Rethinking Two Weeks’ Notice, with Robert Glazer

Mo Fathelbab:

Welcome to today's episode of People + Strategy. I'm your host, Mo Fathelbab, president of International Facilitators Organization. People + Strategy is a podcast from the SHRM Executive Network, the premier network of executives in the field of human resources. Each week we bring you in-depth conversations with the country's top HR executives and thought leaders. For today's conversation, I'm excited to be joined by Robert Glazer. Robert is an author, podcast host and founder of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency that won the Best 30 Places to Work Award.

Robert, welcome to the show.

Robert Glazer:

Thanks for having me, Mo.

Mo Fathelbab:

Robert, tell us a bit about your career trajectory and how you got to your current role.

Robert Glazer:

I've started a few different businesses during my career. I've always been entrepreneurial, the largest of which is a business called Acceleration Partners, a global marketing firm. I'm not the CEO anymore, but I'm still very involved and I'm on the board and, as you said, we won 30 different Best Places to Work awards. During my time kind of growing that business, I tried to do a lot of things differently. We wanted to build an award-winning culture. When I looked at a lot of tried and true practices and conventional wisdom, they didn't make sense to me. And so I started kind of writing about things and sharing some of the things that we had tested and tried along the way. And that sort of led to a moonlighting career writing books, which now is more of where I spend a lot of my daytime as well as well working with companies and leadership teams.

Mo Fathelbab:

So you've published seven books and your latest is Rethinking the Two Week Notice. I'm wondering, what got you interested in this topic? Just to get us started.

Robert Glazer:

Yeah. So as I said, as I was building the company there were a lot of tried and true things. I really wanted to build a company where I wanted to work and that was different and solved some of the frustrations at the different places I worked. And I thought we had a pretty good culture. But when people would leave, they would kind of surprise us and give us two weeks notice. And I realized, look, this is all people know, and it frustrated me. It didn't feel like the type of company we want to build. It didn't feel authentic and it felt sort of out of touch with the world today. We just know people aren't going to work at our companies for a lifetime, yet the assumption is that they will, and then when they leave it's this whole kind of awkward thing.

And so, we kind of happened into an opportunity to test something new, which led into this concept of an open transition program, which we tried to implement across the organization saying, it's okay when you want to leave or when we think we need a change we're going to have a discussion. And we have had people that are working at our company as they interview for jobs and sort of move on to the next phase of their life and try to really kind of change that paradigm. I wrote about it a bit. There was an HBR article, I did a TEDx Talk, and a lot of people reach out and say, "I saw what you said here and I tried even having an honest conversation and it went better than I expected. How could I roll out this program?" And I realized I couldn't have hundreds of those conversations. So I thought I'd put together the playbook that we had learned and some other leaders and some best practices. And that has led to the book Rethinking Two Weeks' Notice: Changing the Way Employees Leave Companies for the Better.

Mo Fathelbab:

So one of the things you talk about is this notion of really being much more engaged in the conversation so that you're not surprised when it's time to say, "Oh, here's my two week notice." So what are the kinds of things you're doing to dig in early and really listen to what's going on? 

Robert Glazer:

Yeah, so one of the biggest misconceptions when I talk about this program and talk about someone being at your company potentially for 90 or 120 days, people are like, "This person's toxic and we're fighting and it's horrible. We can't do that." And I'm like, yeah, agree. You can't do that because this program would think about if I was having that awful conversation with you today, there was probably a conversation nine months ago when the problem started or six months ago or three months ago that I sort of never had to dig in and be like, "Look, what's going on here, managers? Are you engaged? Are you present? Are you enjoying your job?" Or collecting feedback at quarterly meetings, start, stop, continue. What are sort of problems that affect the happiness or engagement of multiple different employees? We know at our company, clients that are rude to clients and end of month reporting were two common stressors that made a lot of managers unhappy that we had to address.

And when you kind of can have those honest conversations and someone can lean in and know they're not going to get fired, you can kind of dig to the root of a problem and figure out is this something that we can solve and who needs to solve it? Does the employee need to solve it? It's not solvable? Or we need to make a change. So, Mo, if you're showing some signs of dissatisfaction and engagement, and this is the sort of dig to the root strategy part of the book, and I lean in, I'm like, "Mo, you seem a little not engaged as a manager, what's going on?" You might tell me three totally different things. You might tell me, "Look, I lost my child care and I'm having a lot of problem with the hours and I don't have the training I need. I'm just really exhausted and kind of out of it." Well, there's a whole separate set of things that need to happen there and I can work with you, but it's something that's going on externally that's impacting your work.

