Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner

proving workplace culture can sound like an impossible task, but today’s guest, Bonnie Low-Kramen, has had more than 1,500 unfiltered conversations with executives, HR professionals, recruiters, executives, assistants, and leadership experts to identify the people focused solutions that really work to create the ultimate workplace. 

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If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Corporate Governance and Culture episodes.

Contact Bonnie and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, and “X” formerly known as Twitter.

Check out her books: the bestselling Be the Ultimate Assistant, A celebrity assistant’s secrets to working with any high-powered employer and her new book is Staff Matters, People-Focused Solutions for the Ultimate New Workplace.

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PEOPLE-FOCUSED SOLUTIONS ESSENTIAL FOR IMPROVING WORKPLACE CULTURE WITH BONNIE LOW-KRAMEN

Improving workplace culture can sound like an impossible task, but today’s guest has had more than 1,500 unfiltered conversations with executives, HR professionals, recruiters, executives, assistants, and leadership experts to identify the people focused solutions that really work to create the ultimate workplace. Stay tuned.

This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner helping you see business issues hiding in plain view that matter to your bottom line.

Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the podcast for smart executives, managers, and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I’ve got a terrific guest for you today.

She’s Bonnie Low-Kramen. Now, Bonnie’s got a really amazing background. She’s a best-selling author and TEDx speaker who began her career as a personal assistant to Oscar winner Olympia Dukakis, with whom she worked for 25 years. Now, today, as the CEO of Ultimate Assistant Training and Consulting, she’s spoken and taught in 13 countries and is the author of a new book called Staff Matters: People-Focused Solutions for the Ultimate New Workplace.

I am super excited on Bonnie pulling back the curtain on these people-focused solutions, so let’s have her join us now.

Welcome to Business Confidential Now, Bonnie.

Oh, thank you, Hanna. I’m delighted to be here and mix it up with you.

Well, good. I’m so glad to hear that. I am really intrigued about these 1,500 unfiltered conversations because people tend to be so guarded when they talk about this topic. Workplace cultures, it’s pretty sensitive. It’s – there’s no one size fits all solution. It can get complicated. But in these unfiltered conversations that you had when researching your new book, Staff Matters, what’s the scoop?

What are people saying behind closed doors about improving workplace culture? Are there common complaints?

There most definitely are. To boil it down initially to get this whole thing started, it would be they want to have a voice in their work. So, when you think about it, Hanna, everyone who’s employed by a company was hired for a reason.

At some point, somebody – maybe it was decades ago, but at some point, somebody looked at their resume and said, “We want to hire you,” and in doing so, they were hired for their subject matter expertise. The issue is not everyone understands what those things are in the current system. And I’ve been doing these interviews over the last seven years, but with real revision in the last three years in light of the pandemic.

And so, I was able to, with the book, talk with leaders, assistants, HR professionals, recruiters in light of the pandemic in the post-pandemic world, in response to the remote work, hybrid work, virtual work. And those were terms that we weren’t talking about in February of 2020. And then everything changed. In 2022, I did a Ted Talk. A great deal of it is, of course, in the book, Staff Matters, and I talked about the top four things that staff wants.

And this applies to staff, whether they’re in the United States, whether they’re in South Africa, whether they’re in Dubai, whether they’re in London, whether they’re in Omaha, Nebraska. It doesn’t matter what staff wants. And you tell me if this is accurate for you and your career. Number one is respect. Staff wants to feel respected for the role that they hold. And of course, the opposite of this is feeling disrespected.

And you know what? What I believe to my soul is that when people feel respected, everything is possible. Disrespected, almost nothing is possible. The second thing that people want is to feel like they belong, that they are a valued contributor in the role that they hold, whether they’re the janitor, whether they’re a senior VP, whether they’re an executive assistant.

They’re not just a number that they matter, that it matters if they show up to work that day, whether it’s in the office or online, they belong there. The third thing that staff wants is to feel fairly compensated. When staff is worried about money, they feel underpaid, or that they are preoccupied with the fact that that the company has unfair compensation practices, those eat into valuable time and energy.

And leaders need to know that it does not serve them to underpay their staff because staff knows when they’re being underpaid. And thus, we saw the great resignation. There’s lots of evidence to how the feeling of not being compensated well manifests in real life.

And then, the fourth is to have the investment in professional development to be encouraged by their leaders in HR, to keep learning and growing, that even if someone has been in a company for ten years, that it’s – it’s kind of like, top athletes, the best athletes out there need to keep training in order to stay at the top of their game. Well, so do staffers no matter what role they hold.

And so, to turn it around, the complaints are: toxic work environments and feeling disrespected, the feeling of that they don’t matter, being underpaid and being told that you’re going to have to pay for any class yourself. And by the way, you have to take a personal vacation day in order to do that. So, that is a brief summary of some of the complaints that are true, universal truths worldwide.

That’s really interesting, and my experience echoes the same thing. I didn’t talk to 1,500 people, but I was glad to have it confirmed. So, thank you for that. It’s one thing to talk about respect for the role, and I couldn’t agree more, because if you didn’t need that person or that role filled, you wouldn’t have hired for it, right? And so, taking it for granted after the fact kind of negates that.

So, I guess my question is, because people talk about respect, they talk about belonging, but those seem to be like cushy concepts or squishy concepts is the better way, I think, to talk about it, because what does that mean?

I mean, I can imagine some people in senior positions, in the corner offices saying, “Well, I’m being respectful,” but they may not come across that way to the people that report to them. The same thing with belonging. “Well, they’re getting a paycheck, they belong.” So…

Yeah, right. These things – and in the chapters in the book, in this 400-page, 21-chapter book, I know that it can feel nebulous. And so, I offer realistic ways that people can manifest respect, and many of them don’t cost one penny to do.

