How do you plan for the future when you're more uncertain than ever about what that future looks like? How do we keep each other striving for that finish line when we've lost sight of it in a fog of anxiety, ambiguity, and doubt? People tend to see change as threatening. We crave certainty and tend to avoid change as much as possible. When we can't, we become focused on all the ways change puts our safety in jeopardy, which shuts down our cognitive functions and kills our performance. In this episode of Your Brain at Work LIVE, Andrea LaBarbera (Head of Global Talent and Engagement, Zimmer Biomet) joins Dr. David Rock (NLI CEO and co-founder), and Rachel Cardero (NLI Vice President of Consulting) to discuss how Zimmer Biomet focused on their people to continue building their strategic road map, pillars, and guiding principles throughout the COVID-19 pandemic — and how we can learn to become nimble, resilient, and deliberate in the face of uncertainty today.
Zimmer Biomet- Andrea LaBarbera
U1
0:00
How do you plan for the future when you're more uncertain than ever about what the future looks like? How do we keep each other striving for that finish line when we're lost in the sight of a fog with anxiety, ambiguity, and doubt? People tend to see change as threatening. We crave certainty and tend to avoid change as much as possible. When we can't, we become focused on all the ways change puts our safety in jeopardy, which shuts down our cognitive functions and kills our performance. In this episode of your brain at work live, andrea LaBarba joins Dr. David rock and Rachel Cardero to discuss how zimmer biomet focused on their people to continue building their strategic roadmap pillars and guiding principles throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and how we can learn to become nimble, resilient, and deliberate in the face of uncertainty today. I'm Shelby Wilburn, and you're listening to your brain at Work from the neural leadership institute. We continue to draw episodes from our weekly Friday webinar series. This week, our show is a conversation between Dr. David rock, cofounder and CEO of the neural leadership institute, rachel cardero, vice president of consulting at the neural leadership institute, and Andrea labara, head of global talent and engagement at zimmer biomet. Enjoy.
U2
1:14
You in the feet.
U3
1:17
Lovely to have you here with us. Thanks for being willing to take some time to share the story and I guess give a little context on your organization first, and then we'll talk about the kind of the story that we'll tell. But tell us a little bit about Zimmer Biomet. I hadn't heard of them before we ran into you, but clearly a pretty large organization.
U2
1:37
Yeah. Good. Thank you. David. Yeah, I've been with Zimmer Biomet now about ten years. We're a medical device company, a leader in our portfolio, and really, our whole mission is to alleviate pain and improve the quality of life for people around the world. So it's likely that most people know someone, or you yourself has had a knee implant, a hip implant. You've broken an arm and had to get place or screws. More than likely, that's one of our products. One of the things I love about being a part of this industry is that it's so personable. My mom just had a total knee replacement two weeks ago, and so it's been amazing to watch her already see improvement in just her everyday life with that. So big company. Yeah. We're located all around the world. We've got 17,000 employees, been around for over 90 years. We have operations in 25 countries, sales in over 100, and, you know, offer not just those implants, but truly a whole. 2s Portfolio of medical device technology, robotics, 1s information, data to support both our surgeons and our patients. Yeah,
U3
2:47
interesting. I don't know if I'm glad to say it sounds like there's a little bit of Zimmer biomet in all of us or many of us without maybe knowing it. No implants yet, but I think many people probably don't even know it's. It's interestingly. A 90 year old organization that 1s has kind of said we need to do things differently. And I know we started to collaborate a couple of years before the before the Pandemic, in fact, we started this project. We still had an office. I think it was 2019. I can actually remember talking to your past CHRO, Pam Purdue, when she came in to see us and said, I'm starting in this new organization. I really want to get a culture right, but I haven't kind of even started yet, and I want to kind of take this into the organization straight away. Day one, which was really exciting to see. We'd worked with her at another organization. But tell us about the journey. I know you only moved to the talent team. You came from finance and have a big background in accounting, but you've been involved in the rollout of this, but a little bit less the kind of development of the framework. But for folks just joining us, we built a whole culture framework and really helped them with all the overall DNA and then executed this across right across the organization, which Andrew has been involved with. But give us a little bit of background, first of all, about kind of why you did this, a little bit of the context, and then maybe Rachel can talk about the specific framework we developed and how.
U2
4:21
Yeah, sure. Happy to. And as you mentioned, we started this work before the Pandemic. And even then as an organization, we had a new CEO, brian Hansen joined the organization and really, really did an incredible job transforming it. And so as part of his transformation roadmap, he saw the need for us to really come together as one zimmer biomet. We had a history of some acquisitions and it was a bit segmented. And so bringing everyone together and putting this framework together was extremely important for us to move ahead to where we wanted to go. He was very focused on winning the hearts and minds of our team members and that was really the soul of what created that framework and then tackling everything from quality and compliance and any other kind of issues that we had at that time. And so that really started our journey with how do we build a roadmap? What does it look like? Of course, our mission was center, and you'll see that in a moment. But our mission is at the center of everything we do. Really connects us to why we do what we do, why we exist. 1s And then we built together some guiding principles and our strategy of where we want to go and decided there's something still missing. How are we going to work together as an organization to get this done? How are we going to deliver to our patients? How are we going to achieve this big strategy that we have ahead of us? And I think that's where our prior CHRO came in and said, all right, let's work together with NL i. And build the culture, taking pieces of who we already are. But then who do we want to become?
