform and connected overall. I think fundamentally, what we do is we show teams all of the information so that rather than sitting around a table, and it’s just the manager that’s I guess, in control of the insights. It’s about democratizing those insights so that everybody gets a sense of what’s going on.
So, rather than asking the question, how’s everyone feeling, you can actually just put it up where everyone picks up their app, or whatever it might be, and they can see exactly what the team’s been saying. They can, therefore, have a much richer conversation off the back of the insight that they are seeing. We also give managers prompts. I don’t want to go into too much of a promo for the product, but we give managers prompts about what they can do. We also give a whole, I guess, depth of data about how much you want to go into understanding triggers and all this kind of stuff.
Again, coming back to your core question, if you have the right inciting you make it super simple and give them conversation starters, then people can find a lot more normal. They make it part of their rhythm and particularly internally when we use it ourselves. I use it with my team, and it was amazing that we started talking. We just got in the rhythm of doing it every single week and you’d say, okay, well, let’s look at the insights. Let’s look at what people are saying. We can see that people are feeling maybe not as autonomous and independent as they should feel. Let’s talk about why that is. We’re now at a stage where we actually openly offer up who said what because we’re quite comfortable with our feelings, and through doing that we actually get to a far quicker place of, I guess, resolution.
Steve Chaparro
Yeah, I mean, I can make maybe a nod parallel if I could maybe characterize it in an interesting way. So, I was a VP of Business Development at a design firm, and we were looking for a new CRM system solution. We wanted to go from our little rinky-dink CRM solution to a really robust system and we were hot to try to do it. I was looking to get it approved by the IT VP and he says, Steve, you’re not ready for this.
He says you could have this great IT solution to help you with this but if you haven’t built the behaviors that are necessary to acquire the information to then enter the information, and then use that information on the back end, you’re just going to have this robust system because you haven’t built the mindsets and the proper culture around using the CRM it is going to be way overkill. Is there some parallel to that in your work as well in terms of Heelix as a solution, but also, people needing those soft skills and mindsets in order to use it well?
Tim Mullen
Yeah, I guess the benefit we have is that approaching it from a human level, we’re fundamentally talking to who we are. I think that makes it a lot easier for people to understand it because of the simplicity. They can jump in because it feels like a very [21:12 inaudible] tool they can jump in. I think that brought to your broader point about whether people are ready for things or not. I think it does particularly if you’re talking about emotion. You need to have an open mind to actually say, well, I can understand the power that this can have.
So, we’ll still talk to people who are not quite there yet. We can recommend other survey tools if they want to go more of that sort of, I guess, I don’t want to say old school because I feel like it’s putting down the other providers. It’s just, I guess, the more comfortable solution that people might have. Again, and I would argue that that’s fine. You can do that. It can get you into the habit of just asking these questions to start with, but I would then say, are you asking the right questions to begin with? If you’re not, again, you’re missing out on key insights that you might want. I think it does come down to, there’s a broader and I referenced before but there’s a broader problem, I think out there with managers just not having the skills that they need to effectively lead people.
A lot of what we do is try and up-skill the manager to make it super, super easy for them to have more of these conversations. I think that the more you have those conversations anyway, and I’ve seen that with managers that I’ve worked with personally over the last 15/20 years. With those people as you sort of work with them to just get them talking more and to come back to who they are fundamentally. We’re talking about emotional intelligence and empathy. I think that to understand how someone else might be feeling to put yourself in their shoes and understand the decisions that they’re trying to make. I think that, that is a really cool part of not just being a manager or leader, but just being a really great person in general.
I think that we do have a bit of an empathy crisis and Katharina talks about that a lot. She did a study a little while ago, 1000 plus people. That showed that basically, 79% of those people didn’t fundamentally understand themselves. If you don’t understand yourself, the problem with that being is how you’re ever supposed to understand anybody else because you can’t fundamentally relate. You’re still trying to figure out who you are. A lot of what she does in, I guess, a broader set is she’s developed her own personality profiling model which is something that will make its way into our product as well. That helps people to understand what dimension do they sit in.