Number two could be like you're really not enjoying sales. You moved over from the marketing team. You're not enjoying sales. Or you feel like the last three people that were hired were hired at more money and you should have had a raise and we kind of screwed up not giving you a raise. These are all things that we can dig in on and say, oh, maybe a role shift or, you know what, you really did deserve a raise and we can kind of fix that. And you kind of get re-engaged. Or maybe you say, "Look, I know you're a totally remote company and I said I was fine with that, but I'm really kind of missing a workplace." And that's something I probably can't fix. And so each of those then necessitates kind of a next step.

In the unfixable thing I would want to move on and say, "Look Mo, we're just not going to change. We're not opening offices. So maybe it's time for you to start looking for a new job and we can help support you find a company that really has the value proposition that you're offering. Because I can tell you that's something we're not going to be able to change."

Mo Fathelbab:

And I think you shared a story in our prep session about deploying somebody with a friend's company. Can you share that with our audience?

Robert Glazer:

Yeah. So to this timing aspect, if you have these conversations early before things are difficult, you could learn this. So we had a historically really good employee who was starting to get a little antsy and behave a little badly. And his manager sat down with him and sort of under this program, they're like, "Look, what's going on?" He said, "Well, as we've gotten bigger and I've gotten sort of in a managerial role, I'm not working as much with data and I'm working more with people. And I realized I really love data and I'd like to do the data side of this full time and I'm not sure I want to do the people account management stuff." And we said, "Okay, well you're in the account manager role right now. Let us think about this." And it was shared with the leadership team and we are going to need a data analyst role, but it could be 12 months, it could be 18 months. Let's keep the lines open here and let's see what we can do.

A week or two later, someone sends me a job description from a well-known Silicon Valley company and it describes this person, we call him David's dream job, kind of shared it with our executive team and we're like, "Look, should we send it to him?" And so they were both sort of surprised when the person who was asking me if I knew of any referrals, I came back and offered her one of my better employees. And then we told the employee, you should go interview for this job. Because we just felt like if this works out, it's a huge step up. And he interviewed for the job. He moved to California. He got a huge raise. He's been at that company for probably eight years now. And that company actually became a client of ours in the last year or two.

So I really believe in this concept of McKinsey has always understood this notion of productive alumni and going to Patty McCord and Netflix, go be from Netflix. I think we're deluding ourselves, we're not even looking at our own data, if we think we're acting like our employees are going to stay forever and then once they leave, they're horrible people.

Mo Fathelbab:

And what's interesting that maybe was an unintended consequence is this is proving to be a great sales strategy for you.

Robert Glazer:

Yeah, it is a good business sales strategy. People who hear about that story feel more comfortable coming to work here knowing that when they want to do something else or if it doesn't work out, it's not going to be a disaster scenario. So, look, not everything works out as intended. But having our happy, productive... We're in a professional services business and it is kind of like McKinsey. When you want to leave McKinsey, they help you and train you and send you out in the world because they all hire McKinsey and a lot of our ex-employees hire us because they go in-house.

Mo Fathelbab: 

Yeah. I think that's awesome. So tell me, what are you noticing is the impact on the culture since you've changed this approach from the two week notice to the longer ongoing conversation?

Robert Glazer:

It doesn't work all the time, but I think it's a huge improvement in psychological safety. It gets issues out into the open, people realizing that we made a promise, if you want to have a discussion or talk about something, you will not be walked to the door. So it makes them more willing to start conversations. We had another story that I shared in the book with someone similarly who is like, "Look, I just don't want to be doing client service anymore." And that was 90% of our company and we were about six months from launching a key operations and training role that we needed. And they had been a great employee, but they were sort of just burned out on client service. And because of that discussion, we were able to make a plan to transition in that role. They've been in that role for six or seven years. They've been a superstar in that role.

Again, I think it just creates an environment more where... It's never that more communication is bad. I think the more you can discuss things, the more opportunities. If I know that an employee is really looking for a new job, I can have that in the back of my head when people send jobs over to me. If I don't know that... And a lot of people, again, who sort of fight against this will sort of argue around, "Well, how can you do that? They're [inaudible 00:10:41] your company." I'm like, "Look, there are plenty of people, your company that are quitting."

It is much better to know the people that are quitting and leaving than you have a lot of people that have quit and stayed. They quit 10 months ago and they decided they were quitting your company and they've been looking for jobs and stealing stuff ever since and they just haven't left yet. And by the way, when they leave, you will find a trail of bodies that they have left and work that they haven't done. And this is almost every case when the person leaves, you just find that it's the gift that keeps on giving.

Mo Fathelbab:

Yep, I've seen that before. That's why I'm laughing. It's knowing laughter.

Robert Glazer:

Yeah.

Mo Fathelbab:

Yeah.

Robert Glazer:

We've all seen that movie.

Mo Fathelbab:

We've all seen that movie. So, do you no longer get two week notices or anything shorter?