U3
5:58
Great. Yeah. So you had this really clear mission that was very motivating, and you had this new strategy, but then, okay, so how do we work together as people? And so how do we really define culture? And it's interesting, a lot. We've helped about 30 something organizations now develop a completely new roadmap for people and culture. And I think rachel's been involved in probably more than half of those over the last decade. But it's interesting, definitely some of the time, a good amount of the time has been a new CEO coming in and saying, we really need to make big changes here. And it's been an opportunity to really rethink. And that's what drove this initiative. That's what drove the microsoft initiative, HP, a few others. There was a brand new person coming in for the long haul to lead, and we're able to build a whole new roadmap. But interesting, that piece of that culture really is missing if you don't address it. Rachel, talk us through a little bit of the journey before we show the framework we built. Talk us through a little bit of the journey. How was it? Starting with a brand new CEO, a new team, how was it? I know you were leading this project to actually develop the framework. And remember, remember, we're going to show you in a second, but we end up with something very simple. Our goal is something really simple and sticky. How was it? In an organization that needs to be extremely thorough and extremely risk averse, what was it like to do this work there?
U2
7:20
And the stakes are really high. Right. Pain management. Whether a child has the right hip replacement or the device. 1s It's funny that you mentioned that. We've done this at least 30 times. We actually took inventory recently, and we've done this in over 30 organizations just in the last five years alone, really helping them. I know, right? We've done so much of this work, and it's so powerful helping organizations define their DNA, their DNA, how that story comes together, who they are, what's that source code, if you will, for great behavior, great performance, great culture. And so I love how, Andrea, how you mentioned, like, how how because for us, everything is about the habits. And so anytime we're building any type of strategy for an organization around culture to really define that DNA, we have two primary steps that we focus on. One is to really diagnose what's going on. Where do you all want to get to? But what's getting in the way of that. And what we find is that science can often help us cut through the noise and figure out, where do you need to focus as an organization? So we get a lot of feedback's. Not working. We're slow to innovate. We're really segmented. Communication is siloed. Lots of different phenomena popping up. I think what the science really helps us do is say, this all sounds really different, but the root cause of this is psych safety. Let's figure out psych safety and address all these issues in one fell swoop. And so that's really where we started, right? That's just an example. But what we did was really take the time to understand what life was like, what the cultural landscape was like at zipper biomet, and then build a map, a behavioral map of where you all were and where you wanted to get to. And then we use science to answer how we close that gap. And then knowing the gaps that we needed to close, we were able to determine the top three focus areas for you all culturally, for performance, for everything that you needed to be who you wanted to be, to unite those disparate cultures. And that's what you'll see in the framework. And so our team, what we love to do is we like to say we're experts in the science, we're experts in the research and the habits, and we love you all. And that's what the Zimmer Biomet team did, was to act as cultural experts. So
U1
9:51
we've done so much research over the years, and we know that there are three top design principles for any framework like this, that it has to be sticky, meaningful, and coherent. And so we can help make it sticky and coherent. We can nudge the meaningfulness. But once the NLI team drafted something, it was a lot of validation within Zimmer Biomet. Employee focus groups, meetings with leaders to figure out, is the language truly meaningful in addition to accurate from a research perspective, a lot more we could share. But, Andrea, I'm wondering, you have these you've seen the behaviors. What comes up for you as you think about these are the top three things for anybody at Simmer Biomet to focus on. 2s Yeah. In thinking about your concept of stickiness, the fact that we were able to take those cultural promises and it made it onto and you'll see in a moment this one page where it is our roadmap. I mean, it's there, it's the core of what we do now. So the stickiness, certainly we experienced that. I know we'll probably talk about some there's just so many stories I could go on and on about how we've brought that, these cultural promises to life in the organization, through our processes, through building habits in the organization and through our systems. And so I know we're going to cover that. But I think beyond building that roadmap, the next thing for us was now we have to listen. And that's what you see here on the slide is just continuously listening. Because as you know, shortly after building this roadmap, the whole world changed dramatically. And so then we had to go through this series of, okay, what do we do now? How do we
U2
11:35
change? And for us, I think one of the most important things we did was to continually listen to our team members. 1s How are they feeling? What do we
U1
11:46
do from here? How do we make sure that they still feel like a fundamental component of this organization? What are their ideas? What can we be doing better? And so that's been a big part of our journey, and it has led us over the last couple of years to Pivot, to make changes, to be agile and evolve our strategy to a new place that we hope is going to continue to
U2
12:10
drive us and move us forward to achieve our mission. But we'll probably have to change again in a couple of years,
U3
12:17
it seems like. That, right? We've all got to adapt much faster than ever before. It's a real thing. Let's show the framework and talk about it. But before we do, Rachel, what was the process just for people who haven't kind of followed this work, this research, 1s how long was the process and roughly described the process to build the culture framework, and then we'll show kind of the broader framework, but the culture framework itself, what was that process?
