In late March, Cooleaf launched The Great Retention, a community and podcast series focused on employee experience. The series, aimed at bringing people-first organizations together and highlighting employee engagement leaders, has featured ten high-profile guests from diverse backgrounds since its debut. Recent guests include Donald Knight, Chief People Officer of Greenhouse Software, and Nigel Zelcer, CoFounder and Managing Partner at Jabian Consulting.
With years of experience in the human resources space, Donald Knight holds advanced degrees in business and HR from Cornell and Virginia Commonwealth University. Knight’s passion and sole mission is helping organizations empower top talent to do their best work. Knight credits a people-first mentality as the secret to unlocking talent in today’s world globally through Greenhouse, the hiring software company on a mission to improve employee retention at every company.
In his role as CPO, Knight provides global strategy and leadership in developing and administering talent management programs.
Knight joined Cooleaf co-founder, John Duisberg for episode 8 of TGR to discuss Greenhouse’s growing commitments to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and allyship, sharing that an increased sense of belonging across its distributed, global workforce serves as a driver of growth.
“70% of our workforce is geographically distributed globally across the world, and we want our entire team to feel celebrated and engaged,” Knight said. “We represent what the world really looks like. Our workforce diversity goals are a constant improvement on how we can continue to evolve and have even more nationalities represented. At the same time, we want people to feel like they belong here. Our goal is to curate these experiences where we bring people together very intentionally so that when you go back out, and you’re distributed, you’re still a part of Greenhouse.”
Episode 9 found Duisberg joined by Nigel Zelcer of Jabian Consulting. Jabian, a top business consulting firm specializing in strategic management and IT consulting, encourages 100% of its staff to find their passion by employing their skill set in the community. Company culture is structured around a belief that layoffs are avoided at all costs and that people are valued first.
Since founding Jabian in 2006, Zelcer has grown the consulting firm into one of the industry’s most respected organizations, while developing an equitable work culture designed around the principles of “conscious capitalism.”
Zelcer sat down with Duisberg to share his vision for Jabian’s growth as a “conscious capitalist” organization. Among Zelcer’s principles for maintaining a phenomenal work environment? Safety, empathy, and embracing change.
“There are things we’ve done since day one to create the culture that we have,” shared Zelcer. “For example, we do employee surveys about once a year and they take about an hour to do – that’s a long commitment. About 94% of all employees will complete it and most of the questions are open-ended and say, what can we do better? What we take from that is 2-3 initiatives every year that we make into employee strategic initiatives for the following year. We’re a continuous improvement organization and this is just one example of cultural change. It changes daily, but how can you improve that culture?”
Episodes 1-10 of The Great Retention Podcast are available now for streaming on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube, Stitcher, and The Great Retention’s website. Subscribe for a free monthly update with the latest episodes and news on The Great Retention and the future of work.
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