Robert Glazer: 

I'm not involved day to day. I'm sure that we do. We really try to avoid it as much as we talk about it, repeat it, and you'd be surprised how many times you have to repeat it and train on it, some people are still scared. It's not what they know. They're playing it conservative.

But I think, you get in your culture what you incentivize explicitly or implicitly. And one of the things we did a few years ago to make people believe, we said, "Look, we're going to actually offer a bonus." And I don't know, maybe the amount was $2,500 if it's 90 days notice, $1,500 if it's 60. And so when you start doing stuff like that, then people are like, "They really must want me to give a lot of notice, and it's okay to do that." So we actually set the incentives, put our money where our mouth was on that.

Mo Fathelbab:

And I would assume what goes with that is when somebody gives that much notice, they're not getting fired the next day because that sets a bad precedent, of course.

Robert Glazer:

Yeah. It gets rid of this whole concept of notice. You sort of enter a transition period and the transition period is, you're going to start training and winding down your job here and maybe helping us interview and we're going to start finding the replacement. Instead of having you leave and paying you some severance and then you're not employed and looking for a job, you're someone that's gainfully employed and going and looking out for a job. So it's notion of sort of you enter this open transition period and the whole notion of notice, it's an extended notice period. You might not even know where you're going or have a job, but you may decide you want to go look for one. And by the way, it's a lot easier to look for a job when you're not lying about doctor's appointments.

If we go back to the why on this, this whole two weeks notice, it's really bad for employers. The turnover's bad. They'll never get someone in two weeks. There's a lot of stuff on that side. But employees don't realize it's where it's bad. Beginnings and endings are the things that are seared more into our mind, and endings tend to be the thing that people remember most.

So if you had a great employee and you mentored her and you worked with her and all of a sudden she blindsides you with two weeks notice, you may have just created someone who's... It may impact the entire memory of the employment there. But by the way, there is so much back channel... This is what 20-year-olds may not understand today. There's so much back channel referencing in the world. There are people calling references and people who worked with that you did not give. And if you leave a trail of people that are pissed off at you, it really can hurt you for years to come. It's like this invisible hand that you don't know about.

I've gotten these calls for years and it's not that hard. They see that the person applied for a job, they look, they know that we're mutual friends with Mark. Mark sends them over and says, "What do you think about this person?" And you don't want the person on the other end of that to be remembering that you left with a couple days notice and asked them for all this time off and vacation and doctor's appointments where you were interviewing the whole time.

Mo Fathelbab:

Yeah, makes sense. So seven books, and I'm sure you've got a couple more in the works. Tell us what's coming up.

Robert Glazer:

I've written my next book, which dives into something from my book, Elevate, on helping leaders figure out their personal core values because I think that's a fundamental building block of being a good leader is kind of knowing yourself and being authentic. And then the research I'm knee-deep in now in some of the early writing as a concept I've been fascinated for a few years, it'll be in my Elevate series. So the working title sort of Elevate Your Kids. But I've been fascinated that the dominant of parenting these days is really ineffective and unhealthy. And we understand it in the workplace that if you were to lead like you parented, you'd be in HR's office on a performance improvement plan or maybe fired.

If you're 360 came back at work that, "Hey, they track me all day long in my location. They don't let me do anything on my own. They jump in to solve all my problems. They don't give me any emotional sort of security and I don't feel like they support me." You'd be like, "This is the worst manager ever." But if I asked a lot of kids, they'd probably describe those same elements without those same words about how they're being parented, and a lot of these are the same people. So I'm really interested in that the more we know that this looks like horrible leadership in the workplace and why can't parents think a little bit more in their parenting around what good leadership looks like? Because I think it's a lot of the same principles.

Mo Fathelbab:

So what you're saying is the principles of parenting are not unlike the principles of leadership?

Robert Glazer: 

No, I think they're almost fundamentally the same. And actually if you look over a hundred years of research on the best form of parenting, which is authoritative, which sounds worse than it is, but basically if I were to summarize it, it is a high support and caring, but with high expectations and accountability, that's the combination. We've gone from an era of sort of authoritarian where it was all just high expectations and no warmth or caring to sort of all caring and no expectations and accountability. And I think most people would say that whether it was a coach or a boss or a leader, that sort of describes one of the best leaders they ever had. When you hear people talk about Steve Jobs, they talk about doing things they couldn't have done before and being pushed on their comfort zone, a lot of things like that. You don't do great things from someone who has no expectations of you and doesn't hold you accountable for anything.

Mo Fathelbab:

And in terms of micromanaging, I think part of that is whether you give people space to find their own answers, to find their own processes. Say more about that, if you don't mind.

Robert Glazer:

Yeah, I mean I was in the research on this morning, it's just so obvious to us. Someone told me this morning, "I don't want to work for that person. They're a micromanager." It's the thing we hate at work. The person, they give us no autonomy. They solve our problems. They tell us not the problem we're trying to solve, but the solution they want implemented. There's just nothing more debilitating or people don't want to work under that sort of person. And there's real studies to show how damaging it is to kids. It ruins their confidence. It gives them lack of anxiety. It gives them a lack of independence. They become a dependent person rather than an independent person.