U1
12:41
Yeah, absolutely. So we put together a core team that meets weekly. So the way NLI likes to operate is to co create with the folks that we partner with. And so there's a lot of live editing on virtual platforms, lots of design thinking workshop activities. So we meet week to week. As I mentioned, NLI runs a light diagnostic first. So we're speaking to executives, speaking to employees, reviewing your assets to figure out what's what right, who's who, what are your strategic priorities, and what's your target state for culture. And then we enter a design sprint where week to week and Elia is bringing options for those focus areas, options for that sticky, meaningful language. And our core team gets to help us shape exactly what that language is. And so the language is deceptively simple, but it is extremely meaningful, extremely native to whatever organization we're working with. And then we validate, we pressure test, pressure test, pressure test to make sure that it is truly sticky, meaningful, and coherent for all levels of the organization. And then we align with the leadership team, make sure it's embedded, and that's where the real work starts, right? We create a roadmap for learning plan for behavior change activation so that you not only have the language that you need and the very specific habits and behaviors, but you also have a full plan to get people caught up to speed and enacting those years in less than a year.
U3
14:15
Let me maybe frame that and then I'll show the framework. Firstly, we think in terms of priorities, habits and systems. And what we did with Biomet is spend about three or four months developing the set of habits, the set of priorities, 1s and this is them right here. The set of priorities shape tomorrow, ignite collaboration, focus to win. So this becomes a set of priorities for culture. Once you've got the specific priorities worked out, you've then got to really build these as habits. And Andrea can talk a little bit about how we went about that together, and then you want to develop systems that support all that. And I know in this case, we've started working already on the performance management strategy and we'll show you some of the big changes that were done to that. So, priorities, habits and systems. This is the set of priorities that was created radically simplified from what was there, and there's a lot in here. How was this received in a highly technical organization? Andrea, what was the response to this when it was launched?
U2
15:15
Well, I mean, I think the amount of work that the team did with our leadership team up front was paramount, right, in getting buy in and bringing everyone along and having them be a part of that process. I know with the folks that I worked with, the facilitation of those discussions with NLI were just phenomenal. You guys do an incredible job of getting to the heart and really helping to generate the ideas and making it our own. And so I feel that that buy in was pretty quick and easy because so much of it reflected who we already were, right? And then there are some aspirational components of that that we know we still have work to do, but so much of it already reflected who we are. Right? It came from the organization, not from outside. We're trying to shape who you are into something sticky, meaningful and coherent. We're not trying to kind of add something. It's been really interesting and I'm fascinated to know how many of these we've done. I need to stay more current, but we actually just did one for ourselves at NLI. 2s And you'll see if you looked at ten of these, you'd actually see ten quite different flavors. But there are some common themes. And this is perfect for Zimmerbimet, the NLI one for ourselves. Keep it real, make it easy, do it better.
U3
16:35
And really, it's got that Australian kind of colloquial sort of human thing and they all have a different tone as we've built this. So this feels very appropriate to Zimmer Bionet and really resonates there. I'll show folks the full framework and maybe you can speak to that and then we'll dig a bit more into kind of how this helped you and what was done. 1s Talk to us a little bit about what's on this page, kind of how it all fits together.
U1
17:08
Sure, I
U2
17:08
sure will. And I mentioned it before, this is really our one pager that captures everything that we are and we start so many of our meetings with this. It helps frame any new strategy that's going to come out from the organization. We always point back to this, it's like our true North Star. And so you can see right in the center is our mission, right? It's the heart of what we do, it's why we do what we do. It's our shared purpose as an organization. It really is what inspires and motivates each of us to get up every single day. To the left you see the guiding principles that we have and these are kind of like our core belief system, 3s what we value, how we inform our decisions, the standards, practices and policies. And not by accident, but very purposely, our team members are number one there and that is all about respecting the contributions and the perspectives of all of our team members. And then we go on to patient safety, focusing our resources in the right areas, making sure that our company's return is equivalent to the value that we provide our patients and then giving back to the communities and people's in need. That's really again, it's our guiding principles of the organization. And then on the right hand side you see our strategic pillars. So that's where we're going, how we're moving forward as a company. 1s It's our highest level organizational priorities. Everyone in the organization, when they build their goals for each and every year, they have to align to one of these three pillars so that we ensure that we are all swimming in the same direction and moving forward as an organization. And then purposefully leaving the best for last year is the culture promises. You can see that encircling our mission in the center. And again, this is the how, this was the missing link to it. How are we going to, as individuals, as teams, as a company, work together to deliver on that mission? Yeah, I know. That's
U3
19:02
great. We did an interview yesterday with one of the biggest banks in Australia. Probably no one here has heard of the ANZ Bank, but they're about 40,000 people and we did this work with them and they really took to heart the kind of rule of three and 2s they were able to get this to three things purpose, strategy and culture. You've got four, which is fine, four is not too many, but purpose, strategy, culture. And to me it's like there are three or four things that really matter in organizational DNA and once you go above four, it starts to get too noisy. You can definitely fit four in, but just that simple. This is our purpose, this is our strategy, this is our culture. It's sort of enough for people to hold in mind. And you've added the values, you've left the values in, in the guiding principles. So you've got that's the fourth one here. Sometimes and I'm addressing a question that came in sometimes organizations just kind of leave the values to the side. 1s Um, you know, your work is so values based. I can see why it's been really important to keep it in, you know, keep it in there. Other organizations have sunset at the values when we've done this, or we've reframed the values and made them the culture promises, or we've done a few things. But if you're thinking about building these, I would never go above four different kind of elements here. Rachel, anything you'd add to that just in relation to values and sort of how many elements
U1
20:20
yeah, I think when we find organizations that want to keep both, the values really become table stakes, if you will. For culture, they're baseline things that are absolutely necessary. Right. Like, before you get hired, we focus on team members first at CB. Right. Respect, integrity, inclusion. When you're talking about the how for culture, you can actually lift the stakes a little bit. You can stretch and push people a little more, and you can get them to really focus on those behaviors that you need for your strategy. And so separating the two is really useful.