Are they driven by more of the seek rank care system? What is it that fundamentally governs their own behavior? What are the triggers that they’re going to have in terms of when you’re dealing with somebody else? I’ll go on a little bit of a tangent, but they use this information internally at the Winning Group. The Winning Group Katharina had a manager approach not long ago who was really having problems with this one individual. I’m not sure how I can resolve this problem. When she said, well, let’s come back to the training that we’ve done from a personality level.
All of a sudden, his light bulb went off and the manager realized they were fundamentally different people to the individuals that they’re trying to deal with. So, the individual was driven by much more of that fun creativity, learning growth and they were driven by much more of a discipline, performance, etc. So, disassociation with the two. When you can realize that and then go, okay, great, I now know what motivates that other person. You can then start to have much better conversations and really get to a true resolution for what that individual actually wants. I know it was a little bit of a roundabout answer to the question, but I think that again, that role of personality is so important.
Steve Chaparro
No, I agree, and it took me a while to even kind of come to land on the difference between social awareness and self-awareness. Many times, even the best of the narcissists can be very socially aware of other people, but not be aware of how they are interacting with that person. I think that self-awareness is so important, not only at the employee or the rank and file if you will. I hate that term but to explain it as well as leadership, it goes back to my father in law told me when we first started having kids. He said, Steve, whenever I wanted my kids to change, I needed to change first. I think that’s something that is so important for leaders to understand as they’re trying to (1) drive better performance of their employees but they have to see, what part do I have in this whole matrix of things? Any thoughts there about that?
Tim Mullen
I mean, this probably goes back to just thinking about how we can be better humans in general. I think my upbringing was always about trying to. I was very fortunate. My dad traveled a lot, but I was raised by an amazing mom and grandmother. The impact they had on me; I’m not just saying that my dad’s not empathetic because he’s very empathetic as well. I guess they taught me the value of how you need to understand if you want to make it change and if you want someone to change, you need to do that as well. I think from a very personal level, my wife has probably taught me a lot about that as well.
I think I was a very different person when I met her, and she’s taught me so much about how to adapt to situations. I would have generally a higher reactionary approach to things if you want to call it that. Things that frustrated me and I would tend to go over things in my head more and more to sort of, I should have done this, I should have done that, and she’s taught me a lot about how do you just let go of that. I think that it’s often quite difficult. Let’s put in a situation. If you’re in an argument per se and you so firmly believe in what you’re saying that your way is the right way. If you can just take a step back and it comes back to that emotion piece.
So, you process the emotion, feel the emotion feel how you’re feeling effectively, and don’t try and ignore that. Once that subsides and you are understanding how your brain is processing everything, you can then get to that more rational pace, use the information you just had from the emotion. But then now what can you do with that to have a really objective conversation and then open yourself up? I think that that real sense of how do you open yourself up and admit that maybe you could be wrong or maybe you are actually not wrong, but maybe that other person has a point that’s really important to them. You just need to adapt and to accept that. I think that’s a really important part of your own personal transformation.
Steve Chaparro
Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I think of it. So, a lot of my work is based on design thinking and human-centered design. When you’re talking about (1) asking the right questions, and I think that leads me to think of the first stage of design thinking which is problem framing, really trying to understand the real problem to solve which compels you to ask the right questions. Then the second phase is empathy which is all about research. It’s asking those questions both in a quantitative and qualitative way. Then the third part, which is kind of what you’re talking about, on the insights, which for us, we call that a re-framing of the problem.
I think many times when we go into some type of problem-solving, we enter into the process thinking we understand the problem. If we are truly empathetic, truly self-aware, socially aware, and we get additional data points, we start to realize that our initial understanding of the problem may have been faulty. We may have to re-frame that so that we can properly then solve. So, much of the work is done to understand the real problem so that we can then you know, come up with really good solutions. How much of your work at Heelix deals with… Once you have those insights and it compels leaders that have those conversations what about the solution side of the challenge? I know Heelix may or may not deal with addressing the solution side, because maybe that’s where the human element comes in. That’s where the conversations come in, but I’d love to hear your thoughts about that part of the problem.