You think about what is the job of a parent? In the olden days, it was to create your replacement, which is what you're supposed to do with leadership. Now, they're probably not going to come into the family business or become the family blacksmith now. But you should be creating this next generation of leader, not a permanent employee. And I think a lot of managers of homes are creating lifetime employment for themselves. And we all know that the job of a leader is to create more leaders and eventually develop the person who's going to take your job. I don't think people are viewing parenting through the same lens.

Mo Fathelbab:

And you mentioned an example in our prep time about a woman who was tracking everyone on Zoom. Can you share that story with our audience?

Robert Glazer:

Yeah. I was speaking to a company, while COVID was still going on, to their company around sort of best practices around virtual work otherwise. In front of a whole group of people at this conference, we were talking about autonomy and what's the right sort of work from home and hybrid and how do you hold people accountable? And she said, "Well, I have everyone on my team, they turn on their Zoom and they leave it on all day and then they come to work. So we can see that they're working and we can feel connected and they have to keep it on all day. What do you think of that?" And I'm like, do I embarrass this person in this conference or not?

And I tried to say, "Well, there's a lot of data that would say that that's really not a healthy practice. And they might be really exhausted by that. And by the way, why do you have to track... Do you really want to know..." Employers that track employees, one of the things they track is their mouse movements. There's devices, is it moving? And then people buy mouse movers on Amazon. If this is what your company is managing, you've lost whatever game you're playing.

So you should have a dashboard of what good looks like or KPIs or goals and it should not be about hours in front of the camera or hours of worked or face timed, it should be about outcomes and empowering people to get to the outcomes and holding them accountable if they don't. I was flabbergasted that this person thought that this was a good idea. I'm sure if you had interviewed everyone on their team, they would've been like, "We [inaudible 00:20:11] hate this." She doesn't trust us. She makes us stay on camera all day. This is horrible.

Mo Fathelbab:

I just heard about these mouse movers and I was shocked when I heard they actually have invented a device that does that. When is the first time you heard about that?

Robert Glazer:

I heard about it during COVID because people were implementing software and the only thing that they can track is attention. So is the person hitting their keyboard and moving their mouse. And so then people got mouse movers. And like I said, whatever game you're playing, you're losing if that's what you're managing. You should be managing, "Look, how's your portfolio? How are the client satisfaction level?" All the things that determine whether the business will be successful or not. 

Mo Fathelbab:

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. So last question for you, sir. What is one piece of advice that has shaped your work or your life the most?

Robert Glazer:

Yeah. I guess, I don't know if it was advice, but I mentioned before when I was sort of emerging as a leader and I went to a leadership training. It was very focused on, I thought it was going to be outward skills, and it was very inward. It was sort of like, who are you? What do you value? Figure that out first and then that'll help you figure out how you need to lead authentically. I figured out my core values. It changed everything about my life, my parenting and my leadership, and I wrote about it and I started to help other people do the same. And so still, one of the things I do to this day is I train our up and coming leaders on discovering their core values so they can kind of figure out their authentic leadership style. That advice on sort of lead with values and make sure you understand your own has still been one of the most powerful things that I've done.

Mo Fathelbab:

Do you think there's a... Sorry, I'm cheating here. One more question. Do you think there's an important correlation between an individual employee's core values and those of the company?

Robert Glazer:

Yeah. Look, they should be pretty aligned. And if they're not, that should tell you something that there might not be a fit. As an individual, you should want to work... Look, and the values that the company has on their wall may not be the actual things that they value. We all know Patty McCord's slide around Enron was trust, integrity, and that's not at all what they valued. But yeah, it should be alignment. It shouldn't be perfect, but it should rhyme.

Our company has a value of excel and improve. We're really about learning, getting better. And almost every employee I do this exercise through, particularly the ones that have been around and are great, they have some thing around getting better, improving. That's what drew them. They're not looking for a steady state. Some people love steady state, that's calming. But we are the grow, improve, break it, make it better company. So yeah, I don't think that needs to be perfectly aligned, but if you're working in a company where it's fundamentally diametrically opposed to your personal core values, like if you were in a relationship or a community, that's going to feel horrible and that has probably very little chance of success.

Mo Fathelbab:

Thank you, Robert. And that's where we'll end it for this episode of People + Strategy. A huge thanks to Robert Glazer. You can follow the People + Strategy podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, podcast reviews have a real impact on a podcast visibility. So if you enjoyed today's episode, leave a review to help others find the show. Finally, you could find all our episodes on our website at SHRM.org/podcasts. Thank you for listening and have a great day.