U2
20:58
Yeah, I know. It can be great there. Fantastic. Well, let's dig in a little further. And, folks, feel free to put any questions in as we go. There's a couple in the Q and A, but you can put them in the chat as well. Talk to us about the habit work. So we've talked about building set of priorities. It was about three or four months of work. And then I know you started in the organization, Andrea, and you started to look at, how do we roll this across 17,000 people in a 90 year old organization? So what was the approach that you used to build habits? Talk us through that journey. 2s Sure. Incredible work, great partnership, of course with you all in giving us a framework and some great tips and tricks on how to approach that. It took a team partnering closely with our leadership team, our communications partners were incredible through this journey. But as Rachel had already mentioned, we implemented a series of learning sprints for the organization. And so it was over the course of a month and we learned one culture promise per week and then had the last week as a summation of all three culture promises in a team discussion. And the expectation was that every team member across the entire organization would get with their individual teams and they would watch a video. So we had short video developed to describe the promise and the habits and the behaviors that we would expect to see. To live out that promise. Team members had a very easy to read two pages, really a light read of the research summary. So why should we care? It's kind of the burning platform as to why the culture promise was important. And then we provided them with practice tools and many teams got together in practice and had some dialogue and some role play to talk about how to really put it into work in their individual setting. And so they also had study guides that are available to them and they had some other activities and practice sets that they could do for us. Probably the biggest challenge was the fact that nearly half of our team members are manufacturing team members so on the floor. And that was probably the biggest challenge in making this all come to life. And so again partnered closely with our creative teams and we had imagery all across the plant floor up on screens, on posters so that people saw the words, understood what they meant. And then we created daily team meetings and shift meetings where those team members have the same experience of coming together and doing a bit practice and walking through these activities together.
U1
23:37
Yeah, no that's great. I mean one of the things that we. 1s Um, got really excited about back in about 2012 was the power of social learning. And we did an initial body of research that we published in 2010 on the Ages model. And Ages defines the four conditions that have to be high 1s for learning to stick, which is attention generation, emotion, and spacing. Um, but what we started to do this new research and we published a new paper on the Ages model, I think in 2012. And what we saw was there was this big body of research coming out showing that when you learned things in a social context, 1s you actually stored the information in a completely different way. And we were able to simplify this into kind of a bit of a mantra. You embed more richly, recall more easily, and act more often. When you learn socially, you embed more deeply, recall more easily, act more often. And the reason is that social information embeds automatically. Like those teams that are meeting every week, right? 3s The weekly meeting that they have in a factory and a factory floor, wherever it is, people can recall without any effort, like who was at that meeting, who was missing, how people were feeling, if any arguments happened, even like, what they were wearing. So that's a lot of memory. It's a huge amount of memory that encodes automatically. And so social information basically encodes automatically because it matters a lot to the brain. So basically, if you take a piece of information you want to embed and you kind of connect it to something that automatically embeds, you've got a much deeper network. 1s Plus you get the fact that if a team learns something together, everyone thinks everyone else could be watching them. So you get this huge accountability. So since about 2014 or so when we started to do this, 1s we've just seen that giving managers tools to really share with their teams is a dramatically better option for scaling learning. And that's what we've done here. We've put together a series of tools. This has gone out to something like 17,000 people. Teams have done it in different ways and kind of hit it with different ways. But the fact is, it's happening in a social context at a team level, and it's happening over a little bit of time as well. And then what we try to do with the content is build content that really creates insights for people and then shows them what to do. So create the video, create the insights in the video, and then here's a practice tool to go and try it. So there's a lot of science behind this. It looks light, but when we've measured this approach, it's about 50% more effective than putting people in a half or one day workshop. And it's because it's over time and it's in the social fabric, 1s which is really interesting. What did you notice about how people kind of picked this up, put in, you know, in teams and how people did it. Can you share any stories about that?