I mean, I don’t know if it’ll resonate with you, Hanna, but there was one conversation – I had many conversations I had with assistants, for example, who their executive refused to pronounce their ethnic name correctly. And over a period of many months, the executive thought it was really funny to mispronounce the name. And what we know is that there’s almost nothing more personal than someone’s name, and so executive assistant ended up quitting, because the feeling of disrespect was so strong.

And it is respectful to say please and thank you. And how about good morning, Hanna, as opposed to just coming in and swinging by people? Now, some CEOs and some executives are – when asked about this, you know, executive, it really matters to your staff if you take the time to say good morning and their name, or good evening, or have a good weekend, that kind of thing.

And some executives actually said, “I don’t have time for that. I don’t have time for those kind of niceties,” and what I respond back and what many of the experts say, “If you are working with humans, humans need this. They need that kind of validation which simply feels respectful, respected, and that they matter – it matters that they are there.”

And the busiest, most successful executives out there do take the time to do what I’m saying. Now, it goes much deeper than those very simple things to do, seemingly simple things to do. But during the pandemic when so many people were dying of COVID and getting sick with COVID, one professional told me the story that her parent passed away.

And that they were going to have a small service for the parent. And her CEO showed up at that funeral and then went further and bought meals for family members, et cetera. The extension of that kind of kindness was seen and viewed as respectful, that she was respected by her leader enough to warrant that kind of care and nurturing. That is respectful.

Now, belonging has to do with being invited to meetings and having your opinion respected. Theoretically, if you’ve been working at a company for two, three, five years, you have learned quite a lot. It’s not about only what people are doing, their actual job description, their responsibilities, but it’s what they know.

It’s the institutional knowledge that they hold in their head, it is – and who they know. Over a period of time, staffers get to meet and know a lot of people in the company, and so it is valuable for leaders to recognize that their staff holds a lot of valuable information. And so, someone absolutely feels like they belong and that they have an important role to play in the company.

If in fact there are plans in the works for company initiatives and to be consulted not for approval, but simply for an opinion, I mean, Hanna, no matter where you worked for a certain period of time, it would be shortsighted of me as your leader to not ask you. I would want to say, “So, Hanna, we’re planning X, Y, Z. Wondering, since you have had firsthand knowledge of these operations over these years, could you sit in on a planning meeting and give us the benefit of what you know?”

And can I tell you, Hanna, how often that is not being done to the point where chapter four in the book is called “Ask First,” that one of the most common complaints around the world from staff is that decisions are being made by leaders and HR, where staff -and that directly impact the staff, and – like open floor plans, the scheduling in the aftermath of pandemic. And the list goes on and on.

And the staff is not even asked, “What information do you think we’re missing? What is it that we might need to pay attention to that would make this project go even smoother?” That’s belonging, where your opinions and points of view are taken into consideration. And again, not for approval, but for the benefit of what you know. You’re already on the payroll, why wouldn’t leaders want to take full advantage of what their staff knows? Does that help you?

Well, yeah, no, I appreciate your – having flesh that out. I think those are great examples. But I’m just wondering, so many organizations are still run in a command-and-control type of leadership style. And to answer your question about why wouldn’t somebody want to ask their staff, they probably think they know better.

And they would be wrong. They would be wrong about that. Because in my book, in fact, one of the impetuses for the book that I am deeply concerned about is that as I traveled in 13 countries and 38 states and talking with staff from all over the world, what I heard, Hanna, was a lot of fear.

I heard fear among the staff and fear about the idea that staff has a front row seat for what goes on in companies, that they are eyes, they are ears, they know things. But staff is fearful about being the voice, about being the mouth. They’re afraid to speak up to leaders and to HR about what’s really going on in companies, and some of these fears are founded in reality. Some are imaginary, yes.

We tend to worry about things needlessly, but some of the fears are very real. Fears of being fired if they raise an issue that’s too problematic for a leader that they don’t want to hear. They don’t want to be the messenger. There’s a fear that they might get labeled a troublemaker if they raise a concern about what they see. They might – they fear not being liked or being brought into – being shunned from a group of staffers.

So, there’s a dynamic, there’s a culture that each company has. And so, my concern is that in this post-pandemic world, we have a large number of staff now working at home, and so they’re very disconnected and fragmented from the leadership even more than they were in February of 2020. And so, leaders and HR are very busy making decisions for a company.

But because – I don’t believe that they are getting full information because the staff is choosing to not tell them. They do not feel free, they do not feel psychologically safe to tell their leaders the truth about what’s really going on.

And therefore, I believe that there are many decisions being made with faulty information. And I decided that I had to reveal this in Staff Matters in order for leaders to pay attention to both the silence and to the retention rates. The great resignation was – showed just such a huge volatility worldwide of people running for the exit. People do not leave companies where they feel respected and valued and paid properly and supported to keep learning.

People leave companies where they feel disrespected, and that’s what leaders, in my view, need to pay attention to. And I am optimistic and hopeful in this post-pandemic environment because leaders recognize that they don’t have all the answers. No leader was prepared for what happened. And now the dust is still settling and the world is running far faster than our ability to keep up with it.

I mean, just look at all the articles about ChatGPT and AI, which is now all of a sudden supposedly taking over the world, which it is not. But there’s so much volatility and movement. I want to do everything I can to pull back the curtain for leaders so that they can see that it is not in their best interest at all to think that they have all the answers, and that they – many of them, they don’t need to look much further than their staff who are sitting there with answers, if only they were asked.

Well, that makes a whole lot of sense, and I’m grateful for several things. One, that you put so much of this information between...