Tim Mullen
Yeah. I think it’s interesting going back to your point about design thinking, and how you then get to that output. I think that a lot of the benefits you have with what you would do is that there’s a lot of communication. There’s a lot of talking. There’s a lot of processing and being quite open about where things are and how you get to that resolution. I think that it just reinforces the fact that the more you talk and the more you actually step back and assess and have really open conversations, the more you can get to a resolution. So, I think jumping forward to then about how we can do that when it comes to how we work together and understanding those intricacies of our relationships. I think, again, what we do in the product. Again, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to [30:00 inaudible]. What we do is, I guess we allow leaders to see what’s going on.
We allow everybody else to take some accountability in that as well. But we help them get to a solution. It’s almost like, if you want to think about it a digital coach, psychologist, whatever you want to call it, but we allow them to get to their answers. I think that, that’s the important part because every team is different. You’re made up of obviously, fundamentally different people who do sit into different personality types. I guess that’s the benefit of having the root of our product programmed on those personality types because that effectively fades into it. It’s about giving teams what they need to have the conversations to then figure out and get to some resolutions by themselves. For those that need a little bit of guidance we can give that to them as well because we provide like recommendations based on organizational neuroscience.
So, they can use those, particularly managers can use those to say okay, I can definitely try with my team and it may then spur them into having a greater conversation about something else I didn’t even think about. We’re also about to start to release to individuals the ability to give them talking points so that at a technical level, it’s not just the manager. At a team level. and for me personally, what should I be thinking about? What should I be talking to my colleagues about? So, I think it’s about again if you do measure that fundamental standpoint of emotion and the core drivers of who we are as humans.
You can use that to then have a richer conversation and to get to a point where you can either celebrate what you’re doing. I think it’s the other really important part because it picks up obviously, where things are going well. You can celebrate that stuff together. Likewise, if things aren’t going so well, you want to fix them. you can just do that really quickly, really simply. It doesn’t have to be a big thing that we’re going to roll out a three-month project to solve XYZ. It’s just like maybe we just make a little bit of change. Maybe we’re having too many meetings. Maybe our meetings have agendas. I mean, it could literally be something as simple as that which alleviates a lot of frustration that people might have about the way that they do work.
Steve Chaparro
So Heelix specifically addresses employee performance. How does that employee performance relate to employee engagement as well as employee experience?
Tim Mullen
So, effectively what we’re measuring, those touches, it covers performance, but it also covers how they’re experiencing work. Every week we ask them, how was work this week? How are they feeling? What are the cool things that they’re feeling? So, that effectively talks to their overall experience as well. I think that one of the things you were asking for, what’s the difference between engagement and experience. I think that quite often people can use these. I’ll probably make myself unpopular, but people can use these labels and sort of fundamentally believe that this means this, and this definitely means this. At the end of the day, we’re experiencing everything. I think that how engaged somebody is, I mean, that sort of talks to experience that they’re having as well. Is engagement, just this sort of term of like, oh, I’m just feeling engaged with my work.
If you feel engaged, are you actually performing well? Are you having a good experience at the same time? I think it actually starts with that feeling of how you’re experiencing the work that you’re feeling and from that derive a whole heap of other benefits such as performance, better conversations with your managers, whatever it might be. I think that rather than labeling things and being so fundamentally set in our ways of, oh no engagement means this, and experience means that. At the end of the day, it’s just how people are actually coming in each day and experiencing the work that they do. I think that just goes with that and whenever you have a unique experience because the reality is you’re all going to have unique experiences. Just adapt to who you are, who your organization is, who your team is, and don’t overthink things. Don’t try and label what you should be doing. Just come back again, and I know I sound like a broken record but come back to who you are as individuals and humans.
Steve Chaparro
Alright, folks, we’ve been talking to Tim Mullen, the co-founder of Heelix. So, Tim, if people want to learn more about you, and your work at Heelix work, can people go
Tim Mullen
So, come to our website, which is heelix.com. So, that’s h double e lix.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn if you want, Carla who’s in our team as well, very happy to always chat with you about stuff and Katharina as well. We can probably play with some links if you want to learn a little bit more about I guess the science and who we are.
Steve Chaparro
Alright, Tim, thank you very much. I’ll see you in Sydney one of these days really soon after this mess is over. Thank you very much for coming on board.
Tim Mullen
Thanks so much for having me.
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