U2
26:41
Well, I mean, just to echo a little bit of what you said, it was really important to us to take this deep scientifically rooted research and make it bite sized and easy to digest. And so we heard stories from teams across the company of the discussions that they had. Certainly for every team it looked a little different. Some would schedule additional meetings because the conversation would just go on and on and on. And they came up really with grassroots solutions on how they can incorporate the habits into what they do. I recall at a global meeting that we had a global leadership meeting. Our C. O. Chero talking about the promises and the habits themselves. And I remember afterwards standing in the lobby and a team member coming up and saying how the habit component of it and the story that was told how all the habits connected together really resonated for that team member and you just saw their eyes light up and the motivation coming from that. And to me that was the priceless part. Just seeing people feeling motivated to say yes, you've captured in words the things that we have felt we already are and the things that we want to become and then being able to give them these tools, then to then go practice with their teams and make it real. That's where the magic happens is when the people go and do right when
U3
28:04
they go and do it. We put a ton of work into building those practice tools. In fact, we have a new generation of them now where we have three really great individual activities you can try or three really great team activities you can try in all our practice tools. Now, it's really tricky coming up with the ultimate, most powerful, effective actions at those levels, but it ends up being super helpful and scalable as you do that. So I think freeing the teams up to have some certainty of some good choices but then some autonomy as to which choice and then the team can kind of pick, oh, let's do this activity is super powerful. I know we wove that in here as well. So it's interesting. We think of learning as you got to put people in a workshop but really learning happens in people's brains. It happens when they pay attention, happens when they pay really close attention, happens when they have insights. That's what really changes and motivates people and then it happens when they take action, which is much more likely when there's other people involved. So we just saw that you can really deconstruct the whole concept of learning and really transform it. I actually wrote a piece on this. Maybe my team can put it in. It was in Fast Company a few months ago about the fastest way to change a company and the upside of the virtual world actually is you can scale learning much better now than if you had to do Workshops if You Had To Do Things In Person? Rachel, do you want to comment on this? I know you were deeply involved. What was some of the experiences and learning on this? Before we shift gears and talk about some of the systems work, let's dig in a little bit more. Maybe we can talk about some of the listing that was done as well. But talk to us about your experience.
U1
29:43
Yeah, I just wanted to call out some of the questions we're getting in the chat and the Q and A, because I think it's just so pertinent to how we did all of this work. People are asking, like I see Deborah asking, does the learning translate well when teams are virtually versus in person? And for you, Andrea, you have all these folks in manufacturing on a shop floor. I'd love to just hear a little bit about how this translated for them, because a large part of our process is to design habits that are applicable for all, but also the learning that's applicable for all. So I'm wondering if you could speak to that, how it translates to that manufacturing environment.
U2
30:27
Yeah. Well, as I mentioned, it's probably one of the biggest challenges that we had. And certainly I'm sure there was room for improvement from what we did, but, again, making it visible so that it was in their environment from the moment they walked into the manufacturing floor on screens all around them in posters. And then really fundamental to so much that we do in manufacturing is having those daily shift meetings with the team. So each supervisor meeting with their team to talk about whatever it is, announcements, production goals for the day. And that was just the perfect forum for us to then introduce bite sized. Let's talk about this habit today. One thing that we can talk about and what is something let's get everybody involved in the conversation. What's one thing that we can do differently to ensure that we are making this come to life for us here on this team, in this particular piece of equipment, in this particular setting? And I think that's where the magic happened. I'm sure for some groups that worked exceptionally well, and others, I'm sure they struggled with it. And we relied very heavily on the supervisors and the leadership to ensure that those conversations were
U1
31:40
fruitful. 2s Yeah.
U2
31:45
That's. I was just going to say, I think what's great when you design for the brain in mind, right? And I see this question is in the chat, right? Does this work for most companies? Is that we all have a brain. And when you design learning using the ages model, really focusing people's attention in the right way, right? Whether you're at a desk or on the shop floor, whether you're creating the flexibility and spacing for them to learn on. Their own terms. But also in those social settings, you get a really powerful approach that is low maintenance and really embeds very deeply, very quickly. And it's one of the best ways to have people create the culture, right? To have this united front around culture, where culture isn't just this idea, right? The cultural promises aren't just, oh, it's something on a piece of paper. It's literally what we do every single day at work. It's our shared everyday habits.
U3
32:45
Actually, I have an interesting question for you and Andrea. 1s You understand accounting. Give me some numbers. How many times a week would you say you use this language? Shape, tomorrow, ignite, collaboration, focus. How many times a week would you say either you remember this yourself and it influences you, or you say it out loud to someone else 2s in the role that you're in? How many times a week do you think this comes up, the framework?
U2
33:14
Oh, my goodness. Hundreds, thousands. 2s But I can tell you that 2s each of of our leaders, I think, have done a really great job of just incorporating the language and what they do very naturally. Right at the beginning, it may have felt a little bit 2s not that we were forcing the organization, but a little bit constructed and a little bit, 1s um. I guess stage like this is what we're going to do now. And there was a lot of hesitation, I will admit, at the beginning, is this the flavor of the day? How long is this going to stick? But we're going on five years here and now it has just become a part of our language. And so one of the things I think I described to you guys is we started talking early is that we have three habits under each promise and over time, as we train transformed our brand as an organization, we had a need to link up some of the branding language we wanted to use with our culture habits. What was great is some of the words were already there in the habits. We brought it up a level and we really integrated that language and it is everything we do when we talk about seeking bold possibilities under shaping tomorrow, right. That word bold, I can tell you, gets used by our leaders all of the time. Every time we craft an all team member message, guaranteed this language shows up when we do our engagement surveys and we hear back from team members things that they'd like to see us do even better every time we acknowledge, like, we heard your feedback and here's what we're going to do about that. The inclusive environment that we want to create, empowering every voice was one of our habits under Ignite collaboration and that has become a theme throughout the organization. I mean, I could go on and on. One of the most frequent ones under focus to win. We have simplify the complex and something we're hearing loud and clear from team members right now through COVID well being has become a hot topic and just the workload and the need for in what we do so that people can manage their workload. We just launched Tiger teams throughout the organization to identify ways in which we can simplify the complex. And here's a few numbers for you. We had over. 1s 120 ideas that were formed by these Tiger teams. And we have already saved the company about over 100,000 team member hours and time back in their life to reduce workload, because we exercise that habit of simplifying the complex.
U3
35:56
Nice. The power of these frameworks is not they look good on the wall. It's literally the number of time a week the average employee thinks about these. And what happens is, if this is really sticky, like shape tomorrow ignite collaboration, focus to win. Right? This can get really sticky when you use it a bit. When this is sticky, it's unconsciously priming you. So it's actually priming you to think differently, but you can also do something we call conscious self calibration, which means hold these ideas in mind and compare this to a person you might hire or a strategy you might play out and say, how do we make sure this is right? 2s You've got unconscious priming, you've got conscious self calibration, and then continuous sharing. And so when you get these frameworks right, you get all of this. And if you poll 100 people in your organization, whether they're frontline or manager or up the top, you should see an average of every day, a few times a day. People are being influenced by this one way or the other. And that's how you really change culture. Now, all you have to do to mess this up is make it four or five categories, and you get none of that. So the simple really matters, and the simple and sticky is really essential. Rachel, do you want to add to that from your
U1
37:09
experience? Yeah, something that just comes up for me so readily is 1s part of what you brought up right up front. Andrea, is like, how to create certainty in times of uncertainty, how to steer the ship and culture. And right now, so many organizations are doing scenario planning. They're trying to figure out what's next, how do we help people manage, how do we bring up their change agility. And it's with this very specific, very radically simple approach. The culture. I know you did it before the pandemic, but it served you well during the pandemic. So you all were just prepared with exactly what to do, how to mobilize. 1s I wonder if you could speak to that, like how this helped you through the pandemic.
U2
37:59
Yeah, I'm going to focus on the Ignite collaboration promise that we have. And I had just mentioned one of the habits was empower every voice. And on top of COVID right, we had all of the social justice and all the things happening in the world all at once. No one could have anticipated the difficulty that we would have to face through that. And I feel like that organization did a really great job of embracing the opportunity to say, okay, what do we do in this situation? How are we going to empower every voice? And so one of the things we did is we actually cascaded an empower every voice listening session with our team members. It was leader led. So we had significantly high leaders in the organization conduct small group conversations with groups of team members that were interested in sharing their voice, interested in having a conversation about difficult topics. And so we covered everything from the racial issues that were going on in the organization and how people were feeling maybe excluded. I got to take part of and co facilitated a couple of those sessions and people were truly just like vulnerable and transparent and really shared their stories and we made space for that. I was extremely proud of our company for making space to do that. To taking the time to empower people's team members and making them feel. 1s Like part of the team, like their stories mattered, and give leaders that opportunity to share their own personal story, listen to others, and really find a common ground with one another. So that was just one example of how we put that into practice 1s during the Pandemic era and all of the other things that were going on in the world. You got really lucky basically investing in a much more human framework just before the Pandemic and rolling it out, and then suddenly you've got this really great foundation to build on. Let's get to the S, and I see some great questions coming in the chat. Keep them coming. We'll get to address them a bit. I want to spend five minutes or so walking through some of the S. The systems work that you did, we talked about on screen. Now you've got the set of priorities right. Shake Tomorrow, ignite, collaboration, focus to win. There's a set of habits under those there's nine habits under those that you can get a sense of them from the writing, but you've got this set of priorities. We've talked about how you built the habits very much social learning with some fantastic tools to generate insight in those teams. But talk to us about the systems work and I'll go to some of those slides. I know that there was has been a big emphasis on performance management from, you know, shifting from kind of one way to more open conversations, making something more flexible,
U3
40:51
more growth mindset focused, more learning focused, 1s more of a human connection. Tell us a little bit about that journey and kind of where you're up to with that.
U1
41:05
Yeah, well, we immediately recognized the opportunity to our performance management system hadn't been looked at for a long, long time. It was time to give it a bit of a facelift. And since we've just launched these culture promises, how do we tie them together? There was a clear connection point that we needed to make. So here you can see how we did that. How do we make this real for a person in their own career journey? Right? So shaping the tomorrow is certainly about how Zimmer Biomet can become the medical technology leader in the world. But then how do I discover my tomorrow as a person? What do I want out of my career? How am I going to move things forward? 2s We did have to take a look here at the from and the two taking kind of our pretty antiquated systems and making it more fluid, more flexible and more human centered is really where we came to. So we translated the culture promises down into a personal aspect from a career perspective to serve as our framework. One of the biggest components of this was in the center there, having those meaningful conversations and interestingly and maybe a little bit of luck. This happened before pre pandemic that we designed this so that we were having more frequent conversations. Right. We wanted a manager and a team member to not talk once a year to do their annual performance evaluation. We wanted these to be weekly, monthly, quarterly conversations so that they were more connected and could share and grow together and adjust and be agile in their priorities. And not just that priority at the beginning of the year and it doesn't change all year, but something where we can adjust and change it throughout the year so that we could get to the point where we're really unleashing the potential of our team members so that they can grow in the way that they desire.
U3
42:55
Yeah, no, that's great. Talk us through the framework that you develop. The architecture we've got on screen now, you simplified it down to a few key pieces. Talk us through that.
U2
43:06
Yeah, so at the top, you see, these are our structured check ins that we've created. So four times a year, guaranteed, you're going to sit down with your leader and you're going to, at the beginning of the year, set your priorities for the year. What are the most important things, things that link back up to those strategic pillars on our roadmap that need to be done this year. And then about mid year, we check in from a career perspective and it's a very purposeful conversation, very focused on the team member. Where do you want to go? What developments have you made and how is that serving you and what do you want to develop next? So that we make sure that we're investing in them in the right way. And then we have a performance check in, of course, on how did you do from your priorities of the prior year. And then of course, the rewards and compensation discussion. So those are the formalized ones that we have. And then in between, we have just ongoing check ins. Right. So maybe in between the January conversation and the May conversation, you might have two or three check ins with your leader to say, hey, I know we set out this priority, but XYZ has changed and I really think we've got to refocus our resources and our time on something else. So let's move that or, hey, how am I doing? Is everything balanced? Do I need help? It's a great way to have that both coaching and contracting type of conversation multiple times throughout the year.
U3
44:31
Yeah, that's great. And so let's maybe kind of bring this together a little bit with sort of the big picture and where you're going, and then we can take some questions for the last few minutes. Talk to us about kind of some of the big picture as we lift up a bit. 1s I
U2
44:50
sure will. Before I just move on to that, I do want to say by implementing those check in conversations, we had an eight point increase in our engagement scores on the particular question about conversations with your leader on performance and probably one of the biggest wins that we weren't even anticipating. But it hit just right as people were then sent home, working virtually and needed those connection points. So big win for us. I just wanted to share that.
U3
45:14
Congrats. That's an amazing that's a big jump. Yeah. So talk to us about some of the kind of where you are, where you're going and what's important 1s strategy evolves.
U2
45:27
So I don't think this is unique to just us, but a lot of companies this past year going through and reevaluating what's changing in our relationship with our team members and really what is our employee value proposition? This is just a bit of a timeline that I really liked from Mercer that talked through. It used to be this loyalty contract, right? Our team members really just needed pay, benefit and job security in exchange for their commitment to us as an organization. And then right before the Pandemic, that was really emerging to be a little bit more of satisfying psychological needs around achievement and camaraderie quality, all of that. But now here we are in a very different state, and this is again from our listening strategy hearing from our team members that flexibility and well being surfaced as a top need for our team members. And so it's no longer just about the pay and the benefits. People are leaving because they want more learning opportunities. They're leaving because they want better balance in their life. So that was a big moment for us to say, okay, well, what do we have to do different now? How do we change our strategy?
U3
46:32
Learning has always been one of the biggest drivers. Like, people leave because they're not learning as fast as they can. Especially the younger generations really want to be learning rapidly. It's a big thing. Speaking of learning, maybe my team can put up the poll and so folks can get that out of the way. If they want to jump off before the Q and A, we're going to jump into some questions and kind of address some of those questions. Let me put the kind of overarching framework back up. I think this one and there's some interesting questions, Rachel, I think I've seen in both the Q and A and the chat. Let's start to dig into those. And folks, this is a great time to put some questions in the chat as well. And if you do need to jump off to get to your next thing, fill in one of those buttons so we know how to support you. I think you can as many of those as you want, but yeah, let's dig into some questions. Rachel, what's coming up for.
U1
47:28
Yeah, I mean, one of the big questions that I thought was just asking about how to embed this in different talent processes like hiring. So we see the direct link to performance management, but I think that there are very simple and elegant solutions for almost any talent management process. Like for hiring. You can make this the language to determine whether a new hire is aligned to your culture or not, even for internal mobility. Adding that in as criteria for folks changing roles with succession planning processes. Asking people like, okay, if you want to become part of leadership here, if you want to move up, if you want to add value in that way, you have to demonstrate some type of align alignment to what we believe is most important from a cultural standpoint. So it not only becomes the language of day to day performance, it's the language for talent management for what great performance looks like. It's a one stop shop for amazing, right?
U3
48:33
Yeah, fantastic. Can you talk to that a little bit? Andrew, how did you tie this framework to hiring into some of the other elements outside performance management?
U1
48:42
Yeah, rachel, you just triggered another thought for me. But, I mean, we certainly use it in our employment branding, right, to help people understand the culture that we have here at Zimmer Biomet. We hope that is a thing that would attract them to come to the organization. But we have recently finalized our leadership competency model, and it is completely anchored in our culture promises. It was the evolution of that entire model that we just completed the validation of, and we'll be rolling out to the organization shortly. So those are two key concepts that we've integrated it into. It certainly plays a key part of our engagement strategy and how we engage our team members. And again, listening to them getting their feedback and making changes where we need to. But it's the basis of everything in the entire talent spectrum.
U3
49:32
It becomes a thread. It becomes kind of the context through which you hire, promote, give feedback, manage performance assessment, development. It should become the organizing thread through all of it. 1s And that only works if you have something simple. You only need to make something slightly more complicated, and that doesn't really work. Rachel, maybe one more question, then we'll wrap up. Anything else you wanted to take there? Yeah,
U2
49:58
I just wanted to mention, I think this level of clarity, this radical simplicity, saves a lot of time. One of the questions that came up was, how do you facilitate culture change? The question is about a workshop, but really it's about, like, when part of the organization is in another place, right? Maybe with a fixed mindset. They haven't moved here, how do you get them to move along? And I think one of the answers is focusing on the behaviors. Of course, there needs to be the communication of why the title strategy? What's in it for me? But the simplicity of these are the behaviors that we enact every day, whether you're hiring somebody, right. Judging that alignment. Like, you know what? I don't want to ignite collaboration. That's not me. I don't want to work in this organization. That clarity is so useful. And I think when we're in the midst of transforming culture of change management processes, bringing people along, focusing on the actual behaviors is the fastest way to move people along. And the simplicity is really if folks don't want to be a part of that story, they have the option to opt out, right? They have the option to choose something that's a better fit, but it makes it crystal clear to make that how to make that decision.
U3
51:17
Yeah, I've said this a lot and maybe there's new folks haven't heard it, but honestly, the biggest reason people do something or change is because they think everyone else is doing that thing. And so it's really easy to focus on, oh, we've got this 10% of people that are not on board that have a real fixed mind and how do we fix them? Well, it turns out probably the best way to sort of fix them is to create what Zimmer Biomet have, is create a movement where everyone is involved in this movement and these people actually start to feel like outliers and they actually self select out or they change. But if you create this environment where this is the way everyone is expecting everyone else to work, then that's how I think that you get the biggest change. Let's bring that together. So we let folks take a few minutes to the next thing. Andrew, any closing comments before we wrap up? Anything you'd like to add as we finish off?
U2
52:11
I just think to your last comment there. I mean, it is a constant journey. It doesn't end. You don't just do the work and then check the box and say you're done with it. It goes on and on and you have to be able to shift and be flexible and adjust where needed. But 1s it's a constant emphasis, emphasis of the work. Like I said, that's why we've got that roadmap. That's where we just always go back to that and point people to it when you have to make a decision. Rachel, you made the comment about connecting to why and that's our very first habit and I think intentionally, right, if we can always go back to why do we think this is important, then you can bring people along a little bit more easily.
U3
52:54
Fantastic. Yes, start with the why. Fantastic. And Rachel. Any closing comments?
U1
52:59
Just big hands off to everybody at Silver. But I'm so happy to see you all not only just starting this work before the pandemic, the way it's helped carry you through the level of integration. 1s I'm always amazed and inspired by this type of work. So thank you for sharing.
U3
53:19
Yeah, I mean, I have a personal connection to it. I actually very tangibly viscerally. Remember Pam coming into my office, she was that CHR at the time, coming into my office saying, I've got this new job, we've got the CEO, he doesn't necessarily want to do this, but I'm going to go into Bat, so you really can't let me down. And I'm really glad we didn't let Pam down and that we did a fantastic job partnering together to build something that really has made a difference. So it's really fantastic to see that this has created such great change there. I'm going to hand back to Tony. Just thanks so much, Andrea, for joining. Thanks, Rachel, for everything that you do. You're going to have to let me know this week how many of these we've done, so I don't make that slip up. But thanks, Andrea. Again. Thanks to the team behind the scenes, I'm going to hand back to Tony and everyone else. Take care of yourselves, look after each other and keep doing what matters. Bye. Bye.
U1
54:07
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